Personal opinion? And this applies almost equally to Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL. But that they all lost the messenger wars. Of the four, Google was the best positioned to take mobile, really the best positioned of any company in the world. And that blunder is probably a bigger blunder than Microsoft and Facebook arriving late to the mobile world. Because Google WAS the mobile operating system, they were the cross platform browser vendor, and they completely, absolutely, 100% failed to deliver a worldwide mobile first + desktop messaging solution that was better than the competition.

Does this not in fact support the claim that they are not quite the monopoly that people make them out to be? That it is in fact not that easy to abuse their power in owning the platform to gain market share in messaging?

I'm not sure what people want these days: people are angry that they have successful products that people use more than competitor's prodcts, and also angry that they have unsuccessful products that are shut after failing to gain traction.

I dont know how the accusation that they are a monopoly in search and advertising related to them being poor at spending that money to become a monopoly elsewhere.

Interesting.. I’ve seen the messaging wars start up again every 5 years. The current iteration is business oriented with slack etc.. but that doesn’t mean it won’t be personal again.

Mobile is all about power management. Apple got that right and really nailed the UX.

I don’t think Google knew that playbook at that point. Maybe Rubin did but even MSFT blew it.

Quite honestly, I think Facebooks play to overlay chat ontop of something more addictive was its big win. Then having a mobile app to talk to the same people.

None of that matters anymore, because Messenger/IG/WA are all mobile apps that most people probably dont chat as much through on a desktop/laptop. But at the time, it gave people a compelling reason to have the messenger product open on screen. Google Talk was similar, being overlayed over Gmail, but google squandered having a Talk bar over the bottom of every google property. Yahoo as well. Yahoo News should have had messenger across the bottom of the screen.

On the mobile front, FB Messenger sort of won out because people started to like iMessage, but there was still a need for a cross platform alternative. I believe Apple could have prevented FB Messenger from being a thing, had they released an Android client along with a browser extension. Apple's best move was releasing iTunes for Windows, something they are scared to repeat, and shouldnt be.

>On the mobile front, FB Messenger sort of won out because people started to like iMessage, but there was still a need for a cross platform alternative. I believe Apple could have prevented FB Messenger from being a thing, had they released an Android client along with a browser extension. Apple's best move was releasing iTunes for Windows, something they are scared to repeat, and shouldnt be.

I wonder what the numbers are on WhatsApp vs FB Messenger, because people of all socioeconomic levels, languages, ages, country, and tech literacy use WhatsApp in my experience, whereas only Americans of a certain age group use FB Messenger.

WhatsApp is the clear winner since it has always been optimized for very old devices. But it's now a FB product anyway. At some point FB will develop a unified messaging product... maybe in response to antitrust.

how much revenue is in the mobile messaging business?

I mean the gold standard here is WeChat. QQ is probably the next one. Messaging apps are probably more important than FB for example. The problem right now in the US is friction with using messaging apps for payment. Venmo, apple pay and other apps are making inroads here but we are still mostly confined to credit card interfaces.