It’s crazy to me how Facebook has so many employees when their entire business is basically managing 3 software products (Facebook, instagram and the advertising platform).
Meanwhile I think Apple has about the same number of employees if you subtract the retail Apple store workers.
Yet, Apple’s business is comprised of managing, and this is only a rough guess:
- 30+ hardware products and their supply chain, marketing and distribution
- A microprocessor and component design business
- 3 entire operating systems and developer tools and app store sales infrastructure for each
- 50+ software products and services, including competitors for Microsoft office suite, Netflix, Spotify, Google Chrome, Dropbox, Adobe Premier, Zoom, and more
Isn't a lot of retail apple stuff essentially outsourced? Apple sells a lot of stuff in Poland, but there are zero Apple jobs here. It's all "authorized reseller" and "authorized service".
I’m assuming you’re in Poland. In the US and in some countries neighboring Poland there are owned and operated Apple stores with Apple staff. When I visit my work’s Warsaw office I always seem to need an Apple Store for something and end up settling for an iStore or similar third party. Authorized Retailers are fine but they usually lack all the small spare parts Apple will carry. On these trips I always seem to break a specific part that I know an Apple Store carries and have to wait until I am in another country.
These stores were started in the early 00s due to Apple’s lack of control over how their products were merchandised in US big box stores. Prior to Apple Stores, I purchased all my Apple products and equipment from a catalog or the early E-commerce catalog websites A lot of the experiential sales in Apples world stemmed from the retail experience they created.
No one is going to challenge Facebook head on. Google tried and flamed out. Zuckerberg is afraid of new forms of social media that will expedite the death of Facebook. This is why he bought Instagram. Was it really a competitor? Nope. But it was the new thing the kids were flocking to.
Oh hell no. I'm glad that Whatsapp is being mostly left alone, or at least that's what I see as a user. They ship some improvements and extraneous stuff (Whatsapp Status) from time to time, but the core of the app stays as it is.
Most people don't look forward to every time their app is redesigned starting from the icon up. It mostly doesn't get better, it gets worse to satisfy a Product Manager's CV checkbox.
Says you. Lots of people like software that keeps working reliably over the years. I know I do. The only valuable updates to WhatsApp are when new emojis are added ;). For the rest it already works very well, why break it or redesign it?
There is actually something very cute and personal about WhatsApp.
I would go to Telegram to get movies or some restricted (conspiracy?) news feeds.
Spam, payment notes, etc. come via regular Messages/SMS.
But when something comes via WhatsApp... Dunno, it just feels more personal from me. As if, it's someone I personally know or care about / involved with.
I think some of this magic is preserved just because it does not add any other features that dilate the original use case and how it makes one feel.
In addition to 1-to-1 chats and group chats, telegram has channels, which are kind of similar to twitter timelines, 1-to-many communications.
There are a large number of channels that take advantage of the 2 gig filesize limit by uploading pirated media. It's actually more convenient than torrents for most things, but it's still a hassle compared to a good usenet setup.
You can find entire seasons of animes just by doing a global search for the name of the anime. Sometimes there's even a chat attached for discussing the anime!
The articles I can find with numbers show Whatsapp at about 2B users, ahead of WeChat and everything else. When I flew Southwest the other day the only apps the "free wifi messaging" bothered supporting were iMessage and Whatsapp.
Unless memory is failing me, WhatsApp had ~55 employees (engineers ?) when they were acquired, also I doubt that Facebook is now pumping tens of thousands of engineers on a product that kept itself up with more or less 50 people.
Moreover, I'm not sure what sort of change were they even supposed to bring to the app when their goal, as WhatsApp stated, was to take over SMS as global messaging system.
Well Adobe has also done a lot of acquisition and (many of them they then failed to maintain those products, until a slow death. what they did to Macromedia still hurts.) let us not forget they purchased photoshop and most of what is there PDF software today came from the acquisitions of several companies.
Some call it price gouging and some call it a subscription to professional software that's constantly under significant development. Other professional tools in adjacent industries cost a LOT MORE. Nuke Studio, for example, costs 4k/quarter.
Sure Adobe should focus more on old usability issues in lieu of new features and many of their programs have such broad userbases that they couldn't possibly focus equally on everything their users want them to focus on, but when it comes down to it, people are mad because it's something they want, but not enough to pay for. Looking at their uservoice forums for 5 minutes dispenses with the notion that they're just giving these apps the bare minimum amount of work and using them as cash cows.
