A dedicated and stubborn minority can gradually impose their preferences on a majority who does not have a strong opinion on something. This why you'll order a cheese pizza if you're hanging out with friends and a single person in the group is a vegetarian.
In my own life there are many group chats that are now on signal because one stubborn 'ole grouch, namely me, insisted on it. Most people don't give too much thought to the chat app they use, so they kind of shrugged their shoulders and went along with it.
With messaging apps you can use both Whatsapp and Signal, so even if you convince a few people to convert, Whatsapp is unlikely to decline.
The important word in Taleb's thesis is 'stubborn', not minority. The change isn't gradual but 'fractal' with one person in the group being able to flip everyone else, and they going on an doing the same thing.
You can have both Whatsapp and Signal installed, but everyone in a conversation needs to have the same app. So why not both doesn't apply as neatly as you assert.
It's also a backup mechanism in case Signal fails (like it did when the exodus happened)
I view SMS as a fallback solution. It has plenty of benefits, i.e. no app required, works on every mobile phone ever made.
It’s just a question of how many people are extremely pro WhatsApp and will Facebook drive them away.
Done, nobody cares anymore, for real and features will come from Google :D We're so stuck on using 2 apps instead of 2 networks we forget mobile phone providers had to agree together to do SMS decades ago, and it went fine with dumbed down feature.
And let's be honest, the only killer feature that made me finally adopt whatsapp like 6 years ago was that it used the data plan that works on WIFI rather than the phone plan. We were all fine with SMSes before.
I had more issues with iMessage delivery then I ever had with SMS in my whole life. I dont even remember a single incident with SMS delivery. And I consider your "missing media" point an advantage. Sending stupid videos from phone to phone is a disease that I dont want to deal with.
Signal actually has a desktop app. It requires having installed signal on a phone before, and linking the accounts, but it doesn't depend on the phone after that I believe.
As for SMS, it works on pretty much any device and network, with the caveats that it's the first and lowest common denominator messaging service.
>Signal actually has a desktop app.
So yeah, while saddening I don’t expect SMS to make much progress as its lifecycle is tied to the worst one in the industry.
XMPP had a better chance, but unfortunately chatting service is the bait for other purposes... so an interop standard has no chance to survive without regulation.
They based it on the decentralized protocol Jabber (or XMPP) and even open their servers to others. Meaning you could discuss with people using other servers than GTalk, just like email.
Google closed their servers to federalization, rebranded GTalk to Hangout and made bad decision after bad decision (but always in the direction of closing up instead of supporting open standards), lost the fight for messaging despite controlling the dominant mobile OS.
tl;dr I have no faith in Google to (1) do the right thing for open standards and (2) manage to get any sort of market share on messaging
rewording your sentence: Google stop volunteering time & resources on efforts that help others make money, and focused on only Google making money. I don't own any Google (AlphaBet) stocks, but if I was a shareholder, and someone would have told me that "we have a line item that is -50m on our statement, but hey, it is good for the competitors", I would like that line item gone.
I have faith in Google that they will try their best to make money. They may lose 1 here and make 50 there, but that -1 will be gone after a certain time. And this is a good business decision. Otherwise they would have one cash cow and 100 losers and they would be a break-even business, which is not a Business because Business = profit.
You just added a bunch of accounts and all you messages and conversations (SMS, Skype, Jabber, etc.) were in one unified place.
Its still effectively this way on modern SailfishOS but as new IM services are effectively app based silos with no public API this system needs, you are not really able to make use of it.
3 groups:
1. Uses Signal only
2. Uses both
3. Uses Whatsapp only
1 is the stubborn minority, 2 is slowly increasing, and 3 probably doesn't care enough to be considered stubborn, and definitely not minority.
At least that was my thought, this whole debacle reminded me immediately of the stubborn minority, so I'm very curious to see how it plays out.
1. Uses whatsapp out of momentum. Doesn't want to use anything else, but might if people really push them; i.e. open to transition to group 2.
