Since then, I have actively trying to convince my contacts to move away from WhatsApp, but it is really hard now. This clearly shows that no matter how much trust a company might inspire at a given time, nothing prevents that ten years from now, when everyone is dependent on their technology, they will not change the rules. And nobody will be able to do anything. (Next: Apple, maybe?)
I doubt it. Apple doesn't make a dime from user data. Really, the only use they have for it, is usability/A-B testing, and crash dumps (which have been quite useful for me, as a developer).
If FB brought Apple (maybe ten years ago, but today? Fat chance), then that would be a different matter, entirely.
In a way, it's quite fortunate that Apple was considered too radioactive to buy, when it wasn't doing so well.
They have different data policy for sure than google or Facebook, but they do get your data, and they use it to make more money.
A company that I've been wondering about is Netflix. And a reason why I haven't protested their various price increases over the years is because I'm hoping that they continue to be successful on the subscriptions alone.
FB’s market cap wasn’t equal to AAPL’s Jan 2010 market cap until sometime in 2014.
Purely out of curiosity + interest, do they do A/B testing with their software? I can see them A/B testing something ancillary like their online store, but I can't remember an instance where they A/B tested new features or designs or anything like that in their actual user software.
There's just no way that Facebook wasn't planning to monetize this platform when they wrote this article. Frankly, situations like this should be treated like deceptive advertising practices.
Just like in the political arena, there are very few consequences to just flat out lie to people, and that's unacceptable.
That being said, it was "only" 20 months later that FB acquired it, so it's hard to believe that the ideals discussed in this article were no longer in the founders' minds when they accepted the deal.
That said, WhatsApp's plans to make revenue didn't involve showing ads in 2016 (2 years into Facebook acquisition) when they made it officially free:
> Naturally, people might wonder how we plan to keep WhatsApp running without subscription fees and if today's announcement means we're introducing third-party ads. The answer is no. Starting this year, we will test tools that allow you to use WhatsApp to communicate with businesses and organizations that you want to hear from. That could mean communicating with your bank about whether a recent transaction was fraudulent, or with an airline about a delayed flight. We all get these messages elsewhere today – through text messages and phone calls – so we want to test new tools to make this easier to do on WhatsApp, while still giving you an experience without third-party ads and spam.
https://blog.whatsapp.com/making-whats-app-free-and-more-use...
I don't think you can get every single user across the globe to pay that kind of money. $20 is a lot for some of the users of this tool.
Point is, yes they charged for it - but I dont think it was ever a viable part of their business model.
I wonder if they considered a legal structure which would tie their hands, precisely to prevent such a thing. Long before they got so big, I mean. Would that be possible?
Your data isn't even in the picture. We are simply not interested in any of it.
https://write.privacytools.io/right-to-privacy/getting-whats...
WhatsApp now collects:
WhatsApp: Device ID, User ID, Advertising Data, Purchase History, Coarse Location, Phone Number, Email, Contacts, Product Interaction, Crash, Data, Performance Data, Other Diagnostics Data, Payment Info, Customer Support, Product Interaction, Other User, Content.https://blog.whatsapp.com/making-it-easier-to-shop-on-whatsa...
Basically trying to catch-up with WeChat in terms of a transactional platform
Permanently enjoin the acquirer from showing ads or sharing data. Heck, require operating independence. Just like any other transaction, terms like these are negotiable. Maybe those reduce the purchase price by $3 billion, or even $5 or $10 billion, but the founders would still be multi-billionaires and they’d also see Whatsapp survive the way they envisioned it. Best of both worlds.
(And if the buyer totally walked rather than reducing the price, at least you’d know their true intention.)
For me personally, I hope that I'll never be offered enough money to betray those who trust me. But I fear that my selling price is far lower than $19B.
Yup, agreed.
And Acton left after his golden handcuffs were up and put $50M into Signal.
Honestly, the situation could have been worse. Let's hope that $50M now propels the future towards truly decentralized communication.
Is the good you're doing via whatsapp enough to outweigh how you could leverage 19B?
For a founder-controlled company that raised capital so late, is selling for $19 billion much better than selling for $15 or $13 billion and knowing your creation will solve the problem it was meant to? Any of these outcomes leave the founders with many billions (and leave the few employees set for generations).
Contrast with a $2-3 billion acquisition like Oculus or Instagram. They were huge but still in the range where 20% or 30% less (for restrictive deal terms) might actually matter, if only barely. Whatsapp's deal was so large that there's not even the tiniest practical tradeoff from 20% less.
