WhatsApp have more than a billion worldwide users, but most of them aren’t in America. Why is that?

With the social media explosion, everyone’s become a communication machine, even if it happens to be with auto-responding bots on Twitter. But not everyone wants to post everything to everyone, sometimes you’ve got to keep it discrete.

WhatsApp is the most popular messaging app in the world, used by an estimated 55.6 percent of the world’s countries. Over 70 million users in India alone. Brazil, Mexico, Russia and Africa are also massive WhatsApp adopters. (No, Africa isn’t a country.) So why isn’t the US jumping onto a winning instant messaging app?

It provides a lot more than just traditional text messaging, such as seamless photo and video sharing, voice recordings, internet calls and more. WhatsApp messages get sent via the Internet, so they’re basically free over Wi-Fi and doesn’t deplete your data limit. Whereas text messages get sent over the telephone network, who aren’t afraid to charge.

So why the disconnect?

The biggest reason seems to be a great diversity of competitive mobile operating platforms, offering bundled flat-rate packages on SMS and MMS at a much lower cost than countries outside of the US. In the US, MMS messages are still part of the unlimited text messages included with your plan. WhatsApp’s cost effectiveness perhaps doesn’t provide enough reason for Americans to switch.

In other countries with less resources and higher data costs, the population have to get creative to save money. The rest of the world seem to have been drawn to WhatsApp as a cost efficient and user-friendly workaround. This also includes other options such as Skype, Telegram, Viber, Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, iMessage and Kik.

The day Whatsapp started offering phone calls was a major milestone in communication for many. Before this it was overly expensive to call internationally. You sometimes had to wait until you flew home to find out whether your newborn was a boy or girl. Now we have almost free group calls linking all corners of the planet.

And why not, we should all be able to communicate freely. Or at least at an affordable cost. (Let’s not get started on local data pricing.)

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Is competition a good thing? We are all scripted to believe it is. People often say things like, “We welcome competition.” Is competition a natural thing? Is it a product of society or is it something inherent in all of us. Animals don’t compete. They try to survive – there is a big difference. Animals certainly don’t try and better each other in the process. The leopards, for example, are climbing trees, not the corporate ladder. It’s not about eating more, or catching the antelope faster than the next guy. It’s about eating – that’s it. I think. So, do we need to beat our competitors? Surely we should strive to beat ourselves, besides, why climb the corporate ladder when you can take the escalator?

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A business represents a group of people – a team. And this is probably where the cracks start appearing. A team should try challenging itself to continually improve on the day before, the week before or the year before. And we need teams. “We” compete better than “I”. There is enough competition in the marketplace – there is no need to bring it into your corporation.

I guess we can debate whether competition is a natural principle for hours? Or whether it is something that is a result of our surroundings and the society we have been conditioned by. The world is in an anxious state (just watch the news on any given day). There are too many obsolete and incomplete paradigms in the world. Competition is one of them. We live in a world where we are told that competition is good for us. And it is a powerful, deeply entrenched principle that is old fashioned. It is a not paradigm of mutual benefit, but rather of win/lose. Win/lose is incomplete. All teams need to win. Take a soccer match, for example. Can both teams win? How can this be so? Dig deep into your imaginations here. If the principle was “stretch” and not “competition” then both teams could win. The game could always be a draw and each team would try to do better than they did before and they would stretch themselves and try to realize their full potential. And in the match itself you would exercise, bond, socialize and have fun. In short: we could get 2 teams to play each other and reap all the benefits of social interaction and yet at the same time we could have everyone be winners.