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A comment on Effective Engineer – Notes. Parent comment

Re:Effective Engineer – Notes by brucephillips on Thursday December 28, 2017 @04:37PM (#16025095)
> But without the benefit of hindsight, how do you tell the difference?

See value missed by others.

Do you have sources for any of the success factors you described? My understanding was that WhatsApp's success was largely due to focusing on feature phones, increasing ubiquity.

Regardless, none of this changes the fact that OP is correct in saying that you shouldn't work on the wrong ideas, of course.

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Re:Effective Engineer – Notes by nostrademons on Thursday December 28, 2017 @05:07PM (#16025363)
WhatsApp's push notification story is in the Wikipedia page, though I think I'd read it in a news story profiling Jan Koum after the acquisition:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp#History

I was wrong about timing though: it was only about 6 months after WhatsApp was incorporated (2 years after they left Yahoo though, so they might have been working on it beforehand).

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