One of the biggest problems with the Android ecosystem is fragmentation: every hardware OEM can operate different versions of Android and can significantly slow down the release of software updates. Gradual reduction of Android fragmentation For example, the emergence of Google Photos as an application across Android and iOS significantly reduces the lock-in of Photos, the emergence of Spotify reduces the lock-in of iTunes, and the emergence of Drive and Dropbox reduces the lock-in of iCloud. While iMessage may be the most important example of Apple ecosystem lock-in, there are many other products where Apple lock-in could similarly be weakened. In either case, the network effect of iMessage would be significantly diminished, greatly lowering the barrier for those wanting to leave the Apple ecosystem. Alternatively, the migration of SMS to the Rich Communication Services (RCS) standard could bring all of the advantages of messenger applications to texting. It is not inconceivable that OTT messaging applications like WhatsApp could replace SMS entirely. Today, Blackberry OS has only a 0.2 percent market share. But ultimately BBM wasn’t a strong enough draw to keep people on an inferior OS and third party developers created cross-platform messengers such as WhatsApp. One of the big draws of Blackberry, outside of the corporate environment, was Blackberry Messenger (BBM). Hence the draw of the “blue bubbles.”ĭoes this story sound familiar? A mobile hardware manufacturer with a proprietary OS and a captive OTT messenger application? Research in Motion, now known as Blackberry, had exactly this positioning with its popular Blackberry smartphones. So OTT messaging in general and iMessage in particular exhibit powerful network effects. Since iMessage is built into the native SMS application on iOS, users also don’t ever have to switch to a third party application, and are automatically drawn into the network. The ability to easily share media, the lack of a character limit, the seamless continuation of a conversation while switching between desktop and mobile, and the lack of per-message international charges all add to OTT messaging’s appeal.īut most importantly, OTT messenger platforms are valuable to users to the extent that one’s peers are also on the network. The assurance of knowing that one’s message has been delivered and the synchronous knowledge that the other user is typing add a deeper level of intimacy and immediacy to the conversation. It teased that it "will immediately engage with industry and continue its market research to determine whether any other US-based hyperscale can also meet the DoD’s requirements.Over-the-top (OTT) messenger applications have many advantages over SMS.
The DoD went further still, offering hope of recurring defense revenue to less successful cloud firms. But it added that its JWCC solicitation would be "a multi-cloud/multi-vendor Indefinite Delivery-Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract" and assured both Microsoft Corporation (Microsoft) and Amazon Web Services (AWS) that it would seek proposals from the two firms because each could meet its needs. The Pentagon at the time said its $10bn JEDI cloud contract – the award of which to Microsoft triggered a bitter legal dispute and accusations of political favoritism by spurned contender Amazon – no longer met its needs.
Continue readingĪfter cancelling its contentious Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) Cloud contract solicitation in July, the US Department of Defense (DoD) promised a followup request for proposals to provide cloud services for national defense under a less catchy acronym, the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability (JWCC). If you prefer to avoid such things, both services have no-cost forks: Ferdi from Franz and Hamsket from RamBox.
DESKTOP OS MARKET SHARE PLUS
Both use the "freemium" model: there's a completely functional free client, plus subscriptions for extra features. There are a few of these around – first came RamBox, followed by Franz. There is a brute-force way round this: have one app that embeds lots of separate Electron instances in tabs. Which is fine, but Chrome is famously memory-hungry. Most of these "clients" are JavaScript web apps anyway, running inside Electron – an embedded Chromium-based single-site browser.
DESKTOP OS MARKET SHARE INSTALL
There's no need for this: there are free open standards for one-to-one and one-to-many comms for precisely this sort of system, and some venerable clients are still a lot more capable than you might remember.īut as it is today, if you need to be on more than one chat system at once, the official way is to install their client app, meaning multiple clients – or at best, multiple tabs open in your web browsers. Most modern chat systems are entirely proprietary: proprietary clients, talking proprietary protocols to proprietary servers.