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Comment by psbp | Hacker News Reader

Or facebook is trying to trivialize and destroy the startup market.

Destroy? There will be a host of new messaging startups created off the back of this, and suddenly the Snapchat valuation looks sane. Do one thing that Facebook does but better is the new gold rush. Sure, most of them will fail hard without raising a cent in revenue, but others will start to threaten to chip away at Facebook's market share..

Anecdata: I get a lot more messages on FB messenger than WhatsApp...

Whatsapp has virtually no market share in the US. In basically all markets outside of the US, however, they are dominating the messaging space. Text messages in major EU countries like Germany and France have been almost completely supplanted by WhatsApp.

> In basically all markets outside of the US, however, they are dominating the messaging space

...WhatsApp certainly isn't dominating in the Asian markets, you only have to look at WeChat.

From what I can tell, though, it's literally the two of those that are controlling the space outside the U.S.

er.. Line? KakaoTalk?

WhatsApp is huge in Malaysia, where I'm from. WeChat, Line, and those other messaging apps are tiny in comparison.

Is that because SMS costs a fortune in Europe? As an American with unlimited SMS/MMS, I don't see the point of WhatsApp at all.

I guess maybe if I wanted to send a text to somebody in Europe.

I agree with this. In South Africa we use Whatsapp more than anything (including BBM these days). When I rocked up in Canada, I found that very few people use Whatsapp here, since BBM is losing market share, I find that most if not all of my colleagues are just using plain ol' text, as they get unlimited texting from their providers.

Nationwide SMS is dirt cheap in most of Europe too. But the cost goes up rapidly when you send messages across borders, say from Italy to Germany. And international MMS are just ridiculously expensive. A friend of mine once paid ~5€ for a single MMS sent from Croatia to Germany. Croatian, Slovenian and Austrian telcos all wanted their share of roaming fees.

With WhatsApp you don't need to worry about all these things.

Seems like carriers or device manufacturers could easily undercut them by offering the same service, but preinstalled. I guess Apple already does, with iMessage. If only they weren't so blindly stubborn about interoperability.

The problem with iMessage is that you don't know if your friend has an iPhone.

In Spain the same as that, or even more so. That's 45MM people at a single strike.

Surprisingly in France you can have illimited text messaging for 2€ per month, 1 hour of communication included.

Though I'm not sure about you stats for usage.

Whatsapp appears to have very little market share in the sparsely populated arse end of the world (Oceania), at least so far as I can tell. Not that that's exactly a large market, but still.

To be fair doing startups with the goal of getting acquired by FB has been a thing for a while.

I'm not sure I'd call the WhatsApp of today a startup.

Why not? ~50 employees, a couple of years old, $8M in funding.

50 employees? That's awesome. Twitter has like over 2000. Sure, Twitter's infrastructure is more complicated, but still.

From this blog post[0], "WhatsApp runs lean. With only 32 engineers" I am very impressed.

[0]: http://sequoiacapital.tumblr.com/post/77211282835/four-numbe...

Whatsapp is 5 years old.

They were just valued at $19 billion. Kind of not a startup.

No, they were acquired for $19B. That's exactly a startup. They had a small amount of VC and the revenue to match, but sold for a king's ransom--the storybook version of a startup.

Value = the amount that someone will pay for something. $19B in this case.

That's not value, that's called 'price'

At this rate they can only pull that off a handful of times.

Before this people were comparing their value to snapchat's. This is a very unhealthy market that they're creating.

...or facebook is trying to own messaging. I already have shifted a lot of the work I do on email to facebook messaging.

We'll see new angel investors. That will help the ecosystem.

the startup market of other messenger apps? The ones that are around are already big and profitable (KakaoTalk, LINE etc).

The bubble spreads across all tech startups. Before it was whether your product could be viral enough to match snapchat's $1 billion, now it's whatsapp's $16 billion.

This creates a very unhealthy attitude around tech startups that will have a cascading effect on the entire industry. It's like a hegemonic military policy. The strategy doesn't matter, as long as you have a big stick.

@psbp ... and before that it was Instagram's $1b. It was a running joke back then.

Well going by itunes top 20 free social networking apps, you still have kik, tango, oovoo, & zello.

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