Amazon possibly working on new stand-alone messaging app called Anytime

Re:Amazon possibly working on new stand-alone messaging app ... by btown on Sunday July 16, 2017 @12:23PM (#14782665)

WeChat is the perfect counterexample here, and I think it speaks to why a company like Amazon would love to "own the bloat." For western markets, if Apple or Facebook is equivalent to WeChat with their pervasive messaging platforms, and Amazon is the equivalent of Alibaba, then the war between them alluded to in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WeChat#WeChat_Pay_payment_serv... tells you all you need to know about why this is a crucial battlefront.

It's one thing when bloat is from attempts at software feature differentiation; that's what kills these apps. It's another thing entirely when you're interfacing with product and payment ecosystems, when your features make you the core way in which people live their lives. It'll be damn hard to stick the landing, but Amazon absolutely has to try.

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Re:Amazon possibly working on new stand-alone messaging app ... by otoburb on Sunday July 16, 2017 @12:55PM (#14782870)

This hits the nail on the head. Western companies have seen the massive ecosystem that WeChat provides via their highly effective messaging UI and belatedly realize through their corporate and fiduciary duty bound value systems that there is a whole 'nother level they must aspire to.

When web-based giants successfully developed and implemented private clouds they served as an aspirational beacon for CIOs to transform their internal technology roadmaps. CxO teams are now greedily eyeing the WeChat experience and saying to themselves "we can do that too!" in a similar manner.

By the way, this type of thinking isn't confined to corporate executives -- WeChat is so appallingly all-encompassing that even pure decentralized plays (e.g. Urbit) use WeChat as a concrete instantiation of the type of end-user-experience to strive for, albeit in more user- and freedom- friendly manners.

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