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Comment by donor20 | Hacker News Reader

The press goes from calling out Facebook and zuckerberg as idiots for wildly overpaying for instragram to now saying that it was unfair they bought instagram.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/follo...

Does anyone doubt facebook has pumped some pretty massive bucks into insta? I mean, insta had 13 employees or something?

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Instagram is less of an issue compared to whatsapp for the reasons you outlined, Facebook mostly took it to where it is, and it also has plenty of competition. TikTok, Twitter, Snap are all large.

Whatsapp and Messenger have significant combined marketshare and it was already much more valuable when they bought it.

and it holds potentially less important data. I know many influencial people including first line politicians in my country that use whatsapp on the daily, while I really can't see any of them sharing confidential information on instagram of all places.

And yes, using a service like that is an extremely bad decision in the first place, but that's where we are right now.

Whatsapp was something like 50 employees and a 400m users when FB bought them in 2014. Plenty of people (though not not all) were baffled by the 19B price that they paid at the time (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7266618 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7275470, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7272641), especially in the US where Whatsapp was/is relatively unpopular.

That's a great set of links. The hotmail comparison is apt - Microsoft basically trashed / dropped hotmail? So these acquisitions can go either way?

The risk with what's up is definitely higher. That said, Facebook has an INCREDIBLE acquisition success rate with insta and whatsup.

Facebook didn't make the WhatsApp acquisition blind. They had data from their Onavo VPN service showing exactly how popular it was compared to their own Messenger.

I can see that - I use neither and don't have the facebook app on my phone so for me it's irrelevant but I know internationally whatsup just crushes the local telcos.

It's just the price of making a successful bet. Critics were fine with it when they were confident it would fail. They just can't stand being wrong so they're making an effort to make it true.

How does overpaying for an acquisition preclude Facebook from forming a monopoly? If anything, Facebook has more incentives to overpay because of the monopolistic powers it would have.

'The Press' is a single entity?

It's not, anyone that uses that term or "Mainstream media" can instantly be dismissed.

The hivemind behind the press is a single entity

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