None of us is able to think about the amount that Facebook has paid for WhatsApp and not come to consider that it is too much money for an application. Google was said to be willing to pay more, although Android's chief executive officer claimed that they did not enter the bid for WhatsApp. Now, the business manager has said that is an exaggerated amount for a company of 55 employees.
It was at the Morgan Stanley technology conference in San Francisco. Nikesh Arora, who is the business director of the Mountain View company, gave his opinion on the multimillion-dollar purchase of WhatsApp by Facebook, which has cost the latter 19 million dollars. Scott Devitt, the Morgan Stanley interviewer, asked him if, now that WhatsApp was part of Facebook, they were considering buying another company dedicated to instant messaging. Nikesh fully understood the real question behind Devitt's disguise, and responded with two rhetorical questions: “$ 500 million per employee? Is it a good use for our money?
It's not really $ 500 million, but $ 345 million per employee. Even so, it is still an exaggerated figure and it is well understood what the Google executive wanted to say. Facebook paid too much for WhatsApp. And one of the references we have to measure that is what they get when they acquire said company. In the case of Google or Apple, when they buy companies, they don't do it just for a product, but because that company's specialized staff goes to work with them. This is what happens with Siri for example. However, in the case of WhatsApp we are talking about 55 people for an extremely high amount. What's more, the complexity of WhatsApp is nothing to write home about, so it is possible that we are even talking, mostly, of engineers who could have hired for zero euros, only having to pay them their corresponding salary. Be that as it may, Facebook has considered that 19 million dollars a fair figure for an application like WhatsApp. It is clear that they have some strategy to recover what was spent.
I think Facebook thought it was a good idea to have WhatsApp on its side and not as a competitor, but I think it was stupid to pay so much.
The truth is that if I pay too much, on the other hand I would have preferred that Google bought it and not Facebook, let's stop with fairy tales, in case Facebook does not have a good record in terms of user privacy, even if they say that each an independent functionary is pure story, fable and legend.