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ONO sells for $9.5 billion and nobody cares
- leugim 13y agoThat is really true. Facebook buys Instagram for 1B$ and everyone know. Google buys Nest and everyone start to discuss about "Internet of things", but no one cares about ONO.
- baddox 13y agoFacebook, Instagram, Google, and Nest are all well-known in communities focused around Internet technology companies. I suspect that this acquisition is well-known and well-discussed in communities focused around telecommunication companies.
- voyou 13y agoFacebook's purchase of Instagram was big news because a lot of people thought of Instagram as an app that lets people post cheesy filtered selfies, and it seemed surprising that that was worth a billion dollars. Google buying Nest has a somewhat similar hook, in the sense that you can tell a story around "WTF is this company doing and why do Google think it's worth so much." Vodafone buying ONO is one telecommunications company buying another telecommunications company; it's not obvious why it would be interesting to anyone outside of the telecommunications industry.
- spindritf 13y agoIf you primarily rely on sources of information in English (of which I'm guilty, too) then obviously you will be mostly getting information from the Anglosphere dominated by the US because it's, oh you know, richest and most powerful country in the history of the world. This is not some "Americans cover their successes" thing. It's that they matter more. There is an underlying economic reality in which we are lagging far behind them. Not Africa-far but still far. In a picture http://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/290-width/images/print-edition/20120728_FBC674.png http://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecac... from http://www.economist.com/node/21559618 http://www.economist.com/node/21559618
- Hermel 13y agoThis effect even gets reinforced by the European journalists: a German speaking journalist will read German and English sources. A Spanish journalist will read Spanish and English sources, etc. Having the "lingua franca" is a huge asset for the Anglosphere. It not only affects the flow of news, it also leads to cultural dominance (everyone watches Hollywood movies, but European movies are primarily shown in their home countries, same goes for music). I would say that average Jean in many European countries knows more about the Anglosaxon legal system than their own one - just because they get exposed to TV shows about US lawyers all the time. The French try to fight that influence - but I think resistance is futile. Instead, the Europeans should try to find angles to inject their own views into the English news & culture stream. This leads to one large globalized, multi-cultural soup of values - but that's better than an Anglosaxon dominated soup of values. The times where each country could have their own soup are over.
- 1stop 13y agoLanguage is culture, good luck injecting chinese expressions into english... they just don't work. Language is the way we think, translating the way we think to one language changes how we think (i.e things are lost). > The times where each country could have their own soup are over. There are more people who don't care about the anglosaxon world than there are people who do care (China is a prime example here).
- mkr-hn 13y ago> Language is culture, good luck injecting chinese expressions into english... they just don't work. Ni hao English has a lot of loan words and imported phrases, and new ones are always on the horizon.
- sliverstorm 13y agoClearly he means expressions, e.g. idioms and that sort of thing. It's time to jump off the stage at Kiyomizu Quick, without using Google tell me what I mean.
- danieltillett 13y agoI am wondering if the company name did not sound like a mistake in english if the news would have been be bigger - congratulations to them though.
- onion2k 13y agoA couple of weeks ago Actavis bought Forest Labs for $25b. A few days earlier Comcast bought Time Warner Cable for $42.5b. And before that Beam offered $16b for Suntory. Huge deals that affect entire markets (and industries) happen all the time, but unless you follow that specific market you don't get to hear about them. The fact is ONO is a mobile operator in a small local market (from a global industry reference frame), and wholly outside of the tech-news-but-really-only-"startups"-and-only-SaaS-startups-at-that microscope that most of the tech press spend time looking through.
- mmahemoff 13y agoNo-one cares primarily because it's not a consumer product. If Pinterest was Spanish and sold for $9.5B, you'd know about it. See also: http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/03/zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/03/zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...
- chippy 13y agoCcame here to write this. It's consumerism, it's users using things that people care about.
- pippy 13y agoAlso from the article: Google buys Spanish Ono for $9.5bn to start Google Fiber throughout Europe Vodafone won't be rolling out ultra fast fiber networks. They'll be putting everything through a cost-benefit exercise to maximise profits. Essentially just a fish being eaten by a bigger fish.
