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Why did he think Mark wanted to pay 19 billion for whatsapp? To not make any money.
by samfisher83 6y ago
Why did he think Mark wanted to pay 19 billion for whatsapp? To not make any money.
- joshspankit 6y agoMaybe he thought he was one of the only ones to “get through” to Mark, and that Mark’s verbal agreements meant something
- Lammy 6y agoWhatsApp was an existential threat to Facebook in every country besides the US. They had the data to prove it, obtained from real users via FB's Onavo VPN service. Facebook Messenger 3.0 was to WhatsApp as Google+ was to Facebook (the product), and when the usage numbers weren't going the right way they gave up and bought them out before the gulf got even wider. Textual messaging is a low-data-use (accessible to the cheapest phones with the smallest data packages) entrypoint to capture a person's social network so you can have other opportunities to capture them again and again with other services in the future. Facebook saw India as an especially huge burgeoning market at that time (hence Internet-dot-org / Free Basics), and afaik WhatsApp is ubiquitous there.
- annadane 6y agoDoes it never occur to them to say "Maybe the reason we're under attack is people want more privacy and control"? Not double down and take away people's options?
- tharne 6y agoZuckerberg is a Utopian. Like all Utopians he sees any disagreement as the other party being too stupid to see what's good for them, so they only rational answer is to force them to do "what's best".
- annadane 6y agoI might say 'sociopath', but who's counting
- Lammy 6y agoWhat's "best" isn't anybody's fault when you're data driven! Just don't think too hard about who chooses what data to collect and how to measure it :)
- mr_toad 6y agoThat’s probably what every dictator and autocrat in the history of humanity has ever thought.