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Facebook Buying Messaging App WhatsApp for $16 Billion

LizKat said:
OK but you're talking about the brilliance of the Facebook concept and making it happen. Now it's out there with all its good points and plenty of not so great issues, and now he's already cashed out some of the billions he's made. You could ask how much skin he really feels he has in this game, in the sense of how much can you care about the next zillion billion. Others, big investors, will be looking harder at the wisdom of this particular acquisition. If you have millions of FB shares in some fund that you manage, then it's likely you are not exactly thrilled this evening.
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Hence my point. He's a smart man. And an extremely rich one. And no one here knows how this latest acquisition will pan out.

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subsonix said:
That assumes that what they do is unique, the fact that they now needed to buy another company with almost as many daily users as Facebook is proof that what they do is not unique. Internet and it's different protocols are by their very nature 'social', which is why we see these platforms come and go.
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Google became a giant, it would be difficult to knock them off their throne. Other companies do advertising too. Currently the same holds true for Facebook. I'm sure that they will fade away, maybe sooner than later. But to call a young man who made a mult billion dollar empire out of chatting with his fellow students an idiot is comical.
 
AppleScruff1 said:
Google became a giant, it would be difficult to knock them off their throne.
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First you need to define what it is they do, which is a lot. If you look into each separate field there is oportunity for others to do what they do, absolutely. What they are very good at is search, but they do so much more.

AppleScruff1 said:
Other companies do advertising too. Currently the same holds true for Facebook. I'm sure that they will fade away, maybe sooner than later. But to call a young man who made a mult billion dollar empire out of chatting with his fellow students an idiot is comical.
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I have not called him an idiot.

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ThunderSkunk said:
How has, in all this time, no one else put together a decent social media platform that people actually like? Or an auction site? I'd have thought after the first 6 months the great "competitive ideas marketplace of the innernet" would have laid waste to Facebook and Ebay both. Neither company should have gotten this far.

Yet they continue, with their billions. Crazy.
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Facebook just acquired such a platform, before it, Instagram, another one that just passed on $3B from Facebook is Snapchat. Regarding their billions, the FB stock has a P/E of 103...
 
subsonix said:
First you need to define what it is they do, which is a lot. If you look into each separate field there is oportunity for others to do what they do, absolutely. What they are very good at is search, but they do so much more.



I have not called him an idiot.
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Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that you had. I was referring to some of the comments in this thread. I should have made that clear. No offense intended.
 
Avalontor said:
Wow, that's news to me. do you have a link to that?
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It's on MacRumors too

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AppleScruff1 said:
Yeah, Zuck's a real idiot. I can only dream of being that stupid and idiotic.
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I wish I could be as idiotic as Zuck and being criticised all over the internet for spending $19B of my fellow shareholders' money while getting insanely rich at the same time.

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ThunderSkunk said:
Everyone complains that facebooks product sucks, they're a terrible company, and Zuckerborg is a first-rate asshat. How do they still exist?

How has, in all this time, no one else put together a decent social media platform that people actually like? Or an auction site? I'd have thought after the first 6 months the great "competitive ideas marketplace of the innernet" would have laid waste to Facebook and Ebay both. Neither company should have gotten this far.

Yet they continue, with their billions. Crazy.
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Advertisers keep them afloat. Number of users keeps their valuation.
 
iShater said:
Useful, productive, and fun? That's the typical response from people who are public spokespersons for the company ;)

The amount of garbage people post, and the fact that there are so many folks who don't realize how much personal information is exposed is just crazy.
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I can easily keep up with friends and family and get various news and other fun things shared with me that I can get to discuss with friends and family, all at the cost of Facebook knowing my name and that I like to read and comment on tech articles and post pictures of random things I find interesting...the horror!

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iSayuSay said:
How about some options to choose resolution? How about, you know preview photos? Do they need to be in full resolution? Not everyone is photographer, nor everyone want the full sized photos either
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Why would you want crappier photos? You often zoom in anyway to see something better, so you almost always want the best quality.

