Sleeping in the summit

Brian Acton and Jan Koum founded WhatsApp in 2009.

It is quite interesting how the situation in the instant messaging market is clearly stagnant. The service users get in their everyday life is well under the standards seen in other web and digital services.

No significant move nor improvement from the leader has been shown since they took over as the standard platform for instant messaging. WhatsApp seems to quietly sleep alone in the summit while all new incomers try to reach their marketpower and a substantial user base to be considered as a possible menace. 

And it has not yet happened.

Which improvements fit with their culture?

WhatsApp seems not to bother adding new funcionalitites to its product, at least in the short run. And It is not about cheesy and superficial addons: WhatsApp is light, fast and widely available for almost any mobile OS, some key elements for these market. We certainly don’t need video conference or manga stickers added to it!

A computer client is an urgent feature. A web-based client? New cloud-based functionalities? Maybe some integration with Facebook?

It is because of WhatsApp’s well-defined culture that many functionalities clearly fall outside this personality. WhatsApp will never turn into a social network, advertising platform or a cloud-based messaging app. This culture could all be brought down to these principles:

"We are pretty clear on this. I mean, would you like advertising on WhatsApp? We wouldn’t. We want messaging to be as simple and easy as possible. We don’t want our application to be a social network or a gaming network, but a messaging network (…) We want to be purely about messaging" 

Jan Koum, WhatsApp co-founder.

What's happening?

WhatsApp may not be improving their service as a defensive strategy: whenever a competitor grows enough to become a true menace, WhatsApp will unleash all these potential to defitively clear all doubts on its leadership.