There Is No Justification for What Mark Zuckerberg Did to WhatsApp
slate.com
slate.com
That's pretty interesting. They foresaw it of course and put a claim in the contract about it. Though when trying to trigger it FB fought back so Acton left the money on the table.
> Acton gave up some $900 million; Koum gave up about $400 million. You need to be really unhappy at work if you’re willing to quit a job that’s effectively paying you some $60 million per month, and from which you basically can’t be fired.
A new type of "fuck you" money VC style - you can have your dirty stock options I am out of here.
> or was he talked into breaking his promise by Sandberg and other executives looking covetously at WhatsApp’s unmonetized userbase? Either way, he has clearly failed a key leadership test.
The leaders tend to aggregate around them minions who are an exaggerated version of themselves. If they are liars they will surround themselves over time with even bigger liars. If they are narcissists they'll end up with minions who are narcissists. It's mostly natural selection. Well it happened in this case, there was a clash and those who don't agree leave. Over enough years it "distills" the company culture into whatever characteristics the top leaders have.
Is there a term for this behavior? It explains a number of situations.
Let Zuckerberg have his measly $750m, which means F all to either of you and get on with your next project.
This is entirely a pragmatic and reasonable decision on the part of the whatsapp founders.
This is wrong. Who cares what somebody else thinks when you get billions of dollars? Not your problem anymore.
They should have really held Zuckerberg's feet to the fire and enforced the contract by suing. It seems like a slam dunk. (IANAL)
What did the contract say? The only contract I saw in the original story noted that if adds were forced on them some people could leave with more stock..... that wouldn't have prevented anything.
"You own the company. If you put ads on the product we sell, give us more money."
You don't have to prevent anything, you just have to make them think about things.
How can it be Facebook's management's fault if they let 3rd party apps abuse FB user data, but not WhatsApp managements fault for letting Facebook do the same? Acton and Koum sold out their users for a huge payday, and now they are so rich that they can walk away from a few hundred million dollars to "buy an indulgent" for their immortal souls.
The other day I ordered take-out exclusively from Whatsapp. The company where I work recently implemented user support using Whatsapp. I buy coffee from a nearby roaster and he informs me the day before roasting so that I can get fresh coffee. I also know lots of parents that communicate with schools and create groups with other parents.
Signal requires google services and phone number, Telegram doesn't encrypt by default, riot's interface is still not good enough.
I can't redirect my non-techie friends to any alternative because none of them is good enough yet.
Requirements were: secure, iOS/Android/Mac/Linux/Windows, multi-person chats, and multiple simultaneous/alternating device support (that means chat history needs to propagate to my phones and computers).
iMessage was not considered (because it supports only iOS & macOS) and WhatsApp was not considered (because Facebook).
After looking at Signal, Telegram, Keybase, and Wire, we ended up using Wire. It's not perfect by a long shot, but it is better than the others we tested and AFAICT better than any solution currently available.
But I had never heard of it until I really started looking around.
1. Presence/active device detection. Often I am sitting right at my computer actively chatting with somebody, and yet my phone sitting on the desk right next to it is blowing up with notifications of the same messages I am replying to.
2. Too many features. I am constantly accidentally activating features like snapchat-style disappearing messages and weird alien voice effects. Cool if you have them enabled by default but I would like settings to turn OFF the many features that I literally never use (particularly on mobile where there are both small screens and more features, hence more icons).
3. 10-device limit. I know it sounds crazy but I have 2 phones and a few tablets and computers at work and home and I often have to delete a device to use the one I am at now. (20 devices would work for me; even 15 probably would.)
4. Initial log in / start up performance. I know it's hard with the huge photos and encryption. But sometimes i get a notification on my watch that my wife just said XXXXX and I want to respond RIGHT NOW on my computer. But it takes like 8 seconds on an iMac Pro to get to the active/ready state after booting the app. (I tend to just leave it open for this reason, but sometimes have to reboot or whatever and it is not). I would prefer it started up and let me send IMMEDIATELY even if I had to wait for it to load/decrypt the chat histories.
Those are the main ones off the top of my head. It is a great product, though, and I appreciate your efforts!
There was talk about independence but no indication that facebook was paying bazillions and were going to leave them alone for long. The founders even knew it enough to note the possibility of having ads forced on them in their contracts.
I'm no fan of facebook, but justification is ... it is their product.
Can I sue for it then?
I only hope Signal will take steps proactively to not go down whatsapp's path (lucrative as it was).