When WhatsApp opened up its API for transaction messages (announced yesterday), the first question that struck me was: why only this? Look carefully at the evolution of the product, and you'll see that the rollouts have been remarkably conservative, and that they mirror telecom operator services. Which ones? 1. Messaging: WhatsApp, for the longest time, had a single point focus in being the most effective and reliable messaging service, while also bringing rich media services to it. It has, for the most bit, replaced messaging, something which telecom operators have also acknowledged. Himanshu Kapania, on Idea Cellular's conference call in July last year, said: As regards customers who are high end mobile data users is there a cannibalization with voice, so the question is are these consumers using latest messaging services? Definitely lot of these consumers are Idea Cellular Limited using messaging services and definitely there is cannibalization on SMS, now have they started to use VOIP, voice services on data rather than effective circuit switch voice network? Yes, there has been some movement, I can tell you the last number which I saw which was about a month back, about 0.1% to 0.2% of our traffic is currently moving on VOIP. 2. VoIP: On another call, Kapania spoke about how quality of VoIP on 2G and 3G isn't matching up to the quality of regular calling. Notice how while Idea Cellular is assuring investors that they haven't seen an impact on VoIP yet, it's something that the company is…
