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Comment by not_paul_graham | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.)

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