The cost of success (and the convergence of solutions)

When I was in business school, I was taught that the only true measure of success of a company is increase in shareholder value. While the idea sounded right, I was always puzzled by how this translated into constant - Constant! - pressure to grow the topline, expand margins, sweat assets and leverage equity. "Isn't there a limit beyond which it's unreasonable to expect this? Is there no such thing as a 'steady state' successful business?", I used to wonder.

The pressure to grow - and the cost of success - is all too visible to me on communication platforms. Take Facebook. For me it moved from occasional interest to addictive really fast, and stayed there for a while. But over time things got too much. Too many features I didn't use, too many non-friends added, too many ads, too much distraction. Then came facebook 'lite' to 'lite' up some of the dross. But it wasn't enough, to the point that I quit completely one day. I'm sure they had great reasons for all those additional features - all of them must have been essential for some of their customers. But it got too much for me.

Now, I can clearly see WhatsApp going down the same road! WhatsApp started as a breath of fresh air. The simple combination of a messenger and groups and a nice clean interface. But these days, WhatsApp has become a headache! Too many groups (Yes, including the 3rd standard school students' parents' group, also the birthday groups for many of the kids which you never exited, each side of the family... you too?). Too many messages. Too much critical business stuff mixed up with completely irrelevant forwards. Too much pressure to respond.

My own response is to need-want-demand more features! Why can't I classify and group the groups? Why not more fine grained notification control, rather than just mute? Why no auto-reply? Broadcast? Why can't I shut down (without kicking off) that irritating guy who mass forwards stuff on that soccer group, where I'm the admin? Why can't there be semi-admins who can delete posts from groups? Surely with all of these features WhatsApp will again become manageable, right? And then the status updates. Ads. B2B features. Everything.

To me, the feature-bloatification and eventual demise of WhatsApp is already written on the wall.

And then one day it struck me. What I really need-want-demand is for WhatsApp to become IRC!

I know, I know.. What's IRC, right? It's one of the things that make people like me realize I'm old now. It's also (probably) one of the foundational building blocks of the internet, a crazily powerful, fault tolerant, peer-to-peer and group messaging open standard, amongst other things (I am not an expert here). Messenger-bots? Sending files peer-to-peer? Having it restricted to your own organization? Fine grained control? If you can think of it, IRC can probably do it. And because it is a communication standard, not an app, if it can't do it it's probably in the client/UI layer, which you can control by either choosing a client of your choice on a platform of your choice, or building one (or having one build for you).

It was a funny thought to me - to think of probably how things come full circle, how better solutions can fall by the wayside and maybe how all solutions to the same problem might tend to converge towards the same design.

What's also painful to see is how open source/standards/services based design could be the savior of the WhatsApp/messaging experience (by allowing choose-your-own-client/UI, for example), but is anathema to the whole business model as it exists. The objective of Facebook/WhatsApp is complete control to its own benefit, not 'connecting the world to make things better lah di dah', not that anyone falls for that. But I'm sure it's success will plant the seeds for its failure. Fail fast, Facebook!