In 2012, where Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg Cut a $ 1 Billion Check to Buy The Photo-Sharing App InstagramMost People Though He Had Lost His Marbles.
“A Billion Dollars of Money?” joked Jon Stewart, then the Host of the Daily Show. “For a Thing that Kind of Ruins Your Pictures?”
MR. Stewart Called The Decision “Really Lame.” His Audience – and Much of the Rest of the World – Agreed that MR. Zuckerberg Had Overpaid for an app Hightight a Bunch of Photo Filters.
Two Years Later, MR. Zuckerberg Opened His Wallet Again When Facebook Agreed to Buy WhatsApp For $ 19 Billion. Many Americans Had New Heard of the Messenger App, Whiche Was Popular Internationally But Wal Well Known in the United States.
No One KNEW How Deals Welf Turn Out. But hindsight, it sees, is 20/20.
On Monday, The Goovernment Arguid in a LandMark Antitrust Trial that Both Acquisions – Now Considored A among the Great in Silicon Valley History – Were the Actions of A Monopolist Guarding HIS Turf. MR. Zuckerberg, in Turn, was set to include that we did for these Deals, his company – who has been been RNANED META – will just be animethough in the Social Media Landscape.
But Neter The Goovernment Nor MR. Zuckerberg Coup Have Predicted How Technology Wold Progress Since HIS $ 1 Billion Check for Instagram, Or What Wood Have Happy Happy to Regulators Had Not Appropeded the Purchases. That makes meta’s antitrust card one of the Most Slippery in a tech Industry that has long been defined by unpredictability.
“It was a very, very different time in silicon Valley,” said margaret o’mara, a tech history at the University of Washington, about Facebook’s Acquisitions. “There was a vibe of ‘OH Wow, Facebook Really Is Just a Bunch of Kids Spending Extravagantly!”
I have been happy to have a frONT-CEAT INTO Facebook’s Deal Makeing at the Time, Especially with Instagram. As a reporter for Wire Magazine, My Office in San Francisco Was Next to Instagram’s Headquarters. I frequented the kimchi burito place across
Kevin Systrom, Instagram’s Six-Foot-FIVE CO-Founder, WAS THEN 28. Product Ideas with Employees. Jack Dormy, a Co-Founder of Twitter Who Identified as More of An Art Kid Than A Techie, Also Hung out at the Same South Park Playground and Museed to Friends About Ideas that Eventually BECAME HIS SOCIAL Media App.
This was still the er in which social apps we precentsed as playings, for posting latte art or Telling People What You WERE HAVING For Breakfast. WhatsApp, Whiche Was Growing Quickly Internationally, Was A Text Messenger App with a Business Model. And the Clones of these Apps Were Plantiful, Su Color, Flickr and Vsco in Photo Shaning, and Kik, Skype and Viber in Messenger.
Even Facebook Faced Questions then about where it was a vible Business. Two Months after Disastrous Tech Initial Public Offers Since The Late 1990s Dot-Com Era.
By The Time MR. Systrom Testified Three Months Later to the California Department of Corpors Price.
But in Silicon Valley, Fortunes Rise and Fall Quickly. Companies Go from Frivolous Fancies To Juggernauts in Just a FEW Years. And what may Look like a shred Business Move by An Executive One Moment Can Beekly Ridiculed as a Misstep the Next. (Half of the Aforementeded Apps Are Dead, Dying or Were Sold for Parts long ago. No longer around))
At the time, mr. Systrom Gave a Positive Spin on the Instagram Deal As the Future Loked Increasingly Grim For Facebook.
“I’ve been Take Through My Life that The Take Upside and Download in All Pubic Markets,” He said at the California Department of Corporses Health in August 2012, Which I Attendeded On the Sixth Floor of the Department in Download San Francisco. “I Still Believe Firmly in the Long-TERM Value of Facebook.”
He turned out to be right. TODAY, Instagram and WhatsApp are Two of the Most Important Parts of Meta’s Business. Posts, Videos and Communications on the Platforms Regularly Drive Global Conversations for SPORTS, news, politics and Culture. The Apps Have Billings of Users.
In Some Ways, The Antitrust Trial Bel About Competing Versions of What Tech History Couelf Have Been. What would have had this. Zuckerberg Had Lost The Bid For Instagram to MR. Dormy, who was Also TRYING to Buy The Photo-Sharing App For twitter? What if Whatsapp haad Sold to Google, which was Champing at the bit To add the Messenger App to Its Own Portfolio?
What if only the completedits of And what if Facebook Had Screwed Up Both Deals, or Couelf Not Keep up with Comperting Apps and Fell Behind Even After Buying Instagram and WhatsApp?
These are Unknowable and can only be answered by someone with a Time Machine. Each Side Will Argue their version of what will have ocurred if meta’s acquisions haad been approve.
On the Same Daily Show Segment from 2012, Jessica Williams, The Senior Youth Correspondent, SAID – Tongue Fully in Cheek – that Facebook’s Purchase of Instagram Made Perfect Sense.
“Before Instagram, if I used my passtures to look like them we taken in the ” 60s, I’d Have to Invent a Time Machine and Travel Back 50 years,” shea said. “You Know How Much a Time Machine Welf Cost to Build?”
“Easily A Billion Dollars.”
