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Facebook Buying WhatsApp for $16B in Cash and Stock Plus $3B in RSUs

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Re: Facebook Buying WhatsApp for $16B in Cash and Stock Plus $3B in RSUs

#501

Post by nilkn »

minimaxir wrote: post #13
higherpurpose wrote: post #4

Such a waste. Most Whatsapp users already use Facebook in parallel. Facebook will never see a ROI on this acquisition. Not even close.

I wouldn't think of this from a ROI perspective. Facebook might be trying to go for the monopoly on mobile messaging. And once Facebook controls that, they can do anything.

Buying WhatsApp isn't going to help too much there. SnapChat is still gaining steam and it won't be long until there's another serious competitor on top of that.

The market has shown time and time again that in the messaging world it's extremely hard for one force to stay dominant for too long. Unless this pattern suddenly breaks today, Facebook will continue having to shell out many billions to keep buying these companies. I'm not convinced Facebook's profit is enough to keep that up.

Re: Facebook Buying WhatsApp for $16B in Cash and Stock Plus $3B in RSUs

#502

Post by zfran »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #355
primitivesuave wrote: post #103

My uncle in India runs a construction company, and literally every single aspect of company communication is done over WhatsApp. Each construction site has to constantly post pictures on WhatsApp, and basically all management and payroll decisions are made through WhatsApp discussions. Apparently this is not an uncommon practice, as businesses that were once administered by pen and paper are now using WhatsApp to imp…

It's interesting to note from Whatsapp legal info that they say it's only for USA based users. cf my comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7267310 or http://www.whatsapp.com/legal/

That's weird. They did lots of publicity with Nokia and Movistar in Argentina.

Re: Facebook Buying WhatsApp for $16B in Cash and Stock Plus $3B in RSUs

#503

Post by encoderer »

jacklionheart wrote: post #379
nwh wrote: post #60

400,000,000 active users [0] 16,000,000,000 USD ---- $40 per user That's an incredible cost. We can assume Facebook is paying for the userbase, the app itself and it's infrastructure would basically run itself. It's less appealing when you realise that there's probably a miniscule fraction of WhatsApp users that don't have a Facebook account. > WhatsApp will remain autonomous and operate independently. You can contin…

I have trouble imagining that infrastructure supporting 400M users "runs itself".

Services with big fan-out effects can get very expensive to run. But I do believe product simplicity can lead to code and infrastructure simplicity which gets as close as you can in this industry to "runs itself."

Re: Facebook Buying WhatsApp for $16B in Cash and Stock Plus $3B in RSUs

#505

Post by gedrap »

huskyr wrote: post #132

Facebook suddenly acquired the world's (if we exclude the US and China) most popular messaging service. I communicate with this app with all my friends, and share stuff that i have no intention of ever putting on Facebook. Everything that once seemed 'private' is now in the hands of a website that forces it users to share as much as possible with marketeers and advertising companies. It's gonna be one tough mission f…

>>> It's gonna be one tough mission for FB to convince WhatsApp users they're not gonna be playing around with their data.

It's much less relevant if you step outside the HN.

Re: Facebook Buying WhatsApp for $16B in Cash and Stock Plus $3B in RSUs

#506

Post by shortsightedsid »

This highlights another of Yahoo's screwups, IMHO. Whatsapp is built by 2 ex-Yahoo employees. Guess what everyone used in the late 90's for messaging? Yahoo Messenger. That's right - I used Y! Messenger all the time to keep in touch with friends before Social Networking was the norm and I'm pretty sure everyone else did too.

There is one more company that had the lead in messaging and screwed up - Blackberry. They released their app across platforms, 5 years too late. Had they hit the iPhone/Android apps stores 5 years back, they would have been in a better place than Whatsapp. The funny thing is that their co-founder even wanted to do that and not go after BB10 but he got pushed out.

I remember reading that whatsapp's servers basically run using Erlang. Erlang scales massively, and is a beautiful language for messages/telecom etc.. Hopefully, this will trigger some more interest in Erlang.

Re: Facebook Buying WhatsApp for $16B in Cash and Stock Plus $3B in RSUs

#507

Post by gutnor »

nilkn wrote: post #310
bedhead wrote: post #64

When these bubbles really get crazy, you start questioning your sanity and wondering whether maybe you're just plain wrong. You actually start wondering if the valuations are justified after all, whether it be a house, stock certificate of a tech company, the mineral rights to some acres in the Haynesville shale, or some land on the Vegas Strip. My head hurts.

To be fair, WhatsApp has an incredible number of very active users. It's not like the companies in 1998/99 which had no revenue, no users, but spent millions on Super Bowl ads. That said, this is a staggering amount to pay. I'm not familiar with Facebook's financials, but I'm surprised they could even afford this. I'd chalk this up to Zuckerberg's paranoia about no longer being #1 and less to a bubble.

You would hope that from one bubble to the other people learn something.

The last bubble, people thought than making stuff available online was enough (Do X but on the internet). The first crisis taught us you need to have an actual business model and a way to acquire client.

But then, Google happened. Big user base can be monetized. So we have a second bubble where acquisition of user is the main driver, with the assumption than like google they will find a way to milk their users. At some point that bubble will explode too.

Re: Facebook Buying WhatsApp for $16B in Cash and Stock Plus $3B in RSUs

#509

Post by twistedpair »

nullspace wrote: post #420
ams6110 wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll admit to a distinct feeling, that I've started to lose touch with pop technology. I've never heard of WhatsApp. Though I had most definitely heard of Hotmail in 1998.

It's not really "pop" technology. Surprisingly, it's not used much in the United States, but in India it's basically a replacement for text messaging. Everyone from a 13 year old child to my grand mom uses it to keep in touch with friends and family members across the globe. IMHO, they were able to get to such widespread everyday usage because they such awesome and reliable technology. Much better than what Google ha…

I've been using Google Voice since 2009 to similar effect. However Google has never attempted to advertise the service.

Re: Facebook Buying WhatsApp for $16B in Cash and Stock Plus $3B in RSUs

#510

Post by emaste »

cangencer wrote: post #160

Interesting to see that they use Erlang. http://www.erlang-factory.com/conference/SFBay2012/speakers/... I wonder if this is still valid?

Yes, here's a quote from the FreeBSD Foundation's July 2013 newsletter:

  At WhatsApp we leverage FreeBSD and Erlang to provide
  industry record uptime. The ability to scale linearly
  on commodity hardware has allowed WhatsApp to keep our
  serving costs low. These days we run anywhere between
  2 million and 3 million concurrent TCP connections on
  a single FreeBSD server...
https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/press/2013Jul-newsletter#w...
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