How Twitter’s secret offer for Instagram made Facebook pay $1B
venturebeat.com
venturebeat.com
The oddest secret of success is that you never feel successful. You feel someone else is always almost about to dethrone you. Imagine if you had unlimited funds to defend your delusions.
I'd hire the crack tech writing team of Devorak, Cringley, Arrington, and Siegler to work full time on my never-to-be-published biography.
Paranoia is by definition irrational. I don't see this ending well.
To the extent that Google manages to innovate (and we don't always - we've caught a lot of flack for that lately), I suspect it's because of the layer of middle-management whose only job is to stand between the paranoia of the executives and the creativity of the engineers & PMs. Well-functioning teams here always seem to have a strong leader that basically takes all the shit from above and lets only the high-level direction from the executives reach the engineers, filtering out all the fear and capricious whims.
The thing is, this is all but guaranteed to happen. I would say that history has shown us that Internet users tend to be fairly fickle, and that mass migrations away from specific sites (like Facebook) are fairly inevitable. In fact, I'm surprised Facebook has remained as dominant as it has to this point. But I'd still bet that a sea-change will happen sooner than later and that Facebook will be the next site to be abandoned en-masse.
It's not really just a site, it's a world. And the Facebook identity now extends beyond the walled garden. With Facebook Authentification, it's more like our online passport.
The world is pretty locked in.
I think there's a history there where certain social/discussion/sharing sites/systems are popular, for a while, they peak, then the next cooler thing comes along and the masses move on. Yes Facebook has hit the highest peak to date. But that doesn't mean it will last. When Zuck started it was the small cool elite site for Hardvardies. Now there's a lot of Moms and Uncle Bobs on there, the masses, dorks, rednecks, coworkers, bosses, and precisely because Facebook has violated user's trust a few times, and spread it's Auth system and Like buttons everywhere, a growing sense of distrust and avoidance towards it, precisely because you don't want Facebook knowing everything you do, or risk having the Moms and Uncle Bobs find out, coworkers, bosses, etc. Popularity is a double-edged sword: if you get it virally over just a few years you can lose it virally just as well. Now I do think Instagram was massively overvalued based purely on objective evidence to date. But I do understand how Zuck could fear it, based on future possibilities, and priced it based on fear. He knows how quickly Facebook's success came to him. He knows how quickly it might have come to Instagram. And arguably, past a billion or two in the bank, it's all just play money.
I can't remember any website that _required_ Facebook to log in, except maybe weekend hacks were other login methods were added later one. The online world may still have some freedom :)
FB auth is obviously a huge part of Facebook's extension beyond their walled garden, but there's plenty more examples. The fan-page widgets for social proof, Facebook Comments for publishers, and like-buttons are all areas of integration that solidify Facebook's lead.
It's not just a site, and it's growing into being more than just a platform. Already, Facebook's certainly beyond anything any historical precedents have set before.
"but of course, Lisp isn't dying -- it's just that if you think in terms of the imminent end of the world, _everything_ is soon food for the great garbage collector in the sky and whoever is not scrambling in panic looks like they aren't moving and have been passed by or are dying.
"the problem I see is not that Bill Gates has shaped the world of useless trinkets in software, but has also managed to spread his competitiveness and his personal fear of losing to imaginary competitors to businesses and homes everywhere, so now everybody is _afraid_ of losing some battle which isn't happening, instead of getting about their own lives. like, if you aren't using today's fad language in the very latest version of the IDE, you'll be left behind. aaaugh! but it's good that some people run like they are scared out of their wits. if they suddenly disappear over the edge of a cliff, a good number of people will notice in time and _not_ follow them. those are the ones that matter.
"you can scare most people most of the time, but you can't scare all of the people all of the time -- some will always use Common Lisp."
I think it was Kurt Cobain who said this.
There countered that negative seed in everyone's mind. Are you a tabloid newspaper headline writer?!
Little details being off like this always make me wonder a out the rest of the details in articles.
Do you want to play poker or build a better world?
Strangely, Chris Sacca and Jack Dorsey were both investors in Instagram and they still lost the deal. I suspect it just got to rich for them. I don't think this bodes well for Twitter.
There is talk that this purchase was strategic to prevent twitter or google buying a photo platform.
Whatever happened this story is not black and white. This sort of money is crazy.
If you add a photo network on to twitter though, it becomes a lot more of a facebook competitor and I can see people giving up on Facebook and moving their main social networking to Twitter. I can see that being scary to Facebook.
Microsoft was the worst but not the first. Apple acts
this way with Android, and Google has been paranoid for
a few years.
I'm sure Google and Microsoft would've been interested in them. Maybe Facebook's seemingly outrageous offer was the only way to keep everyone at bay.
“These huge West Coast companies, peopled mostly by kids who cannot believe their good luck, commonly turn paranoid and think everyone is out to get them,” veteran columnist and broadcaster John Dvorak told VentureBeat.
I'm also reminded of the old potato chip commercial where Jay Leno went "eat all you want, we'll make more".
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