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Comment by staunch | Hacker News Reader

Damn, Zuck is far more paranoid than I thought. He's going to have to come up with a better strategy than buying every company that presents a potential existential threat though. Especially at these prices!

I actually think it wasn't such a bad idea to buy Instagram. He paid 1% for something that really could have killed him. But paying $16 billion here is pretty much surrender as far as I'm concerned.

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Zuck should probably be fired (gracefully step-aside, courtesy of shareholder activist pressure, given his voting control) when Facebook is forced to do a $16 billion write-down on this. WhatsApp won't even be worth the cash they're paying for it when the music stops. They just bought today's version of ICQ for $19 billion. This acquisition leads me to believe Facebook is most similar to Yahoo at the peak of the dotcom bubble (the acquisition strategy, the massive overvaluation, the weak advertising platform). Yahoo was a portal, Facebook is the same premise but in social networking (the all-in-one champ). There will probably be pieces that spin out of the social networking scene that end up producing the next Google, while FB languishes as the new Yahoo.

> gracefully step-aside, courtesy of shareholder activist pressure, given his voting control

Good luck with that. He carefully maintained voting control over his own company so he'd never have to do that.

Heh, AOL bought ICQ for $287 million, and it had 12 million users. $24 per user.

Now AOL was really good at destroying companies though...

I agree re: AOL destroying value. I think It was $400m total, and keep in mind ICQ was ten times that size three years later (less than $4 per user at that point). I doubt we'll wake up to WhatsApp being at 4 billion users in 36 months.

AOL also bought Bebo for $850M and then sold it back to the founders for $1M a few years later.

Even if its a rope-a-dope its potentially a smart move. He needs to roll-with-the punches and keep in the lead. Once evaporative cooling kicks in, its not going to be a good ride. So its really best to do whatever is possible to stay ahead...even if that means being the borg of social networking. He has enough of a lead and can accept enough dilution that it remains worth it to continue to layer the next generation of services. A touch passive agressive perhaps, but its perhaps agressive enough to keep the party going another year or two. Which is the time he needs to plot the next move...I mean its unlikely he's going to invent the next FB ;D.

Starting to sound like Microsoft post Windows.

holy metaphors!

Nah, WhatsApp clearly was growing at an astronomical rate. They would have been neck and neck with FB in the near future. WhatsApp is I mean was a serious threat.

Under that logic any app that gets enough users is going to be a thread to Facebook? That doesn't make any sense.

I'd just like to mention that in some countries (Uruguay for example) it's becoming the go to social networks, the "hot" news and stuff are spreading though WhatsApp and not though FB anymore.

I guess that could be one of the factors that made them very interested in acquiring.

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