The author ignores strong evidence suggesting that iMessage brings people (especially young people) into the apple ecosystem, locks them in and lands and expands. iMessage is the killer app for iPhone and integrates flawlessly with the desktop app.
I hate to disparage the intelligence of the author in general, but in this specific case they are wrong and startlingly ignorant of the market they pretend to understand at an expert level.
Agreed. It's similar to how BBM was a killer feature for blackberry and brought so many people into that ecosystem.
It may not be enough to keep a company going forever - apple has many other ways of propelling itself - but its powerful enough to get people in the ecosystem
Hm. But as stated this is mostly a US thing because of critical mass. Most people I know already use at least two or three services so honestly they don’t really care what service you are on. I remember that in uni people who didn’t have messenger were “annoying” because it was the service which almost all of the group had (while everybody had also others like WhatsApp, hangouts, kakao and whatnot)
