Thank you. This is the justification I was looking for. It felt like this acquisition was driven by a fundamentally different motivation than the Instagram acqu

Thank you. This is the justification I was looking for. It felt like this acquisition was driven by a fundamentally different motivation than the Instagram acquisition and the Snapchat offer, but I couldn't put my finger on it: Facebook wasn't paying $40/user, they weren't paying $0.5B/engineer, and (unlike Instagram or Snapchat) they were not scared of WhatsApp as a competitor (at least not in terms of mindshare, because there's no evidence that WhatsApp was stealing the engagement of Facebook users)--they were just scared of what would happen if Google bought them first. Preventing Google from getting a leg up in the social space (especially since Hangouts is actually a very good product, despite having what I presume to be a comparatively low active user base) is probably worth far more than $16B to them, so in that sense they got a good deal. But admitting that strategy to their shareholders might not play well. It will be interesting to see how this strategy works moving forward. If they're not careful, it could become an easy way for Google/Apple/Amazon/Microsoft to bleed Facebook dry.