Alibaba Sinks $215 Million Into Messaging App Tango | Hacker News Reader

Alibaba Sinks $215 Million Into Messaging App Tango

forbes.com

21 pointsamitkumar0115 comments

Is it just me, or are many of the recent acquisitions relatively senseless?

Facebook do search, google do social, amazon do streaming video, alibaba and ebay do messaging - I really do not understand why all of these big players seem to feel the need to increase their competitive surface area, and therefore compromise on their core businesses.

We're going to end up with a bunch of corporate jacks-of-all-trades and masters of none, to nobody's benefit, not even theirs.

I mean, from TFA, Alibaba regard themselves as "social media giants". They're a marketplace. If that's not a profound misunderstanding of ones own business model, I don't know what is.

I think the amazon one makes most sense actually. They already sell movies, so they can do better recommendations than anyone else. They also have massive, distributed infrastructure and uplinks without additional cost. They just bought themselves the tech/licenses/customers via lovefilm in the UK.

Yeah, it's relatively proximal to their core activities, to be fair, so that wasn't a great example.

They also own IMDb... a slight annoyance for me because it's integrated with Amazon's streaming service rather than being a neutral platform for movies.

The Whatsapp acq is the WTF one, mostly because of the valuation but that is also an example of a and acquisition that fits squarely into Facebook's business model (even though it's only tangentially related to the way they make money).

Did IBM or Microsoft do so much (as a percentage of market cap or earnings) acquiring. Is the tech industry abnormal in this sense. Is it new?

A simple common sense idea is that Google (for example) is now a big company that should be focused on moderate growth, defending their position and paying dividends. OTOH there's some intangibles in growing and acquiring and doing new things, especially for a creative tech company. Maybe it's like empires expanding in their ascendancy and decaying as they ceded territories.

I wish we could hear real opinions of people in the know without all the PR headline hunting noise.

The what'sapp acquisition is rational in our current economy.

1) what'sapp users are in places Facebook can't hit. Think of how intense of a data application Facebook is and think about accessing it in a country without adequate internet access. What'sapp sold for so much money because of the j2me app they wrote.

2) paying $35/user is looking about 10 years out in monetization, which is not an irrational time window at that scale. If FB can payback the cost of the what'sapp acquisition over the next 10 years, it will have been worth it (other companies make 10 year infrastructure investments all the time. Hell AT&T pours $20B into their network every year and will rip and replace most of their network every 7 years).

In short, what'sapp is rational in the current game theory of our world. Evaluating the present with the rubrics of the past is a fool's errand in a bubble economy.

Those whom God wishes destroy, he first makes mad.

"200 million registered users, 70 million of whom are active on a monthly basis"

That sounds high to me. Does anyone know how they count MAU? I just launched the app and enabled push notifications. Would I count as active this month (and the month in which I joined) even though I've never made/received a call?

Which groups of people (communities or countries) use Tango more than Viber/WeChat/Line/KakaoTalk?

According to the NYT report, they count as an active user anyone who "logs in at least once a month".

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/20/tango-messaging-app...

I can't speak for everyone who uses Tango, but I can tell you I used to use it as an alternative to Skype when I was in a long distance relationship. Both Tango and Skype offer video chat, neither was perfect, but Tango seemed to handle connection slowdowns in a less disruptive way than Skype did. YMMV.

I feel that "Sinks" isn't really conveying how Alibaba sees this investment and perhaps does a disservice to the announcement.

Given that these investments (WhatsApp, WeChat, Tango, Viber) aren't acqui-hires, there is still a relatively long term horizon over which these investments will play out.

Perhaps if certain areas are completely blanketed in wi-fi/connectivity these apps will make calling / messaging completely independent of cell phone providers (such as ATT, Sprint, etc) which is a massive industry to displace. But then again these providers might be the only ones providing wi-fi access.

I wouldn't include WeChat as an investment in the same way the others are. Tencent developed WeChat (then called Weixin) themselves. Also, the interesting about WeChat and its difference between the others you mentioned is it functions more as a platform for mobile games and mobile commerce. Tango, Viber (which finally got stickers a few months ago), and Whatsapp are all exclusively about communication. No doubt all of them have looked at folks like WeChat (from China), Line (from Japan), Zalo (from Vietnam) and KakaoTalk (from South Korea) for profitable business models. All of the Asian chat apps are headed in that direction.

> Tango, Viber (which finally got stickers a few months ago), and Whatsapp are all exclusively about communication

That's not quite true. Tango has a limited selection of games too.

MSN Messenger had 330M active users according to Wikipedia. And today that number is approaching zero. Not that FB and others will handle things as poorly as Microsoft did, but MS was able to take 330M active users, buy Skype, and end up with fewer users (250M according to the Skype client advertisement).

Especially given the time when MSN was popular, it seems like a massive achievement, yet what did MS get out of it?

I think it's the flip-side to keep in mind. Social services can be quickly replaced. (After all, WhatsApp itself had a meteoric rise.)

Isn't Tango a Jerry Yang project? That might explain why Alibaba would buy into it.

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