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you mean $1 once when they first install it? the 'pay this amount' was a well known scam message
Android users pay an annual fee.
Damn, Zuck is far more paranoid than I thought. He's going to have to come up with a better strategy than buying every company that presents a potential existential threat though. Especially at these prices! I actually think it wasn't such a bad idea to buy Instagram. He paid 1% for something that really could have killed him. But paying $16 billion here is pretty much surrender as far as I'm concerned.
Zuck should probably be fired (gracefully step-aside, courtesy of shareholder activist pressure, given his voting control) when Facebook is forced to do a $16 billion write-down on this. WhatsApp won't even be worth the cash they're paying for it when the music stops. They just bought today's version of ICQ for $19 billion. This acquisition leads me to believe Facebook is most similar to Yahoo at the peak of the dotc…
Good luck with that. He carefully maintained voting control over his own company so he'd never have to do that.
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Whatsapp has virtually no market share in the US. In basically all markets outside of the US, however, they are dominating the messaging space. Text messages in major EU countries like Germany and France have been almost completely supplanted by WhatsApp.
Is that because SMS costs a fortune in Europe? As an American with unlimited SMS/MMS, I don't see the point of WhatsApp at all. I guess maybe if I wanted to send a text to somebody in Europe.
I just can't get my head around that valuation. For something that's basically a feature, when they already have that functionality baked in, built out to a similar scale? It's not an acquisition for talent, or technology, so what is it? It's an acquisition for investors probably. To argue back against the people who say the kids are leaving FB. Well guess what, we BOUGHT the thing the kids are using. And it's 'mobil…
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im curious, what do americans use instead?
Either regular text messaging or Apple's iMessage (iPhones are most popular in the US). My sense is that they don't really do group chats (a heavily used feature of WhatsApp).
We do pay more than $1 per year for unlimited text messages but I don't know anyone that doesn't get unlimited text messaging these days.
How did WhatsApp gain traction? Presumably most of their users already use facebook, which offers the same messaging functionality as WhatsApp. So why do people use WhatsApp instead of Facebook for messaging?
IIRC, they used to market the app as "free SMS service", which, I believe, was a key component in getting huge amount of users in 3rd countries.
In the UK as well.
Although many people have free effectively-unlimited SMS in the UK, this costs £ and not everyone has. Also consider that international SMS are charged at extortionate rates, and I know some teenagers who have busted through the limit of "unlimited" SMS.
And so, the introduction goes: "I'll text you - do you have Whatsapp? Oh :(". This social pressure has driven almost everyone onto the service. And people have kept using it because it's just as functional and less restrictive than 160 characters.
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> "... it will stay the same and will not develop those features that could have threatened Facebook in the long term." That's fascinating and completely believable. The question will be can FB move those people to their own platform in the future and quietly retire Whatsapp in the future. It's interesting that the CEO of Whatsapp is joining the FB board since that will affect the direction both products take.
CEO of Whatsapp prided on not listening in private conversation or collecting personal data, which Facebook ACTIVELY does.
To get $16bn cash from Facebook is hilarious.
Next time a start-up says they won't pay you market rate because of x, y, and z just walk away and laugh. For the sake of a few thousand dollars in wages, you could make them billions.
Don't work for cheap bastards. Funny how engineers are supposed to sacrifice yet we never see a lawyer or accountant charge below market rates, and their work can save businesses millions as well as jail-time.