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Comment by gshakir | Hacker News Reader

The business chat sounds like a great idea. There are some startups out there that are doing something similar and they are going to be affected.

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The Lowe’s example made me go, “oh yeah, I’d use that.” Hardware stores are one area where talking to someone nominally savvy can save you heaps of time. It’s part of the reason I still go to Ace for some things.

Imagine describing some project and having some semi-retired codger tell you what you need and have it boxed and sent to you.

Cole hardware in San Francisco currently works only over text. You can text all kinds of questions with reasonable reply times. You can’t pay for anything or have it shipped, they’re brick and mortar only.

Not only that, but this makes Apple a competitor to Facebook Messenger. Ever since they added iMessage apps, animations, and Apple p2p pay, it’s clear that they’re trying to compete with fb in this space.

They are really trying to compete with WeChat in China. You can do essentially everything through WeChat and it’s very heavily used there.

This looks great, but unfortunately like most Apple-related things, this will probably be limited to Fortune 500 companies for the next 1-2 years then silently killed.

Sucks for them, WeChat will gladly take anyone else; kinda surprised other chats more popular in the west like Whatsapp haven't gone more the WeChat direction. Might be cultural though.

A larger issue that I see with worldwide adoption is that Apple considers iMessage to be a moat that keeps people tied to its devices. Unless this comes to Android, companies that aren't in Fortune 500 may not even care to support this, even if they're allowed to. So it'll be a niche service in certain countries alone.

Right on time to put it against WhatsApp Business. https://blog.whatsapp.com/10000637/Introducing-the-WhatsApp-...

It sounds like they’re going to be using the RCS standard for those communications.

Another case of Sherlocking, you’d say?

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