- sek 13y agoAnd E-Plus the third biggest German carrier gets sold to Telefonica for $11.8 billion. Did anybody hear about that? Telcos wanna deny it but it's close to a commodity. This is mostly money shifting around. When was the last time they introduced a game changer? Google Fiber is something else, it's simply 50 times faster than the average Internet connection.
- lclarkmichalek 13y agoI mean, most people around here would prefer telecos to just be dumb pipes, with the most want innovation being faster speeds. Regardless, some developments I can remember recently: - 4G roll outs - Essentially free SMS (in the UK at least) - Psudo-phone leasing (http://www.vodafone.co.uk/shop/pay-monthly/vodafone-red-hot/index.htm http://www.vodafone.co.uk/shop/pay-monthly/vodafone-red-hot/...) - "Home Boosters" (i.e. http://shop.vodafone.co.uk/shop/mobile-accessories/sure-signal http://shop.vodafone.co.uk/shop/mobile-accessories/sure-sign...) - Stuff like WiFi on the underground (http://www.vodafone.co.uk/shop/internet/wi-fi/index.htm http://www.vodafone.co.uk/shop/internet/wi-fi/index.htm) Sure, nothing that changes their core value proposition, but plenty of products that indicate a willingness to "innovate". Things like the home boosters stand out particularly to me; the vast majority of their customers will never need such a device, but for those who do, it will be invaluable.
- justincormack 13y agoUnencrypted WiFi on the Underground is a typical telco poorly executed "innovation". They actually promised mobile coverage originally.
- RBerenguel 13y agoI'm Spanish, more or less watch the Spanish media (around 3-4 times per week during lunchtime, usually I don't check most news) and I wasn't aware. So not even our media cares.
- ivanca 13y agoYou may be watching regular news, here he is talking about the tech news scene... if there isn't one in Spain, then that's the problem.
- RBerenguel 13y agoThere isn't a specific one, or at least not one I'm aware of (I guess that's enough for me). Of course, a sale of a Spanish company for 9.5 b€ is big enough that normal outlets should at least mention it.
- muyuu 13y agoI understand it should be bigger news, but I don't understand why should anyone be celebrating. Other than the ones who are making a killing out of this deal, of course. The Spanish telecom market is not a competitive market, it's enormously rigged and regulated. Success in this market doesn't come from innovation or better business practices, but as a result from politics and power struggles. This is probably true for any other telecom market nowadays. Also, who in his right mind would consider ONO a startup these days?
- RBerenguel 13y agoMe neither. If I had shares in Vodafone or ONO, maybe I'd celebrate. ONO a startup? Ha! I think I've known about ONO before I even got a modem.
- mjburgess 13y agoEuropeans arent as unreflectingly captialistic and "frontier"sy. Americans have always seen success in business as an crowning achievement. Europeans have traditionally found this kind of pre-occupation with monetary success somewhat crass or trivial. > Europeans don’t realize that if a company that went from nothing to connecting 7 million homes is not celebrated... That's total BS. You dont need a culture of fanatical adoration of business success for their to be successful businesses. > if a company ... is not celebrated ... we will not get young Europeans on the right track It really worrisome how these people have to go around reminding everyone how amazing they are. I think our children will do just fine without being propagandised by self-aggrandizing money-chasers.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- bogs_carut 13y agoThis post contains a lot of loaded rhetoric. Are you implying that the sort of people who assume the degree of risk required to build a financially-successful business (specifically of the "home-run" magnitude implied by a multi-billion-dollar acquisition, IPO, etc) are merely "self-aggrandizing money-chasers?" Companies of that scale sometimes have the ability to improve society. There's also the potential for abuse. But if a culture's general attitude toward aspiring to construct such a business entails disdain and mistrust, it hardly seems illogical to consider the possibility that cultural pressures are turning people away from the desire to do something entrepreneurial. And that, I think, is the point that the author was attempting to make.
- coliveira 13y agoThe idea of great risk for great reward is a myth. The risk that the founder of Facebook assumed for example was close to nil, because he didn't have any job or money to start with. He risked the precious time that he would otherwise use to party at some Harvard fraternity. Similarly for so many other tech founders. They just happened to do well something that they liked at the right time. There are many small business that represent a much bigger risk for their owners, in terms of financial investment and loss of income.
