War against Snapchat, Facebook inc. is looking desperate!
The need to stay in power and being the most powerful network platform is hurting facebook.
When facebook saw a challenge from WhatsApp they ended up buying Whatsapp for a good amount of money. This move somehow strengthened their desire for leadership in the social networking business. They ended up being the most user rich platform, again. On a personal level I do cherish Mark zuckerberg. He executed facebook in such an opulent manner that the whole world knows him and his product Facebook even more.
The issue with such platforms is that they need to come up with something new in every quarter or semi-annually to keep their visitors active. Be it enabling external links on fb pages -to- gif mounting -to- sudden emphasis on videos (which turned out the best) or the raise of 3d videos. You will have to amuse people regularly to stay active. No wonder the new duck sticker/emoticon is famous these days.
FACEBOOK OWNING OPPONENTS FROM…
From the day Facebook saw it’s first connection on internet to now, it has managed to demolish all it’s opponents. Again a genius business execution behind this. The biggest hurdles faced by facebook came from instagram (now owned by Facebook), WhatsApp (now owned by facebook) and SNAPCHAT. Unfortunately for Mark and his team, they failed to crack a deal with a young maverick founder of Snapchat Evan Spigel. A young lad with big dreams in his eyes he refused facebook’s offer of a whopping $3 Billions.
Evan’s big silicon valley dreams are having a run as they were last evaluated for a humongous $20 Billions. And guess what, who isn’t happy with that? For sure they are hurting Facebook’s market and the Facebook team isn’t enjoying it. So what do you do when your competitor won’t sell themselves? Well, you build the same product in.
But the risk here was managing and getting users, which is always possible for someone like Facebook but is time consuming. So they rebuilded an existing platform with good amount of users to challenge snapchat. Yes, I am talking about Instagram’s story feature. Which is more or less a copy of snapchat but on Instagram. With instagram having more users than snapchat, it managed to shake snapchat and many users started using Instagram storys and snapchat all together, though for private chat, snapchat remained the boss. And in the meantime Quarter 4 Snapchat downloads fell drastically compared to other quarters of the year 2016.
Facebook V/s Snapchat
In order to further weaken snapchat and to get their dominance stronger, Facebook has again rolled out the snapchat like feature on Whatsapp this morning. With completely changing the interface of whatsapp and making it more complicated now we have a Whatsapp which will show you images in place of status. Yes, they killed the status feature from whatsapp, and we are deeply hurt with this step.
The success story of Whatsapp lies with the simplicity of it’s UI and the powerful code magic they have. The GUI plays an important role as it allows everyone from every age group to understand what Whatsapp really is and you can use it. This step on Whatsapp’s 8th anniversary mark looks like a desperate attempt by Facebook inc. to shut down their competitors. It somehow reminds me of old medieval period kings and tribes, who had only one motto “Either be with us or die”.
Though we hope we keep getting better and advanced technologies in this dominance battle but easy to use and not replicas at the same time.
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