Comment by b00ty4breakfast
12 hours ago
Pretty sure they bought Insta and Whatsapp. I mean, that's not nothing, buying a successful business and keeping it successful for over a decade. But neither Zuck nor Meta made those platforms; they were both established successes in their own right before acquisition.
They used the Facebook app to spy on smartphone users and detect Instagram and WhatsApp success to decide to buy them.
> keeping it successful
I’m no Zuck fan, but he’s done much more than keep them successful, they have grown a lot.
I remember everyone making fun of him for overpaying for IG and WA. Now both in hindsight look like amazing acquisitions.
The "amazing acquisitions" should be antitrust. Whatsapp is a non starter given what Brian Acton reported. I'll never use it. People widely report they ruined Instagram and Zuck came back furiously explaining in an email chain later "oh sorry I didn't mean to say we're killing the competition" probably after a lawyer scolded him
Only The Zuck saw the value though. Why didn't MS, Amazon or Google buy insta? Or some Softbank vehicle?
I’m sure the others saw the value too. It just wasn’t worth as much to them as Zuckerberg was prepared to pay. Not surprising given it’s a service that directly competed with FB in the social space.
Probably because Instagram wasn't a direct competitor to any of those other companies (except maybe Google+, which wasn't even a year old at the time that FB bought Instagram). I don't know why softbank didn't get them.
This is the case with most tech companies. Google bought Android, YouTube, DoubleClick, Maps, etc. etc.
Although in this case Meta bought companies that were already established and successful.
Google bought Android before it had released products.
Google Maps was purchased, but was Where 2 actually a successful product prior to that?
I feel like you just cherry picked from my examples. YouTube was certainly successful - Google bought them because their own Google Video competitor was a flop. DoubleClick was also obviously huge. Where 2 had a successful product, it just wasn't web based (nor do I think free), so didn't have anywhere near the distribution that Google enabled once the team ported it to run in a browser.
Instagram had around 10mn users at acquisition, so they might not have gotten to where they are without FB. Whatsapp was a successful product that didn't make any money.