I tried to convince the CEO of Research In Motion, who I worked for, that WhatsApp would end up destroying his business. He thought I was insane for thinking something so small and simple could have such a big effect on his big, important company. Yeah, well, whatever you say, man.
And that's all it had to do; the telecoms weren't interested in making SMS cheap or secure, RIM didn't want BBM on anything but their devices, ICQ/AIM/MSN/etc were similarly unavailable.
You can scrap secure from this, the vast majority of users don't care or even know what that means.
If SMS was more secure I 100% would still expect whatsapp to win. Convenience and cost are the biggest drivers here.
Until you get sued or called in front of legislative bodies to testify about why your customer data was breached.
But maybe you're big enough at that point to ride it out.
On the other hand, it's very very hard to add in robust security after reaching critical mass.
"Here's all the data we have, officers. We don't have the keys. Good luck."
Consumers didn't follow this logic. At all. They went for the convenient and free option.
I'm so confused by this thread. It's like you guys are pasting the output of an ML model with only the input "secure" at me.
You talked about encryption on HN. What do you expect? Might as well have brought up gun control at a Republican rally.
(Not that you were anything but 100% right. The general public didn't care about encryption at all until the Snowden leaks.)
Back in 2009, though, this was a very different story. Even tech-savvy people didn't care.
Well, he had a point. What killed BB was the iPhone, not that their chat app was going to lose out to the competition. They simply had a product that was inferior in every single important way.
BB and BBM are network effect. iPhone alone is not enough to disrupt the social-media aspect of BBM (which was very sticky at that time in quite a few countries).
WhatsApp + Android actually killed BB+BBM in those countries and not the expensive iPhone
A few months later he sent me a message letting me know his private jet had just landed in Palo Alto... Did he want me to be proud of the fact that he seemed to be selling out all of RIM’s IP to Zuckerberg? I never got what that was about.
Both of Mike and Jim were in over their heads. And too arrogant to let people younger and smarter operate the ship. A tale as old as time itself. I’ll write about this in detail at some point, I promise.
I remember selling every BlackBerry stock I had when I got my hands on their touchscreen phone (the Storm was it?).
3 years behind the original iPhone, while Apple had just launched the 3G with the App Store. Guess which phone (and stock) I purchased then?
Was there really no-one at BlackBerry following what was going on in the valley at that time?
RIM was so focused on the "business" market they really couldn't conceive of a real consumer device. Their upper management apparently looked at the billions of feature phones sold (IIRC Motorola had sold a quarter billion RAZRs by then) and said "nah let's double down on the order of magnitude smaller business market". They dipped their toe in feature phones with the Pearl but it was a joke compared to the original iPhone with its original software that didn't even support MMS.
By starting with more consumer friendly features (Web, media player, phone features) Apple had an extremely competent baseline of functionality. As soon as they added workable Exchange integration (iOS 3 or 4?) the iPhone (including older models) instantly became workable business devices. RIM had far more ground to make up for going from business to consumer than Apple had going consumer to business.
https://archiveprod.canadianbusiness.com/technology-news/how...
https://techland.time.com/2013/09/29/the-inside-story-of-the...
https://sites.psu.edu/global/2018/02/09/blackberry-and-the-i...
BB’s market cap is currently a bit over 1/3rd of whatsapp’s acquisition price. And BB has minimal long term debt.
What kind of unmet demand you see out there?
When you combine the story of WhatsApp’s small team / high impact development with the remote work shift of the past few years, it seems that the next cycle (regardless of when/what it is) will be the first that isn’t centered on SF/SV/California. It’s interesting to think of how that’ll affect the psychology of the area.
I've heard this every 5 years for the last... 25 I think?
Still hasn't happened.
Off loading the founders vision to someone else is a failure of both communication and org structure (at the seed-SB stage). People may not think hiring their first PdM is offloading their vision, but it is. That person is going to come up with their own ideas, validate their own assumptions, and push for product updates that directly serve their own self interests. To think that this won’t happen is naive.
