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Comment by tokai | Hacker News Reader

>Zuckerberg knows they need to create or acquire the next big thing to make it in the long

Isn't that exactly what yahoo did?

But Yahoo pretty much ruined companies they bought like Tumblr for example. I’m not saying Facebook won’t make the same mistake but so far they have done a relatively good job with Instagram and WhatsApp. Both of them are very popular and growing. Much different story than Yahoo, at least so far.

I think since they have just this year pushed out the founder of Instagram and will presumably be taking more control of Instagram, we will see how they actually do with it going forward. Up until lately, Instagram has had relative atonomy.

>they have done a relatively good job with Instagram and WhatsAp

WhatsApp announced that they'll introduce ads, and the co-founder left the company due to privacy concerns.

That has nothing to do with whether WHatsapp will continue to grow or not.

Yes it does. Users of the platform today are uninterrupted by ads and have no reason to think about how the platform is mining their data -- many are unaware its owned by FB.

Depending on the intrusiveness of the ads, users may opt to move to another platform, which will lead to more people being pulled away from Whatsapp. FB will have to monetize aggressively to recoup investments and keep wallstreet happy, but users may not be very receptive to ads within their messaging platform.

Well! They are not just buying but improving it as well. Whatsapp and Instagram are the best example.

Yahoo could not keep up the quality of any product that was acquired by them.

How is WhatsApp “improved” by reducing privacy and adding ads?

End to end encryption was added after the aquisition.

While true, I am not really believing Facebook had anything to do directly with that happening. It seems like the entire industry was moving that direction and WhatsApp would've always had to implement it.

Encryption was already in the works via a collaboration with Open Whisper Systems, the makers of Signal (see signal.org).

AFAIK end to end encryption was actually part of the acquisition deal.

And now they regret it ;-)

They turned down buying Google.

Zuck smartly buys his competitors.

Yahoo bought plenty of other "next big things" Geocities, tumblr, flikr, viaweb, Broadcast.com, del.icio.us, zimbra, and hundreds of others besides.

It wasn't clear at the time Google would be any kind of success, you are looking at things with hindsight.

Yahoo's acquisition track record goes beyond unlucky picking, it shows that they can't maintain or grow the services they bought either.

Compare with Google: Maps (Where2), Earth (Keyhole), Waze, YouTube, DoubleClick were all acquisitions they grew to be far larger under Google than they were before.

Disclaimer: I work for Google, although I have nothing to do with acquisitions.

At what point did Yahoo’s core business start to shrink or get the stench of being a loser? I have to imagine that Yahoo! acquiring them was a stinker for their users. Did anyone think of Yahoo as bringing strategic value to the services they were acquiring? By the time they bought delicious and tumblr they had a track record with flickr and any of the users of those services saw the acquisition as a negative.

A key problem with some of Yahoo's acquisitions is that they missed the right point of the curve: buying things once they were already Quite A Thing. While this may look like a safer gamble than buying something small that might be a thing and the next big thing eventually, but might be nothing at all next month, getting in late can have two key problems: already being a thing means it commands a high price, and you already have an invested user-base who may fight tooth-and-nail (or simply leave) when you inevitably make changes.

I don’t think any of the properties Yahoo! bought were very big (by today’s standards). Del.icio.us was great but it was a hobby project compared to Instagram/WhatsApp.

Actually isn't buying competitors a bad thing from the Anti-Trust point of view? If you own all the social networks and then refuse to let Influencers to share their post stats with their clients because "Facebook is not in the value chain" it really seems like it really becomes a real Anti-Trust issue. If you only own one, you can always claim there is competition.

> Actually isn't buying competitors a bad thing from the Anti-Trust point of view?

Anti-trust legislation is scarcely enforced these days. No matter if in the US or Europe.

To be fair, Anti-Trust takes ages to investigate and then go through the courts. But Google just got hit with an Anti-Trust fine of $5 billion.

I'm surprised Facebook hasn't been hit with EU antitrust already. But the EU is already talking about forcing Facebook to split up.

It'll be interesting to see how effectively they can keep that up now their VPN's been taken off the App Store.

Interesting, when did this happen? From the outside it definitely seems like it's been their x-ray vision for sure.

A few months ago: https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/22/apple-facebook-onavo

Still seems to be gone, and seems like Apple have banned the data stuff they were doing.

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