It seems like yesterday, but no: more than eight years have passed since the purchase of WhatsApp by Facebook for 19,000 million dollars was announced, or almost a decade if we count since the conversations between the social giant began. and those responsible for the courier service.
One of them, Neeraj Arora, at that time WhatsApp business director, has told through his personal Twitter account how it all went and how sorry he is that he agreed to Facebook taking over the companyone given that some of the key conditions that Mark Zuckerberg and company made to close the purchase agreement have not been met.
Arora exposes some of the proposals that, before WhatsApp’s initial refusal, they made to Facebook with the aim of convincing them otherwise: total independence in product decisions for WhatsApp management, their own office in Mountain View and a seat in the board for Jan Koum, the CEO of WhatsApp at the time.
Even so, WhatsApp did not fully trust Facebook, says Arora, and among its conditions were, in addition to not including advertising in the application, that will not collect user data or cross-platform trackingsomething that Facebook initially accepted because, among other plans – included as purchase proposals – was to implement endpoint encryption.
Of course, Facebook has been deceiving everyone -or trying- since its inception and the people of WhatsApp were not going to be less, although as some critics point out with these outbursts of honesty, in 2014 it was already very well known what The social giant limped on foot, as if to repent after pocketing the money they pocketed.
That said, Arora is not the first of the company’s former directors to express himself in similar terms. A few years ago Brian Acton, co-founder of WhatsAppstarted a campaign against Facebook with similar reproaches and of a different nature.
In 2014, I was the Chief Business Officer of WhatsApp.
And I helped negotiate the $22 billion sale to Facebook.
Today, I regret it.
Here’s where things went wrong:
— neeraj arora (@neerajarora) May 4, 2022
By deceit is meant everything that Facebook committed to with the original leadership of WhatsApp and did not comply, but also events such as the Cambridge Analitica scandal or the information transmitted to regulators in the same purchase of WhatsApp and that earned them a fine of the EU, among many other lesser examples.
In short, yes, perhaps what all these millionaires are demanding -thanks to the sale of WhatsApp- is a bit of media attention and that everything is already known, but… But they could well have demanded all those limits by contract? is not true? It does not go into such depth in the clauses that the purchase agreement consisted of, but it is not necessary.
As much as one or another inconsistency can be refuted, they may be right or part of it. The truth is that what happened then is in the past and cannot be changed. However, this piece is an excellent opportunity to remember what WhatsApp was like in its early days and the business model it aspired to implement. You remember?
Do you remember when WhatsApp was free? Do you remember when WhatsApp announced that it would start charging an annual subscription of 80 cents, after offering the user a whole year for free? Do you remember how some users complained about having to pay a whopping less than one euro a year to continue using the application they were glued to all day and how they threatened to abandon it for it?
I remember and that is because I have never used WhatsApp more than on rare occasions. I remember the rejection, least of all by word of mouth, from those angry users against paying 80 cents a year to keep the star application on their phones without advertising -.and all that this implies-. And I wonder if any of those are complaining today about the way things are.
