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Comment by jandrewrogers | Hacker News Reader

The problem isn't setting up the servers, they already exist for the most part. It is getting anyone to use them.

I've seen this play out a few times in Europe. People are extremely resistant to giving up WhatsApp. These rules are so widely flouted that no one takes them seriously, including the people making the rules. It is a bit of theater, meanwhile everyone continues to use WhatsApp. There is no will to actually make this change.

If your boss keeps sending you messages over WhatsApp, why would you do any different?

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Maybe I'm just too American to understand, but it still baffles me that WhatsApp is used for business purposes. It makes a lot more sense for regular personal messaging, but it seems incredibly unprofessional to me. I would think it bizarre and a bit invasive if my boss tried to text or iMessage me. Are they at least using different accounts for work messaging?

Not to mention the app itself was pretty mediocre last time I used it, but that's neither here nor there...

most of the world is using WA for biz. US is an outlier

Most biz dont have the kind of money to hand over to Goog workspace or M$. therefore, you get what its free, and thats WA biz

Isn't there a worry about the messages not being private and being read by Facebook? I have that same worry with Google and Apple both.

Alot of people use iMessage or WhatsApp for out of band messaging.

The global usage is nuts. All of my Indian friends live on WhatsApp even if they are iPhone users. When I was in Portugal and Spain recently it’s literally the way businesses work.

Plus, you’re out of your mind for putting Teams on a personal device.

You guys use iMessage and go all weird unless the bubble is blue, so I’m not sure why you can’t understand that other countries have their own cultural messaging practices.

WhatsApp is a much nicer platform for business (and messaging in general), and the rest of the world would find the American idea of "professional" rather laughable.

It was kind of a cultural shock that people companies) in the US still leave messages on my voicemail. Last time I remember using the voicemail in the EU was like 2005 or around that time

At my workplace we only use WhatsApp for personal comms. Like chatting about which restaurant we go for lunch, who's at the office tomorrow, when is everyone's birthday, what did we do this weekend, that kinda stuff.

For work related stuff we use teams and that it's kinda needed too because we can only link to internal resources there, like SharePoint.

I mean at least you have teams as an alternative.

Where my wife works they simply have a WhatsApp group because there _is_ no messenger, and while they don't use it for work stuff, they couldn't even have anything but group emails for discussing lunch plans or reaching someone who is not present at the office without calling (and in the case of reaching someone, they don't have access to anything on personal devices and they 90% have no work phones).

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