We have the alternatives already. We can use them now. To me this defeatism is like jumping out of a plane with a parachute and saying "I guess there's nothing to be done now." It starts with you making the decision to use something else. It is harder because of the lock in. But there's only one way to do it.
Because the business was "sell to fb," effectively. Whoever succeeds in putting together a wide network of people will face similar incentives. I suppose someone could do it Craig Newmark style, but for that a Craig Newmark needs to be CEO of a major app company. Long odds.
Not sure where you got that number, but in 2013 (before aquisition) they reported ~$10 million in revenue. (https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000132680114...)
They brought in $15 million in the first half of 2014. (https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000132680114...)
They only had 55 employees at acquisition.
They might not have become a unicorn... but there most definitely was a path to profitability.
Also that document shows a net loss of $230 million in that same period, so not exactly on a strong path to profitability.
I agree that their losses were surprisingly high at the time... especially given how lean their engineering team and operations were supposed to be. (https://blog.whatsapp.com/1-million-is-so-2011/?lang=en)
- A large chunk of the world (especially people in developing countries) will be unwilling to pay anything more than $0.
- Even if they want to pay, most of those users won't have a payment method set up. How many of their 2 billion+ users have a credit card or even a bank account?
Even just giving paid users some small extra features or a little icon by their name or something small would have been enough to get people willingly give a dollar rather than their approach of trying to charge people.
They only charged some users, not everyone, because they couldn't figure out how to do it.. and who got charged was relatively random.
Those that did get charged could just complain and the subscription fee would just go away.
Value is one thing, but only charging a fraction of your customer base at what seemingly felt like random was never going to gain public acceptance.
I don't even think they even had a plan for how to deal with poorer nations in Africa where the app is exremely popular.
I think this here is the key point, that it was built 10 years ago when smartphones were just catching up and general public needed one working and stable chatting app. Replicating that is not the issue here but making people switch from their "used-to" app is. Not saying that is right or wrong but I get where most of the people are coming from. These apps are now intertwined with normal lives who are either unaware or don't care about their privacy. Also making that switching harder by incorporating more popular apps together like facebook-instagram, facebook-whatsapp doesn't help either.
What about Keybase, though? This thread reminded me of its existence and I just renewed it on my iPhone...
However Threema exists. It is paid up front and otherwise fairly boring: https://threema.ch/en
Bar of what is acceptable was raised.
Windows 3.1 was extremely impressive when released and got popular.
Releasing equivalent of Windows 3.1 in 2021 will not be impressive or popular.