What I’ve found works the best is hiring competent engineers, giving them adequate business context, a decent design spec, and letting them figure it out.
That isn't to assert that PMs don't do fantastic, necessary work. More-so that there's a more ideal reality where the engineers should be doing that work; the outcomes, in my experience, are better in orgs where engineering is not just influential in, but responsible for, customers, business outcomes, product planning, etc.
This isn't always possible. Most orgs don't resemble Whatsapp; they resemble Google. A hundred product divisions building a thousand different things. Its already difficult to hire engineering talent to fill an org like this, let alone the additional number you'd have to hire in order to account for the fact that a double-digit percentage of an engineer's role should be PM-like stuff.
So, throw away idealism; outsource that part of the engineer role to another specialty which is easier to hire for: PM. Its reasonable.
But the issue has arisen in that industry has forgotten than this was a necessary sacrifice; its not desirable. We've now got university and bootcamp programs dedicated to training for PM roles. Many companies have entrenched the idea that every team/org needs a PM. Tons of people are now adding financial momentum to this idea that their skillset is valuable and necessary; the ship can't be turned so easily.
At the end of the day, this is a disservice to many engineers, as their people, product, and business skills fall out of practice and they're further relegated into code-monkey positions. Its actually a disservice to PMs as well; they could have been trained in engineering and unlocked far more professional mobility. In the worst cases, it leads to PMs resembling the Office Space "what is it, exactly, you do here" guy ("I bring the specs from the client, to the engineers!" "Then, why don't the engineers just talk to the clients?" "Well, they're not people people!" mhm)
When they were a startup, Google didn't resemble Google, either.
For large organizations, I'm a fan of the "internal startup" management structure. This just means each product team should be largely self contained, but has the resources of the larger organization to fall back on.
So the leader of each product team can act like a mini-founder, defining and driving the product without being tightly coupled to any other product teams release cycle.
CEO and CTO beware, do not let Product Managers happen to your company.
He wasn't a professional software engineer, but he took the time to actually learn how to program through some side projects and through this gained a real understanding of what would be trivial for us to implement and what wouldn't.
To top it all off, he had good rapport with the CEO and was adept at managing upwards.
The product wouldn't be half as good as it was if not for him.
Rather than tarring an entire profession with the same brush, I think a much fairer "warning" to founders is to make sure the people you're hiring are competent and that the job they are doing is something that actually adds value to the organisation. PMs, when deployed appropriately, can be worth their weight in gold.
I wish more PM's thought like you.
Precisely this. I don’t know when “engineer” turned into “order taker”. There’s no reason to have a Product Manager define and engineers work. Good engineers are more than capable of defining their own work.
The PM isn't supposed to define features in isolation, but crystalize them into consensus between engineers and stakeholders the PM is accountable to.
If your PM isn't your peer, the org is setup wrong. Tech leadership should be helping define this, but people don't know what they don't know and so things end up with PM's becoming de-facto "team leads".
Then, at that new upstart, someone asks "What else can we bolt on to this thing to make it really grow??"
I think WhatsApp is in the place where it is so ubiquitous in some social circles that it faces less competitive pressures than other apps and can afford some of these pretty large gaps.
Because no such state exists. Imagine if Photoshop stopped with updates twenty years ago, or even five.
This is the key mistake. Having teams of 2-3 with a manager each is way too many managers. If you have a clear focus, small teams are great because they can work autonomously, with little management and good results. You can't hire your way out of coordination hell.
I was at WhatsApp between 2011 and 2019; for the most part early on, we had essentially the CEO who does a mix of product management and engineering management and engineering, an actively engineering server manager (who also did some client work), and a client engineering manager. Android team grew enough to have an engineering manager and we also ended up with one product manager. Post aquisition, staff grew and so did management.
For all the doom and gloom Facebook is still too scared of putting ads in there.