2. Will use whatever. Some people in this group want to stop using whatsapp, but won't break contacts to do so. Some people in this group would prefer to stick with whatsapp to avoid the burden of a switch, but won't break contacts to do so. This is the vast majority of switchers.
3. Die hard whatsapp users. Simply refuse to switch to another app, because it's a hassle, and/or because they begrudge other people making a mountain out of a molehill and asking them to do anything. Might oppose yet-another-app; or might actually want to stick to whatsapp because they actually like the simplicity of the network effect.
4. Die hard non-whatsapp (likely signal?) users. Refuse to use whatsapp, likely due to privacy concerns or distrust of facebook.
I don't think most people trying to switch away from whatsapp are in 4. Anecdotally, I people I know asking to switch are clearly in 2, and are largely losing to those in 3. Only 1 person I know claims to be in 4, but I'm not really sure that'll stick if the exodus doesn't keep momentum. Because of the existance of the bulk of humanity which barely cares about this, and some of which will get annoyed at the suggestion - I suspect group 3 is much, much larger than 4, and that suggests this exodus will fall flat. The only real chance here is that since this is all about closed groups that network effects aren't so huge, so a considerable exodus without actual terminal velocity is possible.
To me the biggest question, does 2 grow bigger than 3? When X% of people have Telegram, Whatsapp and Signal installed, then it becomes a non-issue to have Signal only sticklers.
> The only real chance here is that since this is all about closed groups that network effects aren't so huge, so a considerable exodus without actual terminal velocity is possible.
This is my experience so far. I think you're right that the network effect is very fragmented and micro. In my case the few active groups that I value have migrated, the rest don't care and could email me or sms me and I've seen sufficient migration to Signal, signalling that moving from 1 to 4 might be viable.
I think the stubborn minority may indeed be small, but you havent given the intolerant minority the time ineeds to grow.
The guy nagging people with Linux ten years ago.
Anyway.
This is something I want to highlight. I know we’re not all product managers but as people working in tech we should be able to take different perspectives and understand that what matters to us doesn’t matter at all for the 99% of the people outside our tech world.
Also, human have limited amount of attention --- if Telegram/Signal cannot make it to the critical mass soon then average users who had been convinced to try the alternatives might eventually revert back to WhatsApp because maintaining multiple chatting channels can be quite annoying at times, especially considering majority of their contacts might still be on WhatsApp and it is just easier to post there.
So now with that amount of people switching trying out Telegram, could mean that at least 2-3 people on a non-tech social circle might be using Telegram which might end up convincing the whole group to switch because of features (polls? utility bots?) or any other benefit they might find.
I have no issue using telegram or signal, it’s just that the default choice is becoming/became whatsapp.
Cant stand Zuckerberg, but he does have an eye for products that can really explode in growth.
The fact that the acquisition happened has more to do with regulators being asleep than Zuckerberg being awake.
As far as I can recall, the EU regulators believed Facebook's lies about not being able to link WhatsApp and Facebook accounts, which Facebook promptly ignored a few years later. They were fined €110m ($134m) [0]. The maximum fine would have been $276m at the time. Still cheap IMO.
This quote reads like a joke now:
> Today’s decision sends a clear signal to companies that they must comply with all aspects of EU merger rules, including the obligation to provide correct information
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/may/18/facebook-fi...
I don't envision a whole continent to change to something else unless WhatsApp dies.
It also depends on your level of seniority in that group. If you are a junior member, they likely won't switch, but if you have the social clout, you might be able to get them to switch.
For the same reason, Facebook was initially open to only Harvard, then to a few other ivies, until it opened to all colleges in the USA and Canada. If your high school friend who made it to the the highly esteemed college uses the service you are more likely to switch than if it were the reverse situation. Later these people get into important positions of society and if you want to network with them, you too can use FB.
But if you now have several millions of people who will not use Whatsapp at all, all the groups that they are in will need to migrate to the alternative (which is pretty much Signal/Telegram at this point). So those few million become few tens of millions. And once they migrate and start liking it, they may avoid Whatsapp as well, because it's far easier to just use one app, and then their groups need to migrate, and so on.
Edit 1: Added Telegram as an alternative.