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Comment by CydeWeys | Hacker News Reader

Unreal. Do they really expect it to cost more to maintain their web presence in addition to their mobile app than their web presence will make them? If you already have a back-end for servicing all of those mobile apps, is having an HTML front-end really that difficult?

I vastly prefer doing almost anything I can think of on a real desktop with big displays and a good keyboard over a mobile app. Am I that out of touch? Why would anyone, that has a choice in the matter, prefer a mobile app for shopping, when it's much easier to open and manage dozens of tabs of product listings and reviews across lots of different sites for ease of price comparison and product comparison?

... wait, I think I realized why they're doing this. They want to create a walled marketplace where you're locked in to buying things from them, and can't easily compare products or prices elsewhere.

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>Why would anyone, that has a choice in the matter, prefer a mobile app for shopping.

That's the clincher. No desktop, no choice.

Well, the choice is to use a competing service that offers a (likely superior) desktop experience.

One reason I haven't seen mentioned yet is that countries like India can be overwhelmingly mobile-dominated (as in, few people own desktops).

I never had data on India but in places like the Philippines or Indonesia (with similar GDP/capita), your buyer's only internet access might come from his (very basic) smartphone and I sometimes saw > 90% mobile visits. At a previous company, we saw our Indonesian traffic soar after we fixed a bug that prevented the site from displaying on Blackberries... somehow an incredibly popular brand in the region.

If 90% of your buyers are on mobile, you might as well become a mobile company, if your IT resources are limited.

The gap between mobile and desktop is closing though, as companies like Xiaomi keep releasing ever cheaper, more powerful and larger devices in those markets. A Redmi (1, 1S, 2...) costs a tenth of an iPhone for 80% of the functionality.

The reach of mobile devices never fails to impress me. We went horseriding a few hours drive from Jiuzhaigou, and after a day of climbing the mountains on horseback, sleeping on the sloped floor of a tent (heated by a dried yak dung fire, of course), it was quite surreal to see all our guides, on horseback, playing mobile games and happily texting away on their 5" smartphones - even as they were herding yaks...

The issue here is that Flipkart is not poor. It is one of the largest private companies in India, with valuations at $11 billion. They have already spun off their costlier operations (such as courier and warehousing) into separate companies which they have since sold off.

The only thing flipkart is doing right now is tech and sales. They are definitely not "limited" by money or IT resources.

They might be valued highly, but they aren't having strong revenue streams, they still make 2.4Rs loss per 1Re revenue, hardly profitable.

You'd be amazed how money can be wasted in online retail. I know of a 2,000 employee company that took 1.5 years to produce a mobile version of its site and another year for the app. Another (also thousands of employees and over 500 developers to manage code bloat) hires a "Chief Data Scientist" to build a data science team every 6 months or so - the guy quits after 3 months without even getting access to a database, and a few months later the CEO asks the CTO how that data science effort is going and they put a job ad out again. I think they parallelized the effort and hired three in one go last round to speed up finding one that will stick...

These companies have in common that they hired "cheap and many" rather than "expensive and few" initially to lower their startup costs and "tech risk", and that they are run by former bankers and McKinseys who consider tech "below them", something that is "commoditized" and can just be "bought in".

That really sounds like a shitty company. I'm sure that while Flipkart does have its fair share of code bloat and overly aggressive management, they still have lots of good tech people, because of what they are offering in the market.

Their salaries are among the best in the Indian tech industry, so I think they do have the talent to keep a website afloat and running.

> I vastly prefer doing almost anything I can think of on a real desktop with big displays and a good keyboard over a mobile app. Am I that out of touch?

Yes I'm afraid you are. Worth watching Luke Wroblewski talking about Mobile at Google - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-FMTPsgy_Y ... some graphs near the start help make this clear.

Interesting. Thanks for the pointer.

What about Gopher? FTP? Usenet? AOL? WAP? HTTP/HTML is just another way of consuming the content, but the justification for using it over other mediums is that usage is high enough. If it falls below a certain threshold, then it makes sense to throw it out, just like the other low-performing mediums. Although walled-garden reasoning may also play a factor, a simple market-driven analysis would be sufficient in many cases to warrant the decision to drop HTML.

There are some big social media companies whose mobile traffic so far outstrips their web-usage, that they consider from time to time dropping the html frontend. It seems inconceivable to us, but it makes a certain amount of sense.

Not quite. Absolute traffic levels don't matter. The only time it makes sense to throw it out, as the parent comment suggested, is if the maintenance costs exceed the benefits. Even if the usage is low compared to mobile, it only makes sense to stop if it's a long-term net negative.

Personally, this makes me suspect bad architecture. If they've got well-factored APIs, the additional cost of maintaining a modest web presence should be pretty low. From what they describe, mobile is now somewhere between 40 and 60% of their traffic. Even if they were pretty sure that the trend to mobile would continue, why wouldn't they just hedge their bets by investing less in the HTML front end until the web traffic is really negligible? Few people use faxes anymore, but a lot of businesses still publish fax numbers just in case.

Assuming that this isn't purely internal politics, then my best guess is that they have a lot of terrible web code. Somebody saying, "Mobile is the one and only future! Look, shiny future!" gives people a chance to declare bankruptcy on a lot of technical debt while appearing as forward-thinking leaders, rather than bozos who made a giant mess.

Yes, exactly. Any CEO worth his salt would know to hedge his bets and stay on a platform till its already dead. That is what Stephen Elop taught everyone.

I do think that some amount of bad architecture is involved, but flipkart does have a lot of money, and a lot of good engineers. They even have cool stuff on github [0], which needs good people. They have likely fixed their architecture issues by now.

Flipkart has money, and lots of it (current valuation is $11 billion). There is absolutely no way that they are considering this on a cost-analysis basis.

The Nokia analogy bears approximately no relationship to this situation. Nokia was a platform company. Flipkart is just using other people's platforms, ones that will continue to exist independent of their efforts.

Your theory that people with lots of money and stuff on Github have no architectural problems does not match my experience.

Also, I like you using the web to tell me the web is dead. Do go on.

No, the justification for HTTP/HTML is that the client required to use these platforms covers almost your entire addressable market.

One issue with phones in emerging markets is that they are very storage constrained -- the cheaper models often sell with as little as 2GB of storage. On Android, you can add more storage with SD cards, but some apps (Facebook & Chrome, iirc?) cannot be moved to the SD Card. People with limited storage often have to be quite brutal in triaging their installed apps list. Maybe Flipkart has data that shows that users often install their app, but I think a few quarters of anemic mobile user growth will help them change their mind.

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