- ig1 13y agoThe mainstream don't care about telco markets and it's not major news in telco terms. A 10bn acquisition is a third tier telco M&A deal. Think about it this way in 2012 "mobile networks revenues were larger than all revenue combined from mobile phone sales, PCs, online ads, books, recorded music, watches, Apple, Amazon, Google & Facebook."
- pervycreeper 13y agoWon't someone think of those poor non-english billionaires?
- danielsiders 13y agoPeople in general don't care about telco acquisitions unless there's a major strategic consequence. The example the author gives “Google buys Spanish Ono for $9.5bn to start Google Fiber throughout Europe” would have huge consequences for everyone from consumers to device manufacturers to content providers throughout Europe. Normal telco consolidation is rarely anything other than the slow march of monopoly. A 16 year old cable company is barely a startup, and highly unrelatable to the startup community at large. The same story about a US company wouldn't get coverage here unless there was a major strategic element. Kudos to the founders and funders, but it's not a particularly inspirational story for other entrepreneurs. The kinds of companies that get the most coverage here are very young and generally have a global reach. A regional company (which most telcos are) in say New England wouldn't get much coverage in the pacific northwest. This isn't a regional or even a cultural issue, just a significance issue.
- RivieraKid 13y agoAt the core of the problem is that the European market is not homogenous, so building a big company is way harder. * There's a significant overhead in expanding across borders because of different laws, language, culture, etc. That could even mean having to hire lawyers and business developers for every country. * The pool of potential employees is smaller. Perhaps there's someone that would be a perfect fit for your startup, but he lives in a neigbouring country, so he's less likely to apply / want the job. * For the above reasons, the investments are way lower, because startups have lower probability of becoming big. Do you think it's possible to fix or mitigate this problem? What can the EU do to make operating across borders as easy as possible?
- blazespin 13y ago"built ... mostly by my friend Richard Alden", wait what? The thousands of other employees don't count?
- mjburgess 13y agoAs I said, self-aggrandizing. People read this trumped-up BS every day in silicon valley and have started to believe it.
- yason 13y agoIf I'm not mistaken ONO wasn't a public company so I'm wondering why should basically anyone care except the parties involved? Reading about big acquisitions of non-public companies (or public companies whose shares you don't own yourself) can sometimes be nice entertainment, but I fail to see the significance of the lack of news coverage as assumed by the OP.
- bjornsing 13y agoWell the big difference between those two stories (Google buys ONO and Vodafone buys ONO) is that one would imply change (for the consumer - for founders both is of course a big change) and the other doesn't. Who cares if the corporate overlord at ONO is called Richard Alden (ONO "founder" in Varsavsky's eyes) or Vittorio Colao (Vodafone CEO)?
- acchow 13y agoYou nailed it. Vodafone acquiring ONO is just changing uniforms.
- flocial 13y agoI wonder what is the point of caring? If I was a founder a multi-billion exit under the radar sounds like a dream come true. Celebrating success as the author puts it is merely a symptom of meritocracy and individual responsibility. Of course, it comes with its own issues (less of a social safety net and income disparity).
- luka-birsa 13y agoSimilar to what the US is doing in terms of mobile market, thinking that they are somehow representative or "advanced". We get millions of headlines for Apple launching video chat in the US market while they had that in EU 5 and in JP 7 years back. At the risk of sounding overly condecending, if there is something that "ze Americans" do great is selling their supremacy (ie. we are the best). BTW: Thats a good thing as they tend to fake it till they make it.
- interstitial 13y agoWhat color shall the bike shed be?
- NAFV_P 13y agoRegarding the discussions of American dominance / influence / power: Fortran, LISP, COBOL, PL/I, C, VB, Java.
- replicatorblog 13y agoThis has very little to do with national moods/prejudices and much more to do with boring/atypical industries vs. hot consumer ones. ONO got no attention largely because it's "boring" to a mass audience. There are plenty of examples of this domestically, e.g. + Child focused ecommerce company Zulily filed a $2.6B IPO, but got very little attention. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6740927 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6740927 I'd also note that there are blinders even within the startup community. I've submitted plenty of stories about under-the-radar startups that die on the vine because the companies are more focused on execution that cultivating a PR rep that would earn media and upvotes. + Wayfair, a bootstrapped ecommerce company raised $165MM in its "Series A" and barely got a notice here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3625381 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3625381 + Here's another example of HN blindness: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3625381 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3625381 + Nearly a quarter of the top 20 projects on Kickstarter are board games—can you remember the last story you read about one? A couple have raised more than Oculus Rift or Formlabs, but get no attention because they're "boring," while these hardware cos earn magazine covers and lavish praise. + Mailchimp is easily a $100MM+ in revenue company that was bootstrapped, but they're rarely profiled. The reality is the tech news reported by most of the big names is just the most "exciting" tip of the iceberg. There are plenty of worthy stories that just won't generate page views and hence don't get the attention they "deserve," if coverage was apportioned by success measured in dollars or reach rather than pageviews.