WA apps are not better than the competition. Basic stuff like a way to disable automatic downloading of media for groups you are in is still missing. No desktop app. The web frontend is still crap. Outsourcing account registration to mobile phone companies is ridiculous (same as Signal) -- in most of the world, it makes it pretty much impossible to preserve your privacy while using WA. Endless nagging about plain text cloud backups makes WA E2E encryption completely worthless, since even if you opt-out, 99% of your contacts will have them enabled.
The impressive part, considering the size of their team, was their backend stuff and scale.
Discord, with similar team size, was able to build something that succeeded in displacing IRC. (Their Android app was laughably bad for the longest time as well.)
I think they displaced Skype, mumble and teamspeak too.
They had a year fee of $1. Which I never paid yet I used their service anyways. The reason they were able to scale so large with so few devs is simple, their product was super simple. 50 tech people to build a messaging system is actually a lot.
Tell that to Twitter. Whatsapp staying at 50 instead of growing to 5000 is impressive.
That was even a use case I understood. Now I feel too old to understand how to use twitter. But that can't be it. Much older people seem to have no problem.
The app was only ok-ish. There were some alternative apps in the AppStore. But people just preferred talking trough WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger (which was already two years old at this point). I guess people gravitated to WhatsApp because it was less cluttered and snappier, and to Facebook because it also had a proper social network in it, but I have no idea. Two years later Microsoft would kill MSN and integrate it with Skype.
I think of it in terms of divergence and convergence. Divergent thinking is great. If you think of an army on the march, leaders will be thinking about possible paths and sending out scouts. But when the scouts (experiments) come back with reports (results) they don't just send some soldiers along every path that looks promising. They winnow the options down, converging their thinking.
Bad leaders don't have the discipline for that. And I think a lot of them pick up that habit from sales and/or seeking investment. "What will it do? What won't it do!" That's great for manipulating the feelings of the person you're currently talking to so they'll sign the deal. But it's terrible for running an effective, focused product development organization.
I know I've seen companies die like that. And it's probably way more than we know, because as WhatsApp demonstrates, focusing hard on what's working is a great way to succeed well enough that people study and talk about you later.
Doing one thing good is a thing in the past. Venture capital has pushed basically all start-ups into 100-feature shops
As dleslie and that_guy_iain have mentioned, it was expensive to send an SMS text back then, especially in Europe when your friends have different country codes. So WhatsApp was a free alternative that tapped the unmet need for millions.
And signing up with only a phone number seems like a nobrainer nowadays, but the mindset of the time was still email + password. Sure, Microsoft could have launched a competitor, but they would most certainly require you to use an MSN account, thus adding friction to adoption.
The vast majority of people will leave your service if it goes from $0 to even $1. So no, I don't think they could "easily" scale that up.
Hell, If WhatsApp ever got to say "Facebook wants to buy us, but we are also considering changing to a pay-what-you-want model to avoid selling out", I'd easily give them $10/year without batting an eye.
1,000 times this.
Part 1: By definition: more engineers = more ideas.
Part 2: Not so much.
On the one hand, mediocre engineers are sometimes sequestered into small teams where they can't interfere with the important projects that all the smart people and other resources are being thrown at. They just sit there and churn out crappy ideas and crappy non-vital tools. Like daily indicators.
On the other hand, I can see that as more of a tautology: ideas come from one person and are grown by a team. So be definition a quality idea comes from one person, and turns into a team.
The best way I can call it is the impedence mismatch between what business people imagine and envision, and what the real products, their code, their systems are actually doing and are actually designed to do.
It creates a kind of cost explosion in the velocity needed and it is often solved by throwing more developers at it instead of rethinking the actual design of the products so that they can better grow to support additional use cases and scale.
