I harken another commenters words when I observe that this attitude would've prevented the formation of Viber and What'sApp had they simply accepted the status quo of the time. The same could be said of Google competing with Alta vista and Yahoo.
When a large organization acquires a small one, the small organization gains scale and loses the ability to turn on a dime and to compete in the market with agility. It will take 2-4 years to spin up a real What'sapp competitor, at which time the market should be ripe for disruption.
Just my $.02.
Source: I am absurdly deep in the messaging/telecom world.
Some years ago the dominant messaging apps were icq and aol messenger and msn messenger. I think almost every new generation just uses their own messenger.
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.
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.
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.
Presumably IPv6 will be a major change - that will allow every person to have an IP address for every device they have and retain that perpetually. Then we can have true direct messaging and use open protocols (XMPP?) each person choosing a client to manage their end; like how email works now.
If you can send from Whatsapp to FB messenger, Viber, Skype and whatever - and vice versa - that's surely going to democratise messaging?
>that will allow every person to have an IP address for every device they have and retain that perpetually.
Wait... what? has someone implemented IP address portability while I wasn't looking? I mean, there was lots of talk a few years back, but my understanding is that the facts on the ground are such that when you switch ISPs, well, you are switching your IPv6 address (unless you are large enough to speak BGP)
OK, yes, "retain continuity of addressability for every device" then - you'll need something at your end to push a signed notification out indicating your IP address change but there's no reason that can't be seamless like texting your contacts a new phone number but without any interaction needed.
>OK, yes, "retain continuity of addressability for every device" then - you'll need something at your end to push a signed notification out indicating your IP address change but there's no reason that can't be seamless like texting your contacts a new phone number but without any interaction needed.
so, you mean like dynamic updates to DNS? tsig-signed nsupdate? It's old technology, and would do what you describe (well, after dns caches empty. Yes, you get to set the TTL, but even with a short ttl, I wouldn't count on a dns update percolating down in less than two hours.)
Of course, there are problems with the end-to-end model you describe, where every device is publicly accessible. (Don't get me wrong, there are strong advantages to the model, too... but there are problems) I think I'd feel a little weird, a little naked without a statefull firewall in front of my consumer devices.
If changing ISPs is your only use case, it works fine. But if you expect to keep the same name when you walk down to the coffee shop? Yeah, you're firing up the VPN.
I mean, nsupdate is great; I use it all the time, but it doesn't really solve the problem that the 'IP portability' folks were going or.