- omegant 13y agoI think that Martin is refering to the attention that the wasup adquisition had here in Spain and how little is getting in the spanish media, a Spanish start up that's selling for that amount.
- taylorbuley 13y agoIt's easy to blame media "blindness" and inattention -- here, apparently both in Spain and on the wider Web -- but to me it just boils down to the economics of attention. If the author is right and "nobody cares" then the lack of press is pretty explainable. In today's ad-driven world, journalists are tacitly rewarded (at the very least) for Web traffic. As such, the coveted beats are the ones that drive guaranteed interest -- Apple being the traffic gorilla when I was a staff writer. The stuff closest to consumers (porcelain) on the whole drive more interest than infrastructure (plumbing). Starting out in the Valley I got beats like Seagate and storage (after getting the assignment, another editor joked that it was "borage"). I remember envying the consumer electronics writers for their traffic, but was always more of a pluming guy myself.
- omegote 13y agoI've been a ONO customer for more than ten years now. Honestly their internet service is the best around. Vodafone buying Ono isn't something for us customers to celebrate, because I'm sure the service will get worse. Mark my words.
- fiatjaf 13y agoBecause maybe it worths $9.5 billion and infrastructure and expected profits, while WhatsApp is worth nothing.
- Ryel 13y agoI lost interest at "cable company"
- btomar 13y agoI won't call an MSO/Cable company news as boring. Why the American industry creates so much attention is due to the dominance of American Technology Sector and American media firms. The MSO sector has lot of potential for innovation with the rising sectors such as Home Automation, Gigabit fiber or to sum it up (Internet of Things). When it comes to technology, even Nokia the most respected handset brand of the pre-smartphone age, was acquired by Microsoft, an American firm. Unless Europe gets more flexible with its tech industry (like encouraging Kickstarter/Ycombinator type firms) they would never gather the focus like the US.
- mbesto 13y agoUgh. Let's talk about media. Commercially speaking, media has one goal - procuring eyeballs. Just because eyeballs aren't fixated on a particular story doesn't make it sad, it just means it's not a compelling story. So why is WhatsApp a compelling story? 1. Broke conventions - company only had 55 employees and valued at $19b. This isn't normal for us. A telecommunication company selling for $9.5b makes sense. 2. Story of triumph - the founder of WhatsApp was "from a small village in Ukraine". You can't get any more American than this my friends. You see, America is quite possibly the greatest marketing engine in the world. This is what separates itself from the rest of the world. We are engrained story tellers, not because of some magical gene inherited, but rather because we know good stories sell well.
- samuel 13y agoONO really was an startup? I don't think that any startup, in the HN sense(garage startup), has the financial strength to become overnight a cable company. Anyway, I haven't heard about this "guy", Eugenio Galdon, and it seems that he was the chief advisor of Calvo Sotelo, former president of Spain. So, in my opinion, this is hardly news. This is a typical story of spanish success, where a "well connected" person, with the financial help of big investors, takes advantage of regulatory and (foreign) technological changes. Panoramio, idealista... even Inditex are real spanish startups, much better examples of entrepeneurship.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- syntheticlife 13y agoNice complaint-brag
- AznHisoka 13y agoMaybe this attitude of nobody cares is more healthy. Versus "look at that startup that got acquired! Look at his successful their founder is! And look at all the billions they have that YOU DON'T". To me, THAT is more depressing.
- stretchwithme 13y agoWhy should people care if people care about a business changing hands?
- johnchristopher 13y agoThis article is just part of the propaganda for the coming european elections. Spain has much bigger worries than the plebe not caring about telcos tycoons buying each other's companies for such astronomical amounts of money.