>You can't sell the platform if it's heavily integrated.
Do you think lawmakers care? There is a fair bit of public goodwill for acting against big evil intl tax evading tech companies...so I think they actually could force this.
Presumably the pre-integration builds are still sitting around somewhere on Facebook servers. I suppose they could destroy this IP specifically to sabotage the sale-value of it, but I can't imagine shareholders being too pleased with that.
> You can't sell the platform if it's heavily integrated. Whoever buys it will just have to rewrite it from scratch then.
Not necessarily. My understanding is WhatsApp basically uses the Signal protocol right now, Signal itself is open source, so I assume an acquirer could just stand up some new Signal infrastructure and get 80%+ of WhatsApp functionality without much redevelopment.
> Not if they integrate the messaging infrastructures as described in the article...
WhatsApp is a phone app. Even if Facebook heavily integrates the messaging infrastructures, the problem an acquirer has is porting the existing users over to a new messaging infrastructure. Signal-based infrastructure is (relatively) turn key, most of the software is already developed, deployed, and tested. After you have that, the main thing you have to do is push a new version of the app out to all the different app stores that uses your new infrastructure. Bam, you're done.
I am simplifying certain things (there'd definitely be a somewhat complex transition period where your new app would have to support both infrastructures), but my main point is that this integration is not as big of a barrier to re-separation as it may seem.
> the problem an acquirer has is porting the existing users over to a new messaging infrastructure.
If you're selling it, it would be your job to port it. This wouldn't be the purchaser's job, it would be Facebook's job. It would be like expecting someone to dismantle a bed your selling on eBay. No one in their right mind would agree to dismantle it for you unless you were giving it away.
The Signal Protocol only covers the E2E encryption of message content (and related activities like key management). Think of it more like OTR from the old IM days, but more deeply integrated into the product and invisible to the user.
All the other protocol bits are very much WhatsApp-specific.
Which isn't a lot of work now that WhatsApp doesn't support the userbase that supported them in the beginning (all the crappy old hardware and twenty different platforms). The network effect is what makes WhatsApp worth billions instead of thousands. The software can be reproduced in a few weeks.
> but it doesn't have any social media platforms with the reach that American ones do.
A lot of people I know don't bother having more then one social media account. I don't know what you mean
Discord has a huge image problem. I won't touch it with a 10ft stick or even mention it in a professional environment. Besides that it's very annoying that it's a complicated mess that has no real focus.
It's also been latched onto by a lot of articles about the alt-right/Charlottesville, they were apparently using it for a while before they got banned there - and Discord have been subpoenad and things. Nothing that's Discord's fault (actually I don't think it's even encrypted?) but I can see why it'd get a bad look professionally based on that sort of coverage.
Their base product is bringing in $5/month/user, and they'll often get dozens to hundreds to thousands of users for each company that joins, whose employees are usually already using the free version of slack, as a sort of grassroots movement within companies. It's been the primary means of asynchronous communication for the last ~5 customers I've worked at, and I've been in slack channels of 30 to 300 users - in total, an easy 500 paid accounts, and that's just from my network.
Anyway yeah it's a risky investment and a precarious valuation, there is plenty of competition out there right now, yet somehow nothing seems to be able to come out as better than Slack. Maybe if a party actually spent those millions in investment funds to create good non-Electron apps.
One of my Slack channels (not servers, no idea how many are on this workspace) has, no exaggeration, ~45k users. It's a hosted FOSS project so they're not making money on those users, though. I'm curious what the largest Slack instance is if it's not k8s.
Tool integration and automation with Slack are things that people have come to depend on. There’s not much unique to Slack in that regard but they have the momentum and many products will either be Slack-first or be integrated exclusively with Slack. There’s a lot more out there in terms of APIs these days so people can, and do, develop their own integrations for other chat platforms but that’s not quite the same.
I don’t know about 7 billion but based on how technical and non-technical teams alike use and depend on Slack I can easily see 1 Billion or more. But 1 and 7 billion are really far apart. If I were a Slack employee I’d be thinking about my stock. If it sold for 2 billion would I be shit out of luck? Legitimately asking, I don’t know how stock preference works when the VC investment comes after stock has been issued to an employee.
Have you been living in a cave for the last decade? This is modern business, whatever is hot and gets a lot of users, gets a ridiculously unrealistically high valuation. Also, you never need to be profitable, as long us ure hot you can just keep doing more rounds of funding.
The comment you replied to is (snarkily) saying that as long as a company is "hot" (i.e., it has a lot of users) then investors will keep coming. That's totally reasonable; a product doing well that grows as a function of the number of users using it is a promising investment (especially when those users are paying!). That's not a Ponzi scheme.
Really? Has it always been the case or is it a recent development?
I've seen whole businesses revolve around offering SEO services, and an uncountable amount of clients caring more about SEO (and willing to pay more for it) than actual web design/development.
Would you have any resources to share where I could read more about this please?