You can't totally call it a hack, but it kind of is. A system was designed in a way that doesn't scale to the user demand and to the additional features or the new abstractions that it wants to grow into. Instead of rethinking holistically about how that system should be re-designed to now encompass all of this new stuff, and then put the work into changing it from its current model to that new one. What people do is they break up the current system in two, so now you have two service where you had one before. And now they hire a new team of engineers, manager, PM, etc. to start working on this new half. This repeats again where each of those two half are split in half again, hiring a new team, now there are four teams and four service, etc.
As that happens, you can no longer redesign the way the systems fundamentally work, so each team accrues more and more complicated workarounds on their individual pieces and all new feature becomes cross team projects where you now need someone to coordinate the work between all teams for each little project.
Once you start down this path, there is no way out, the only solution becomes throwing even more teams at it, breaking things down again and again into smaller pieces with a whole team behind it as each piece becomes more and more complex to all work around the inherent holistic limitations that were never reconsidered.
It's a vicious cycle, the piece cannot grow in it's current state because it is too complex, break it up, have two teams tackle each half, now they can take the complexity until they themselves add more stuff to it which makes them too complex once more, break it again, add another team, rinse and repeat.
The issue is often that complexity is accidental, due to the design in place and the tech dept accrued till now, as opposed to being inherent to the domain problem. But instead of addressing the accidental complexity, it is simply broken down in two so we can throw more people behind taming it.
Amen to that!
Much better are the folks with a solid vision who can drive folks to execute on it, successfully.
By the way, this is mentioned here: https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-us...
For example Google had thousands of engineers back when they had only 3 products: search, auction, and AdWords. I remember Travelocity having over a thousand developers and not being able to redesign a webpage.
Its deeper than a product problem. Its an execution problem. It’s the ability to do what works with great criticality opposed to what’s expected, standard, normal, or comforting.
I get scared every time that senior leadership pushes a new member on the team, because I know that overall quality will drop; their view is completely related to how much things they want to done on every cycle, and they don't care about quality (until it blows up in their face)
I wrote something similar [1] about its success not long ago on HN,
>WhatApp grew because it was the only IM that worked on Smartphone. Thanks to Erlang. Yes. ICQ didn't bother. Microsoft refuse to accept Smartphone is the future of computing hence there never was MSN on Smartphone. Other contender tried but none of them managed to Scale. I still remember all my colleagues and friends used to download instant messenger on our phone to test them out, creating a group and basically DDoS each other until the system or network crash. No IM was able to handle the traffic load, not only WhatsApp did it many times better than their competitors, they also had almost all platform support, from Symbian to Blackberry.
There is another part of the story that dont get much appreciation, is how they managed 2 million connection per box on a what is now a relatively slow server. The latest M1 Max would have been a lot faster. I often wonder if they could have pushed to 10 Million connection per box with same latency under current CPU and Memory. ( Not saying it is a good idea. )
Higher quantity of ideas == More engineers. Higher quality of ideas == Fewer engineers.
WhatsApp success is not about what WhatsApp did, it's about everything they didn't do. No desktop, no browser (until after reaaaaaaallly long), no account creation (your phone number is enough, thanks), no hidden ad engine, no hundreds of stupid features that product people stuff down in the name of experimentation.
There are some leaders who want anything and everything: Throw 100 darts in the wall. Leave what sticks (don't touch or nurture it). Go back to throwing 100 more. The other guy does that? We want that too. Mobile? Yes. Desktop? Yes. Browser? Yes. Different affiliate channels? Yes. Custom features for B2B partners? Yes. Merchandizing? Yes. Build a mini Ad engine? Yes. Multi user profile management systems? Yes. Yes, yes, yes, every requirement is a go.
The crucial difference is: What happens when you have a restricted pool of people, but insist on doing 100s of things? Some leaders simply treat this as an "org structure" problem, not a problem of focus. They slice and dice the org until the 30 people become split into teams of 2-3 with a manager for each, running into coordination hell on each step – just so that more quantity of features can be seen on paper. This is how most startups are, except for those rare few which don't "talk" about focusing, but actually focus.