That kind of stuff is what Musk chases with X, by the way. It's his once-a-lifetime bet, even bigger than SpaceX and Tesla combined - succeed in delivering a "one for everything" Asian-style app to the Western ecosystem and you have a money printer of unfathomable power. Had he not completely destroyed all trust in the brand Twitter/X, I'd think he'd have a serious chance of achieving that goal.
The really interesting thing, IMO, is where Facebook went off the rails. They have the moat with literal billions of people using their apps already, they got real names, addresses, location data, in some cases (legacy Whatsapp users, people who ever ran ads) payment data, Facebook already has sort of a "shop" solution with Marketplace... but they don't seem to be attractive at all, or doing anything innovative. It's all Metaverse or whatever.
It's not just Facebook that "failed" to build the so-called superapps, none of Western private chat apps company had done it, let alone social media, or any app from anyone with strong C-class leadership and lean bureaucracy for that matter.
The way those "superapps" grow the "apps" is middle management doing his personal projects on corporate microservice infrastructure and IC hire upper management succumbing to bureaucracy. Thanks to bureaucracy, some brand integrity is maintained, and that kind of makes money anyway as company side gigs. After it goes garbage in and out of translation, the whole company doings end up on BBC as Oriental wonder superapps.
SoftBank subsidiary owns LINE. So do Masayoshi Son even know how many individual sub-apps there are or who's under who running what? I highly doubt it. And I also highly doubt a control freak like Musk can even bear that kind of situation; he'd personally dragged out a server rack out of an NTT datacenter without going through rituals and ceremonies, which made a web article by itself. None of superapp operators seem to have that kind of boss.
the fact of the matter is that there are massive differences in consumer opinion. Western markets prefer specialist companies that do one thing really well, whereas in East Asia people often prefer trusted conglomerates.
As a general example, department stores are much healthier in Japan and Korea, whereas in the US they were hollowed out by specialty clothing retailers, specialty makeup retailers, etc. and then finally kicked over by online shopping.
>As a general example, department stores are much healthier in Japan and Korea,
Not only that, here in Japan some of the biggest department stores also operate their own train lines, and own all the real estate around the stations. It's an extremely different way of running a business than in the US.
> None of superapp operators seem to have that kind of boss.
But they also don't have the shareholder/activist investor pressure that Western companies face.
To achieve "superapp" size, you need to have either a strong leader personality driving the push by their sheer will and vision and especially with enough authority/financial power to overrule investors - people like Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg - or you need to be one of the Asian ultra-conglomerate/"chaebol" companies that have absurd amounts of money flowing through them that enterprising middle managers can divert.
Unfortunately, with the exception of the visionaries I mentioned, corporate America and Europe just doesn't have many company founders with both clear visions and a backbone, and there's (partially "thanks" to de-conglomerisation trends of the 90s and later like with German giant Siemens) nothing at all left that comes even close to the diversification of revenue that Samsung has.
How do you mean? The situation with X seems mostly to do with marketing (people not liking the owner & his behavior) and bots, with maybe a little bit of instability thrown in. As noted elsewhere in the thread, Facebook already has experience with a bunch of different types of services-- from the games they used to host, to Marketplace mentioned elsewhere in the thread, to event management rivaling Meetup & Eventbrite, and even a dating app. X talks about being an "everything app," but they really just have posts (with media) and that's their only feature to date. Facebook does a lot more. So I don't see how pushing harder on non-social features would make them any more like X is right now.
X public perception is centered around Musk, easily enough.
Meta's public perception was semi-centered around Zuck, not nearly to the same degree, but I can easily imagine that if they didn't pull back a bit, they would have had a hard time continuing forward with that prior image.
Not saying they can't go forwards now, just that they are being careful, to try and make a more solid, longer lasting brand. As opposed to the burn-everything approach of X.
They have the time to spend: X isn't going to ever trend upwards in public perception, Google is already there in every aspect, so the only option is to play catch-up to Google and not worry about anything else.
For a decade now I've been completely stumped just why Meta (and before they were sold, WhatsApp) hasn't tried this. Why is only Musk trying this? It's the incredibly obvious thing to do.
Does Zuck find the idea boring? Is that why he rather do something flashy like "Metaverse"? It's the obvious model to go for and East-Asia has already made that clear since a decade ago.
Even bloody MSN Messenger 15 years ago was more of a super app than WhatsApp.
Now finally Musk says he's going to give it a go, but I reckon he'll struggle because X's penetration, as high as it is, is nowhere near WhatsApp. He's also extremely late in the game, so much that unless he starts buying up incumbents (maybe that's what he needs the $56 bn pay package for), the barriers are now incredibly high. When WeChat, KakaoTalk and Line started branching out, there was no huge incumbent in the areas they competed in.
The really interesting thing, IMO, is where Facebook went off the rails. They have the moat with literal billions of people using their apps already, they got real names, addresses, location data, in some cases (legacy Whatsapp users, people who ever ran ads) payment data, Facebook already has sort of a "shop" solution with Marketplace... but they don't seem to be attractive at all, or doing anything innovative. It's all Metaverse or whatever.