There are cheaper or FOSS alternatives that suit most non-professional's needs but if you want Adobe's professional tools and have those tools keep up with our ever changing technical landscape, that costs money. I professionally use Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Premier Pro, After Effects, Audition, Acrobat, Lightroom Classic and XD, so the CC subscription is an absolute bargain.
Facebook, Instagram, Meta (which is Oculus hardware and all the metaverse...stuff), Whatsapp, ads, Portal (which includes hardware). It still seems bloated, but they do a wide variety of things, including running their own enormo-scale platform, in addition to doing things on AWS.
It's especially crazy given how terrible Facebook's UX is outside of the native apps. Ex. You can't rate marketplace sellers at all and it's been that way for a year or more.
You're probably right. Now management can reap the reward of sic'ing thousands of engineers on data collection rather than fixing the deficiencies in their product. Too bad for the engineers, though.
I am in US, from an Asian community; & people in my circle who own an iPhone still prefer Whatsapp for like 100+ msgs a day. Never saw them using iMessage even for other iPhone users.
That's not how it works, WhatsApp had 50 engineers when it had 900M users[0]. Beside iMessage is not only used by 10k, some estimates put it at more than 1 billion users[1].
iMessage has a lot of users if you count people with iphones who very occasionally try to send a text but end up using iMessage. I count as one but it still is completely irrelevant to me. WhatsApp is where everything interesting is.
I'm always surprised when I meet someone who does.
None of my friends (+their family) or my family have ever used it. Nobody I hang out with will even say they have whatsapp. Maybe it's because we're "desktop people", which doesn't explain the lack of participation by someone like my wife. She uses her phone almost exclusively. shrug
there's still infrastructure in place to support you. there's a cost per user and cost per message, and you contributing to the former even if not to the latter.
Presumably a lot of these are content moderation staff, often much cheaper than engineers. Facebook claimed to have made good progress in the last year automating moderation, but could also just be backing off on moderation to reduce costs at increased risk of regulation.
Often that kind of staff will be employed via agencies, so it's difficult to really compare between companies as we don't have the numbers. For instance, Apple presumably need a lot of staff to moderate apple pay, but if they have outsourced the rolls we won't know how many there are or see if they get cut.
>> Apple runs a competitor for that too with iMessage so I’d call it a wash.
I agree, and I’m sure it’s adoption rate is increasing globally.
I’m just saying… WhatsApps global impact on an everyday basis is quite overlooked.
There are countries where people solely depend on WhatsApp to communicate externally. Todays’ green sms on an iPhone is equivalent to a WhatsApp text.
If that fallback, that Facebook controls and owns, didn’t exist or your country banned it—imagine not receiving messages from your kids because “WhatsApp is down”?
Anyways tldr; WhatsApp is cheaper than sms. The default communication for many. More affordable. More used daily as a necessity.
If you look from the outside yes, however there is low we don't know about FB and hidden works not producing a product etc just yet.They are very long term focused and very different from Tim Apple's idea of a company as an operational engine.
Many businesses have the "not invented here" syndrome, i believe they have many employees doing yak shaving or writing tools/libraries to support the business.
Examples are osquery, folly and contributions to Apache Thrift as well, just to mention a few.
WhatsApp and Instagram, both acquired by Facebook, were actually a gold standard in lean development. 1o to 30 people for a massively popular product.
If these companies were creating sprawling and unnecessary micro-service-based infrastructures, they would have easily needed headcounts 10 times as large.
So it's really a case in point that Facebook is ultra-wasteful.
Meanwhile I think Apple has about the same number of employees if you subtract the retail Apple store workers.
Yet, Apple’s business is comprised of managing, and this is only a rough guess:
- 30+ hardware products and their supply chain, marketing and distribution
- A microprocessor and component design business
- 3 entire operating systems and developer tools and app store sales infrastructure for each
- 50+ software products and services, including competitors for Microsoft office suite, Netflix, Spotify, Google Chrome, Dropbox, Adobe Premier, Zoom, and more
- a film & tv production business
- a massive physical retail store footprint
- a global e-commerce store
- I’m sure I’m forgetting something else