Comment by erikpukinskis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by erikpukinskis | Hacker News Reader

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I think the number of active users is what makes this comparison invalid. At the time of AOL's acquisition of ICQ it had 20 million active users¹. WhatsApp has 430 million. In order to eclipse WhatsApp, a competitor would have to get substantially more than 10% of the entire global population.

ICQ was dominant in its heyday, but the game wasn't won yet, so it was theirs to lose. In some sense that's still true: we have another 4 billion people yet to join the game. But we're nearing the endgame and as we get closer to the "everyone already has a good messaging solution" line it's going to get harder and harder for an upstart to come in and eat everyone's lunch.

¹ http://ec.europa.eu/competition/mergers/cases/decisions/m184...

>In some sense that's still true: we have another 4 billion people yet to join the game.

and tens of billions of various sensors, smart toasters/cars/milk cartons ... after that

I agree, but there are still a few things Whatsapp lacks, in particular convenient end-to-end encryption that might not be feature for the mass market, but is probably interesting for enterprises.

Except the number of active users reinforces his point, it doesn't make it invalid.

>At the time of AOL's acquisition of ICQ it had 20 million active users¹

Or 40% of the internet using population of the world.

>WhatsApp has 430 million

Or 16% of the internet using population of the world.

40% is clearly closer to "won" than 16% is.

> 40% is clearly closer to "won" than 16% is.

No, because the internet was expanding rapidly, so it wasn't won at all. That's like saying a basketball game is won because one of the teams got 100% of the points awarded in the first minute.

My point is that as "number of happy messaging users" approaches "number of humans" things will get harder and harder for a messaging upstart. Whoever I was responding to was suggesting that there will just be a long chain of succession forever and ever. I'm saying I think surpassing the encumbants was easy five years ago, is still doable today, but will be quite hard in 20 years.

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