This highlights another of Yahoo's screwups, IMHO. Whatsapp is built by 2 ex-Yahoo employees. Guess what everyone used in the late 90's for messaging? Yahoo Messenger. That's right - I used Y! Messenger all the time to keep in touch with friends before Social Networking was the norm and I'm pretty sure everyone else did too.

There is one more company that had the lead in messaging and screwed up - Blackberry. They released their app across platforms, 5 years too late. Had they hit the iPhone/Android apps stores 5 years back, they would have been in a better place than Whatsapp. The funny thing is that their co-founder even wanted to do that and not go after BB10 but he got pushed out.

I remember reading that whatsapp's servers basically run using Erlang. Erlang scales massively, and is a beautiful language for messages/telecom etc.. Hopefully, this will trigger some more interest in Erlang.