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luckydcxx said:
Who doesn't have unlimited texting? I don't see what the use of the services are for. If I am out of the country and need to contact someone that bad that doesn't have an iPod, iPhone, iPad or a Mac then I will send them an email or call them for the $1 it costs.
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Plenty of people don't have unlimited messaging and quite a few don't even have messaging packs just paying separately for each message trying not to use them at all and generally using apps like WhatsApp for those purposes. If you factor in group messaging and international messaging that takes all that even further.
 
this bonkers figure proves how little Facebook think their stock is actually worth.

A massive waste of money.

I think they want to combat the potential ingress of Weixin / Wechat which integrates a minimal facebook style timeline into the app.

Still a massive waste of money.

I guess they will be able to roll Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp into the same product and integrate those 400 million users into Facebook.

Still a massive waste of money.
 
C DM said:

Plenty of people don't have unlimited messaging and quite a few don't even have messaging packs just paying separately for each message trying not to use them at all and generally using apps like WhatsApp for those purposes. If you factor in group messaging and international messaging that takes all that even further.
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So a lot depends on the kind of plans carriers offers now and in the future to the majority of users.
 
subsonix said:
So a lot depends on the kind of plans carriers offers now and in the future to the majority of users.
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At least that partially, but even then plenty of people with existing plans often stay on them for a long time as they are used to the pricing and what they get for it.
 
I wonder on what basis the valuation has been made, and how robust the stats are? The volume of use and rate of growth seem quite extraordinary! Presumably tech giants like Facebook will have covered every angle.
 
Rudy69 said:
In other news....I still don't understand why people use WhatsApp
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what?????

that's like saying - "umm, i don't understand why people watch videos when radio's just fine."


whatsapp replaces international/domestic text message services, mms, has delivery notification built-in, has "audio text chatting". what's NOT to like whatsapp?
 
Instagram got screwed.

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mobilebuddha said:
what?????

that's like saying - "umm, i don't understand why people watch videos when radio's just fine."


whatsapp replaces international/domestic text message services, mms, has delivery notification built-in, has "audio text chatting". what's NOT to like whatsapp?
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Well that person obviously has no use for it. Neither do I.
 
luckydcxx said:
iMessage :apple:
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I like iMessage, but the fact ist that I've got people using anything from BB 10 over WP8 to Android and iOS among my friends, colleagues and family members, so iMessage is a no-go.

I've just deleted Whatsapp as I've been staying away from Facebook and that won't change now. I've been using Hangouts (because that's pre-installed on most of my friends' phones anyway and the damages has already been done) and Blackberry Messenger.
 
bigchrisfgb said:
In my opinion I prefer iMessage, especially as it's integrated with normal messages. However iMessage isn't cross platform, and as far as I'm aware it doesn't allow group chats.
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iMessage has group chat. Just add more than one contact and everyone gets the message, when they reply, everyone gets the reply.
 
ThunderSkunk said:
Everyone complains that facebooks product sucks, they're a terrible company, and Zuckerborg is a first-rate asshat. How do they still exist?
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because the senior citizens flock to it. Bluntly put, FB is still better than staring out of the window all day. The age average on FB has steadily been going up - used to be between 18 and 24, now it's between 46 and 50.

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wikiverse said:
iMessage has group chat. Just add more than one contact and everyone gets the message, when they reply, everyone gets the reply.
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that's awesome, except that 70% of the population uses Android, 3.5% still use Blackberry and another 3.4% use WP8.
 
Sooner or later in Europe (except UK) everybody is going to use Threema. End to End encryption with servers in Switzerland. It's a one time purchase and already no1 in the german Appstore.
 
AppleScruff1 said:
But to call a young man who made a mult billion dollar empire out of chatting with his fellow students an idiot is comical.
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Even when you're rich you can be an idiot. You make the simplistic suggestion by applying that being young and being rich means you can't be an idiot, that's not comical, that's just silly.

Besides, being an idiot or not within this given context is within the eye of the beholder. But one thing is sure, being rich doesn't rule out the label: being an idiot.
 
To all the US people saying they never use it:

Yes I know you don't. But where I live, and in many other countries, it's the standard. First thing you install on your phone is Whatsapp. Nobody uses text, Whatsapp is the standard.
 
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