4 ms·
What's interesting to me, and we've seen this with WhatsApp only a few weeks ago, is that being acquired by Facebook seems to destroy the public image of a prod
by codeflo 13y ago
What's interesting to me, and we've seen this with WhatsApp only a few weeks ago, is that being acquired by Facebook seems to destroy the public image of a product.
Positive public perception has value, and can (at least in theory) be measured in dollars. In accounting terminology, it's part of what's usually called a company's "goodwill".
If Facebook continues to so negatively effect the public's opinion of every company it acquires, this means that Facebook might get a lot less out of those acquisitions than they might have hoped.
- virtuabhi 13y agoI guess I missed the destruction of WhatsApp's public image after the Facebook acquisition. Can you point me to the numbers?
- gurkendoktor 13y agoHow do you measure a company's public image in numbers? If you can't, then discussing it based on anecdotes is the best we can do. (My non-techie friends have left WhatsApp for Threema, but I live inside the German-language bubblesphere, so YMMV.) Or the other way around: Before the acquisition, I was already on the fence about the Oculus Rift, but now I won't touch one with a ten-foot pole. In which statistic would my change of mind even show up?
- sehr 13y agoIt's been days since Oculus was acquired, and weeks since WhatsApp. I don't think public perception has evened out enough to be measured, let alone predicted. Besides, look at Instagram. It was acquired right around the first major Facebook privacy scare (early 2012ish), and it's doing perfectly okay.
- whistlerbrk 13y agoReally? Is the public image of instagram 'destroyed'? You're in the tech bubble. In the consumer world no one cares as long products perform well and cheaply.
- avenger123 13y agoThis is really it. We in our techno bubble care about these things. For normal people, its basically a non-issue. Heck, I even forget that Facebook bought Instagram unless I'm reminded of it here and there. This goes to Facebook''s credit that they do seem to leave their acquisitions alone.
- pfraze 13y agoInstagram and Whatsapp are really different than Oculus, though.
- morgante 13y ago> Instagram and Whatsapp are really different than Oculus, though. Indeed. They're much closer to FB's core product and hence that much more tempting to meddle with.
- kybernetikos 13y agoInteresting you think this. From my point of view techno bubble people have very little reason to care about yet another text chat app that they don't use being bought by facebook. On the other hand, all the normal people who had left facebook which is no longer cool for whatsapp because it's cooler (and I've overheard these normal people saying exactly that to each other) are going to be pretty upset at the idea that anything from whatsapp might start showing up on someones facebook wall.