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Comment by rrdharan | Hacker News Reader

I think of all of those WhatsApp has been the most successful both in terms of moat defense purposes and it still has the potential of turning into something like WeChat or LINE (or what they're doing with FB Messenger itself) with its own monetization.

For Skype I think it was mostly about rounding out the office suite, MS doesn't want anyone else getting a toehold in workplace collaboration and expanding from there - if you get real classical about it MS Office is the true DNA of the company even more so than Windows/infrastructure. Same reason they bought Yammer and why they were so early on in trying to move on Slack (with the $8B offer that Bill Gates intervened in and shot down).

[Edited slightly for clarity]

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Agreed. These purchases seem to work the best when they're used for defensive purposes and to round out a product offering that already has a substantial userbase.

Whatever gadgets they might hang off the app, they're fundamentally a way for people to talk to each other. If you don't have the people, why would you need a slick implementation? As you mentioned, the app would go out of vogue and users would move on.

Amazon making a bid here sounds like a play for a decent social seed, likely steming from users of its core properties (shopping and dev). Of all the mega-corps, Amazon is one of the few that has all the pieces and user-engagement, but no social component.

Which is ironic, because their properties would play a lot better with one than, say, Google or MS. And starting with something like Slack (bottom up vs top down) is an interesting move.

> Of all the mega-corps, Amazon is one of the few that has all the pieces and user-engagement, but no social component.

Honest question, since I might be out of the loop here in Europe, but what user engagement pieces does Amazon have then ? I use Amazon for shopping and AWS, and would have no idea what other products they have that are dominating a market. Is this about Kindle ?

This would possibly be a first step for AWS to start moving up the stack.

What does that mean?

It means Amazon renting you access to business software rather than access to computers on which you can run your own business software.

The shopping portal, reviews, AWS, Kindle, and Echo are all direct touchpoints with users of some sort.

If you're going to launch social, you could do a lot worse for a starting point...

And in a broader sense, I'm much more optimistic about building a social network to unify disparate features that people already love, vs imposing one from the top down (e.g. G+). FB only got away with the latter because of being first, and seems to be pivoting to backfill as much functionality around it as quickly as possible.

“Amazon making a bid here sounds like a play for a decent social seed, likely steming from users of its core properties (shopping and dev). Of all the mega-corps, Amazon is one of the few that has all the pieces and user-engagement, but no social component.”

Well they do own twitch & good reads, right?

Interesting to note on this front is Amazon's move towards enabling voice and chat communication via Alexa between Alexa accounts, and by extension Alexa-enabled devices.

Sounds like they really want in on the communication game.

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