News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers by i_have_an_idea on Monday October 25, 2021 @04:30PM (#28992750)
> 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.

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.

Re:WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers by hello_moto on Monday October 25, 2021 @06:13PM (#28993821)
It's attack from both directions:

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

Re:WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers by cinntaile on Monday October 25, 2021 @06:01PM (#28993679)
People owned a BB because of its built-in message service.
Re:WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers by aeoanx on Monday October 25, 2021 @06:16PM (#28993847)
A lot of people liked the keyboard