The Best of GRReporter
flag_bg flag_gr flag_gb

What’s up Facebook?

21 February 2014 / 17:02:04  GRReporter
6133 reads

Google is perhaps the biggest competitor. This is because it has the second most popular social network that offers the Hangouts service. This is because it has Android, the most popular mobile operating system, which is compatible with Hangouts. For several months already, the latter has been offering not only free text messaging but also the sending of SMS messages. The information above shows that the software giant is interested in applications similar to WhatsApp. Last week, one of the most popular applications, Viber, was sold for the "moderate" sum of 900 million dollars. However, Google could turn to many services and we may witness yet another acquisition.

Microsoft bought Skype for 8.5 billion euro with the idea of integrating the popular service in its strategy to enter the mobile market. Currently no indications show that it is benefiting from this acquisition in this direction but let us not forget that Skype has its loyal users and they number about 663 million as shown by recent data.

Who is the winner and who is the loser?

The obvious loser is mobile operators. Their losses from the use of free messaging applications amount to billions of dollars per year. Of course, users pay to use their networks for data transfer but the price cannot cover the losses of the messages that are not sent as SMS.

On the other hand, the SMS service is a veteran that cannot be compared to the features and convenience of the mobile IM clients. Many of them already replace the text message as they allow users to send stickers and emoticons, exchange files, leave voice messages and talk to each other. In this sense, the losses for mobile operators are even greater.

Users are happy because they get a cheaper service with a lot of features as compared to the cost of traffic.

WhatsApp employees are the winners. BusinessInsider reveals interesting details about the pay they will receive. It turns out that each of the long-time employees at WhatsApp holds in it a share of approximately 1%. At first glance, this is a small value but it means they will receive 160 million dollars due to the purchase of the company from Facebook.

Companies find new channels for advertising through Facebook, Google and Microsoft, thus imposing their influence. Business is evolving to all kinds of services related to mobile devices and "cloud." We, in turn, will closely follow the development of the issue.

Do you use a mobile messaging application that replaces SMS messaging?
Tags:
SUPPORT US!
GRReporter’s content is brought to you for free 7 days a week by a team of highly professional journalists, translators, photographers, operators, software developers, designers. If you like and follow our work, consider whether you could support us financially with an amount at your choice.
Subscription
You can support us only once as well.
blog comments powered by Disqus