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by lawdawg 4647 days ago
It's amazing that on a place like HN it seems like most people just don't get this.

The vast majority of communication happens on products that: 1. Don't even have a desktop component 2. Have no "status" indication (oh noes!!!) 3. Are completely closed ecosystems

And yet you never see posts about how WhatsApp, iMessage, SnapChat, etc are horrible because of the above reasons.

3 comments

World is a big place and in some areas (like mine) all the services you mentioned aren't popular at all. I doubt 1% of communication happens through them. People around use gtalk and facebook messanger. They used to use GG (Polish product, some time ago most popular here) and Skype but most of them switched to either gtalk or fb. Maybe you don't see complaining because services you mentioned didn't come about as replacement for traditional chat clients integrating most important features of those only to get rid of all this in one go once the user base switched.
>It's amazing that on a place like HN it seems like most people just don't get this.

Communication in general, business communication still is very much dominated by desktop software (e.g. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-lync-video-confe...)

It's the difference between must have features like the ability to communicate with people you want to talk to and features like desktop/status/etc that are nice to have but not essential. The tech community demands perfection and obsesses over anything/everything while normal people just use what works.