"Your product offers a differentiated type of messaging and encourages users to invite their friends to join them on the new messaging platform." ... "That’s the limitation of this strategy: If the messaging experience isn’t actually better in-product than over SMS or email, users will just find it annoying."<p>What kind of "differentiation" are they thinking of? I would pay good money to <i>not</i> have to deal with any (more) proprietary chat systems. They're <i>all</i> annoying. "Download the app" and "Register here" are just synonyms for "Back" and "Mark as spam".<p>There's a couple tech giants whose chat systems I use, only because I've got friends and colleagues who use them. Unless your new chat system will get me a job, or is the only way 1/3 of my friends will send messages online, I'm not going to touch it.<p>I don't understand how we ended up with so many incompatible chat systems today. Did we learn nothing from SMTP? Is XMPP not good enough? Are we so petty that compatible communications are somehow an anathema?