| I'm not convinced... > I'm sorry but this is just not true. Network effects are important, but there's a reason that people are using these networks to begin with. They work really well. There's a reason they use these networks to begin with, but I don't think it has much to do with them working really well. The network has to work well enough, but past that, marketing, chance and being an early player are all factors that I suspect are more important than how good the product is. > As far as I can tell, WhatsApp never spent a single dollar on advertising. Their entire growth strategy seems to have been word of mouth. Yes, there are other ways to get through the initial growth than advertising. Such as chance, or being there before everyone else. But the "word of mouth" is part of the network effect I am talking about, and it comes after the initial growth. They had to get some initial growth somehow. > These companies have hundreds or thousands of engineers who work on these products full time every day, driving the products forward, making them better and better. That is not something an open source client is ever going to be able to compete with. It just isn't. That doesn't match my experience and I don't see a reason it would. If we were talking about a web browser, maybe, but an instant messaging client is something pretty simple that it doesn't take hundreds or thousands of engineers to get right and make into a good product. Since an open source project won't have the strong incentives a company will have that are against the interests of the users (making it into walled garden, centralized, proprietary software that doesn't use open protocols), it won't take much for the open source client to be better. There is not much correlation in my experience between how good software is and how much money the company that created it has or how many employees it has working on that software. |
While you are technically right, making a good (as in "usable") chat client takes at least a competent developer and a UI designer, and most OSS developers lack in the second domain.
Especially for XMPP, you also need to apply a number of extensions to improve the experience.
From personal experience as an XMPP client developer and XMPP Standards Foundation member I can say that most of the work is driven (slowly) by volunteers, and that there is more work than time. We are starting to cover the UX side of things to make XMPP easy enough to compete with WhatsApp, but we need YOU to contribute. ️