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Facebook to WhatsApp team in the acquisition negotiations: "If you don't sell to us, we'll build our own and offer it for free"

And they would have been out of business sooner or later. There are enough people wanting to save that one dollar.



There are plenty of other ways they could have made money that weren't scummy and didnt require hitting up every user for $1.

Business accounts, facilitating p2p payments (minus a scummy new coin), etc.

Sustainability would have been possible in all sorts of ways even though massive levels of profits (in any company) inevitably means being scummy.


Facebook now have to maintain Messenger AND WhatsApp. And Insta also has chat. So I disagree that FB could have killed WA.


Iā€™m tempted to go further. FB bought WA because it would have killed their ad business.


> If you don't sell to us, we'll build our own and offer it for free

Weren't they already doing that? Facebook Messenger officially launched in 2011 (essentially an upgrade to Facebook's built-in chat functionality which existed before that) and was free, yet Whatsapp continued to grow.




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