> 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.

Different product. One is a social media network and one is a messaging app.

You say that now, but Twitter also began as a way to send a quick message to your friends.

You used to be able to use it as a way to create a free self-managing SMS distribution list. Pretty cool, before I had phone with data capabilities.

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.

Umm it quickly pivoted to being a social networking site. Before they even were trying to scale they were a social network, micro blogging site.

But, it wasn't built to scale like WhatsApp.

That's unfair, Twitter had to wrestle scaling with Rails while WhatsApp used Erlang which is a perfect match for scalable communications.

How things would have work around if Microsoft released MSN Messenger for Android and iOS. They had the userbase and the brand already.

Why didn't MSN become what WhatsApp is today? I always wondered how they could screw this up. Smartphones are perfect for chat apps, that's basically what they are supposed to be used for, and MSN / ICQ already covered a gigantic portion of the instant messaging market. Did they just assume people would stay on desktop for chatting forever?

Good question. I remember Microsoft had an app around 2010, but it just failed to gain critical momentum, maybe because people were already moving en masse to Facebook and WhatsApp itself.

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.

Yeah Microsoft was too dysfunctional before, but they’ve improved a lot recently and are killing it in many areas

Yep. They ware the dominant instant messenger here. They would have had a massive user base from day one.

Or AOL, but maybe it died out too soon?

In my recollection it wasn‘t about saving 10 cents in the beginning, but about saving 1-2$ per message, since one of the first use cases it enabled was free international texting. That was a HUGE benefit. All the first evangelists I knew were in long distance relationships ;)