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I've been thinking of ways to phrase this without sounding rude, but it's difficult to avoid sounding that way in the context of how you asked your question :)
by jmitcheson 15y ago
I've been thinking of ways to phrase this without sounding rude, but it's difficult to avoid sounding that way in the context of how you asked your question :) So please don't think I'm intentionally being rude...
Your confusion stems from the fact that you are looking at the situation though a developers eyes. The acquisition of Instagram has nothing at all to do with the code. Nothing. It's about Instagram's users, their brand, and their founders / team. Instagram has ~27 million users [1], a good brand and smart founders. Their engineers probably know a thing or two about scale too, which I'm sure facebook would find useful.
[1] http://www.quora.com/Instagram/How-many-users-does-Instagram-have http://www.quora.com/Instagram/How-many-users-does-Instagram...
PS. IMO, most startup logic makes a lot more sense when you stop looking through developer-centric goggles. You're not making code you want to turn into a company, you're starting a company that you want to produce code...
- tripzilch 15y agoIMO that wasn't rude at all? :) Anyway, I'd even argue it's mostly just the 27M users and the brand. While smart founders and engineers knowing a thing or two about scale are much less common than <code for a photo sharing app>, it's the users and the brand that made it worth $1B to Facebook.
- Egregore 15y agoIf they paid 1B for 27M users it means they paid about $37 per user...
- eblume 15y agoThanks, and that wasn't rude at all. But again - those 27 million users are almost certainly already on Facebook. If Facebook came out with 'Hipster Pics for Facebook!' (obviously I should not be in charge of naming things) then I would assume the vast majority of those users would begin using 'Hipster Pics for Facebook!' instead of Instagram. I guess it would make some sense for G+ to buy it in the hopes of driving use of G+ with it...