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Comment by ignoramous | Hacker News Reader

> whoever can come up with a UI that makes claude code or codex accessible to the average user

You mean UX? Isn't Claude Cowork supposed to be 'Claude but for normies'? As for Claude Code / OpenAI Codex for non-programmers, believe Replit, Loveable, & others are trying & succeeding.

WhatsApp comes to mind in how its sole focus on replacing SMS (rather than Skype/AOL/MSN Messenger/YChat/GChat) meant it had no (user-facing) password/username, no elaborate signup, no login, no chat/friend requests, no sync etc. & became the biggest social network right under the nose of well resourced competitors with worldwide distribution, like Google & Facebook.

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Business wise, neither Google nor Facebook were impacted IMHO. Google sells the tools that WhatsApp need to run and Facebook bought WhatsApp and kept its FB users in house.

Probably phone operators were not impacted too: SMSes bundled with flat plans are still flat plans and Europe style unlimited calls + 100 SMS per month plans are still there and those SMSes are still mostly unused.

So we could have a killer app and yet nothing changes in the flow of money around it.

UX wise, WhatsApp is a big improvement over SMS. Vocal messages, I'm not a fan of them. A waste of my time.

Google was impacted: their chat product is pretty much dead.

Mobile network operators lost the profits (at prices that were pretty much pure margin) they had on pay as you go messages, and messages not included in flat plans (e.g. overseas SMS's). They also lost a huge amount on highly profitable overseas calls. Those of us with family in other countries save a lot of money by using Whatsapp and similar instead of phone calls.

WhatsApp and other over the top messaging and calling apps destroyed “the rivers of gold” that the telcos had in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Net neutrality was triggered by their attempts to block VOIP and messenger apps.

I knew one telco who made €3Bn clear profit a year from 2 Dell servers and a team of five to keep SMS messages flowing. Their billing infrastructure was bigger, much bigger than the SMS servers.

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