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Comment by numair | Hacker News Reader

It’s comical that all of the replies to what you’ve written claim you’re wrong, because you’re actually 100% right. And this is even more true when you remember that the company had fewer than 20 people for a long time, and that there was only one real goal, that seems to be forgotten: they needed to clone BlackBerry Messenger and get it working on every platform possible. That was it. That’s all they needed to do, and that’s really all that they did.

I tried to convince the CEO of Research In Motion, who I worked for, that WhatsApp would end up destroying his business. He thought I was insane for thinking something so small and simple could have such a big effect on his big, important company. Yeah, well, whatever you say, man.

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Also can't overlook that for many SMS was ludicrously overpriced, but the early basic smartphones (palm and symbian) often had wifi capability; WhatsApp provided secure, ludicrously cheap instant messaging across all meaningful handsets.

And that's all it had to do; the telecoms weren't interested in making SMS cheap or secure, RIM didn't want BBM on anything but their devices, ICQ/AIM/MSN/etc were similarly unavailable.

> WhatsApp provided secure, ludicrously cheap instant messaging across all meaningful handsets.

You can scrap secure from this, the vast majority of users don't care or even know what that means.

If SMS was more secure I 100% would still expect whatsapp to win. Convenience and cost are the biggest drivers here.

TBH, I was incredibly disappointed when I discovered that BB shared the same encryption key for all users unless you were on their enterprise system. While I’m just one user, I also discouraged others from buying into them too.

> You can scrap secure from this, the vast majority of users don't care or even know what that means.

Until you get sued or called in front of legislative bodies to testify about why your customer data was breached.

But maybe you're big enough at that point to ride it out.

On the other hand, it's very very hard to add in robust security after reaching critical mass.

I have no idea how your point connects to mine. We're talking about consumers choices here.

Ensuring user privacy _from you_ can be an effective defensive measure for small companies who cannot afford to mount a meaningful legal defense.

"Here's all the data we have, officers. We don't have the keys. Good luck."

Again, how does this connect with why Whatsapp won as an app?

Consumers didn't follow this logic. At all. They went for the convenient and free option.

I'm so confused by this thread. It's like you guys are pasting the output of an ML model with only the input "secure" at me.

>I'm so confused by this thread. It's like you guys are pasting the output of an ML model with only the input "secure" at me.

You talked about encryption on HN. What do you expect? Might as well have brought up gun control at a Republican rally.

(Not that you were anything but 100% right. The general public didn't care about encryption at all until the Snowden leaks.)

They still don't!

I think that depends on how you define "general public". My mum doesn't, but my (far more digitally savvy) teenage cousin does.

Back in 2009, though, this was a very different story. Even tech-savvy people didn't care.

Well, FWIW, the first people I knew using WhatsApp were my friends who were drug dealers or chinese nationals, and both lauded the encryption features.

having the messages encrypted end to end also free WhatsApp from being asked to do censorship or moderating

> I tried to convince the CEO of Research In Motion, who I worked for, that WhatsApp would end up destroying his business. He thought I was insane for thinking something so small and simple could have such a big effect on his big, important company. Yeah, well, whatever you say, man.

Well, he had a point. What killed BB was the iPhone, not that their chat app was going to lose out to the competition. They simply had a product that was inferior in every single important way.

People owned a BB because of its built-in message service.

A lot of people liked the keyboard

It's attack from both directions:

BB and BBM are network effect. iPhone alone is not enough to disrupt the social-media aspect of BBM (which was very sticky at that time in quite a few countries).

WhatsApp + Android actually killed BB+BBM in those countries and not the expensive iPhone

Mike might have taken longer to get it than Jim but he eventually understood the existential threat they faced. He realized this at a time they could have possibly changed course but was unable to do so because the board did not have faith in such a drastic change. The plan to cannibalize device sales today vs promise of future software revenue did not sound so promising for the board, who I imagine were interested only quarterly profits and their stock price.

Mike wasted a ton of my time, and squandered the opportunity to use the brain trust of Facebook insiders, including the guy who designed Facebook, who I assembled to jump ship and build a new future on top of BBM.

A few months later he sent me a message letting me know his private jet had just landed in Palo Alto... Did he want me to be proud of the fact that he seemed to be selling out all of RIM’s IP to Zuckerberg? I never got what that was about.

Both of Mike and Jim were in over their heads. And too arrogant to let people younger and smarter operate the ship. A tale as old as time itself. I’ll write about this in detail at some point, I promise.

I remember selling every BlackBerry stock I had when I got my hands on their touchscreen phone (the Storm was it?).

3 years behind the original iPhone, while Apple had just launched the 3G with the App Store. Guess which phone (and stock) I purchased then?

Was there really no-one at BlackBerry following what was going on in the valley at that time?

There's a number of stories about the insane level of hubris at RIM. Before the iPhone smartphones were seen as "business" phones. RIM reportedly felt like hot shit because they had managed to just not fuck up while Palm, Microsoft, and Nokia tripped over themselves to try to make a BlackBerry But Better.

RIM was so focused on the "business" market they really couldn't conceive of a real consumer device. Their upper management apparently looked at the billions of feature phones sold (IIRC Motorola had sold a quarter billion RAZRs by then) and said "nah let's double down on the order of magnitude smaller business market". They dipped their toe in feature phones with the Pearl but it was a joke compared to the original iPhone with its original software that didn't even support MMS.

By starting with more consumer friendly features (Web, media player, phone features) Apple had an extremely competent baseline of functionality. As soon as they added workable Exchange integration (iOS 3 or 4?) the iPhone (including older models) instantly became workable business devices. RIM had far more ground to make up for going from business to consumer than Apple had going consumer to business.

https://archiveprod.canadianbusiness.com/technology-news/how...

https://techland.time.com/2013/09/29/the-inside-story-of-the...

https://sites.psu.edu/global/2018/02/09/blackberry-and-the-i...

Explains how they doubled down on hardware and lost.

BB’s market cap is currently a bit over 1/3rd of whatsapp’s acquisition price. And BB has minimal long term debt.

Nice story. What are you doing now?

Post-FAANG digital infrastructure. This is that moment, when the cycle starts all over again.

Anything of note we humble readers should take a look at?

I’m having one of those “why can’t there be 36 hours in a day” moments in life, but I’ve got to publish more about this very soon, so, it’s on the way.

When you combine the story of WhatsApp’s small team / high impact development with the remote work shift of the past few years, it seems that the next cycle (regardless of when/what it is) will be the first that isn’t centered on SF/SV/California. It’s interesting to think of how that’ll affect the psychology of the area.

> will be the first that isn’t centered on SF/SV/California.

I've heard this every 5 years for the last... 25 I think?

Still hasn't happened.

Looking forward to reading it, plz let us know once done

What specifically?

Thanks for sharing your insights. With all kindness, this sounds like post-UnionPacific. The neo robber barons have won. To go on with the metaphor, not sure the future holds a car to fulfill point-to-point transportation demand, as our digital information needs are vastly oversupplied.

What kind of unmet demand you see out there?

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