The nature of the mobile landscape has changed. This article gets to the heart of why Facebook bought WhatsApp, but goes much further.
As we move further into the mobile age, it’s clear that Facebook is on the defensive. The problem isn’t with the Facebook mobile app per se, which is elegantly executed and does a fine job of recreating the web experience on a phone or tablet. Rather, the problem is that people don’t want a web-style social network on their mobile devices. They want a simpler, faster, less public, and more intimate way to share with only close friends, the ones they care about the most. They want to swap pictures. They want to say, “I’m here.” They want pieces of Facebook, but not the entire package at once.
That is, what they want is just messaging—good old messaging, like the text messages that have been around nearly as long as there have been cell phones. And they have plenty of choices: In less than two years, services like WhatsApp, Snapchat, Kik, Line, KakaoTalk, and WeChat have grown from nothing to become social lifelines for millions of users. In the near term, these apps are saving their customers money by reducing text-message fees. But that’s not why Facebook has been so desperate to compete with these upstarts. It’s not why Facebook revamped its own stand-alone Messenger app, or why it offered (unsuccessfully) to buy Snapchat for a reported $3 billion in November, or why it finally bought WhatsApp for the aforementioned knee-buckling sum of $19 billion.
No, Facebook’s angst is entirely about eyeballs and fingers, about owning the icon that you tap when you want to connect with friends. It worried that if it didn’t act now, one or more of these upstarts would soon supplant it as the go-to tool for sharing news with friends. As Zuckerberg noted when announcing the acquisition: “WhatsApp is the only widely used app we’ve ever seen that has more engagement and a higher percent of people using it daily than Facebook itself.” The acquisition doesn’t mean that Facebook will win what can only be described as the messaging wars, but at least it puts the company in a position not to lose.
Great read.