You can try to attach a bunch of clauses to try and imprint your legacy, but at the end of the day if you sell your stake you sell your stake. You aren’t in the room anymore.
And if you aren’t in the room, you aren’t responsible, either. I can’t help if someone buys my car and crashes into a telephone pole. I didn’t cause that damage to the world by selling my car. Maybe, I could have found a more qualified driver if I accepted less payment for it! Or, my interested buyer upon seeing my clauses and restrictions might say “thanks but no thanks, no longer interested.”
Rather, I was saying that from their public statements and actions, they weren't satisfied with the outcome, and they may have been able to increase the chances that it looked like their vision (with essentially no tradeoff to them - they aren't going to spend the seventh billion, or probably even the third billion). As you said, no contract terms can guarantee an outcome, but terms could have increased the chances.
I’m not blaming them for selling out for $20B, I would have done the same. But I won’t believe they didn’t know what was going to happen.
I don't fault them for selling, I fault everyone else for assuming it would always be ad free after the sale.
This is the timeline as I recall it (and from quickly googling a couple of articles), feel free to correct me if I'm getting things wrong:
2012: this article
2014: FB acquires whatsapp
2016: Whatsapp becomes free (drops the $1 purchase fee)
2018: Jan Koun and Brian Acton leave FB
I understand why he did it, at some point it becomes irresponsible not to take the money given the opportunity cost (and he did give $50M to signal). Steven Levy has a funny bit about it in his excellent book Facebook: The Inside Story. When someone offers you 19 billion to violate your principles, you have to wonder what you can do with that money and maybe you can do more good than you could with whatsapp.
Plus housing in Palo Alto is expensive: https://www.dirt.com/moguls/tech/brian-acton-house-palo-alto...
I wrote an overly long feudal allegory about this based on pillars of the earth (I know, but it was fun to write): https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/07/14/the-serfs-of-facebook...
His last tweet still stands: https://twitter.com/brianacton/status/976231995846963201?s=2...
###
“Do no knights strike out on their own?”
Philip was quiet for a moment. He pointed across a vast vista to a large castle in the distance adjacent to that of their own Earl Zuckerberg’s. “That is the castle of Sir Brian Acton of the former Earldom of WhatsApp. Sir Acton was an idealistic farmer who rejected the ways of our earl. He promised the serfs he would take no part of their data harvest they produced from the land he provided them, and instead the serfs even paid him a small cash fee for his protection. He had no knights to watch and report on his people and no heralds spreading pronouncements.”
“What happened?”
“He was too successful. Earl Zuckerberg saw many of his serfs begin to leave his lands to work the lands of Sir Acton (at the time he was known as Farmer Acton). This was a risk to the power of Zuckerberg’s earldom, since an earl without serfs to tend to the data fields has no harvest to interest others. In the end he offered Sir Acton a knightship and such enormous wealth that he could not refuse. It’s said he now lives in that vast castle alone, is rarely seen, and rarely speaks. The serfs that were in agreement with him now belong to Earl Zuckerberg as they had before, their deal was broken, and once again they tend to our earl’s data harvest.”
“Are there no others?”
“Sir Acton was just the most noble, and his fall the most tragic. Others like Sir Chris Coyne of the former Earldom of Keybase promised their serfs protection and then cruelly sold them to the Earldom of Zoom, which is closely tied to the Eastern Kingdom, a hostile land ruled by a tyrant king where the earls are weak and only serve to do the king’s bidding. There the serfs are forced to grow only what the king has allowed and serfs that refuse are dealt with swiftly and harshly. While in our kingdom farmers can choose to try to strike out on their own (though most choose not to), in the Earldoms of Zoom or TikTok, nothing can happen without the blessing of their king.”
[0]:https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2018/09/26/exclusive...
I was surprised to find out that the blog post is still accessible from whatsapp.com given how things have changed...
And of course, Appendix A of "Anatomy of a Search Engine": http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
Everyone has their price, and corporations selling out their values for more money is basically a universal truth.
Think about your biggest stance. Be it climate change, political affiliation or controversial issues like abortion. How much money do you need to receive to never talk or be bothered about it again? With a few billion dollars in your pocket, most issues are no longer a concern or anything you will care about reasonably.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-to-buy-whatsapp-for-16...
I guess everyone's an edgy-movie-quote-quoting-internet-hacker-bro until the man from Silicon Valley offers your $19Billion.
I wonder how many of those billions can we equate to Tyler Durden? Must of been worth at least 8 IMO.