
WhatsApp confirms Google isn’t buying it - antr
http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/09/whatsapp-confirms-google-isnt-buying-it-but-you-can-bet-someone-will-soon/
======
EvanMiller
It's time everyone understood a fundamental precept of startup acquisition
rumors:

 _If an acquisition price is leaked before the deal is completed, the acquiree
has no intention of selling._

In a private acquisition, there are only two parties in a position to leak:
the acquirer and the acquiree. The acquirer, which has shareholders,
competitors, and lots of money, has no incentive to leak the price on the
table, or even the fact that there is a table. It gives away too much
information to competitors and creates an unwanted news cycle. So in fact
they'll be pissed if information about the negotiation is leaked.

If the acquiree actually wants to do a deal, they don't want to piss off the
potential acquirer, so they'll keep their mouths shut. But they might have
plenty of reasons to leak the negotation price, particularly if they're a
company that is losing money and wants to inflate the company's valuation
before another round of private financing. Going before investors saying "We
turned down a billion dollars from Google, maybe you heard about it" creates a
nice focal point for the ensuing discussion about the company's valuation.

Negotiating in bad faith like this happens all the time, most famously with
Facebook/Yahoo! (2006) and Groupon/Google (2010). So the next time you read
another news story about an acquisition rumor that includes a price tag,
ignore it, because the story's not for you; it's for a future investor.

(Note that the foregoing logic does not apply if the acquiree is publicly
traded, because the deal must be approved by shareholders, so the acquisition
price is always "leaked" before the papers are signed.)

------
shmerl
Google better buy it, and convert it into normal XMPP service. Otherwise this
sickness will just grow more.

 _> At WhatsApp, our engineers spend all their time fixing bugs, adding new
features and ironing out all the little intricacies in our task of bringing
rich, affordable, reliable messaging to every phone in the world. That’s our
product and that’s our passion._

There is such thing - XMPP. Just create a reliable federated (and standard
compliant!) service, and give people a decent client with audio/video
XMPP/Jingle calling capabilities. Why their passion has to revolve around
gutting security in the process of creating a non compliant walled IM
abomination is really puzzling.

 _> Your data isn’t even in the picture. We are simply not interested in any
of it._

What about your identity being in the picture? Shouldn't they warn their users
that they offer an insecure and identity leak / theft prone service?

~~~
nasalgoat
XMPP performance on mobile platforms, especially on subpar networks, is pretty
bad. It's designed for always-on networks and is a huge battery drain even if
you can maintain that connection.

~~~
shmerl
Whatsapp uses XMPP nevertheless. That's not the problem. The problem is that
it modifies it, to make it non compliant, it doesn't federate and it also
offers no way to control your user name and password, using phone hardware
identity instead.

There are several ways to address XMPP energy drain, some of which were
proposed as XEPs. Google uses one of such methods (google queue). Facebook
uses another.

Example: <https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=38943>

------
mhaymo
Obligatory calling out of blogspam and linking to the original article:
[http://allthingsd.com/20130408/whatsapp-were-not-selling-
to-...](http://allthingsd.com/20130408/whatsapp-were-not-selling-to-google/)

It never really made sense to me that Google would buy WhatsApp. What do they
have that Google can't build themselves? An established userbase, sure, but
any messaging app included by default in Android will have users migrating in
droves.

~~~
morsch
Doesn't Google Talk qualify as the messaging app included by default? Not sure
I see the droves of WhatsApp users migrating to that, sadly.

~~~
micampe
Sadly? Not for me. Here is one big reason I prefer services like WhatsApp (I
don’t actually use WhatsApp itself): I _do not_ want the presence reporting.

I want to send a message to people and they read and respond whenever they
want. I want people to message me and I read and respond whenever I want.

I don’t want to deal with ping, hey, you are online why are you not
responding. This is why half my Gtalk contacts are always “away” even if they
are at the keyboard: presence status has become useless, let’s just get rid of
it.

~~~
derefr
Tracking "presence" makes sense when the program implementing it is running on
a computer sitting on a desk, and then you sometimes walk away from that desk.

Presence makes almost no sense when the program implementing it resides on a
phone, where any time someone sends you a message--even if the application
isn't running--you'll know (because your pants just buzzed), and could very
well react to it if you felt like it. You're always "present"; you're just
sometimes purposefully non-responsive.

...now, on the other hand, "openness to being interrupted" status could be
pretty useful. :)

~~~
micampe
Half my contacts are always away, and have been for years.

I think what you want should be a setting in my machine (whether phone or
computer): silence all notifications when I don’t want to be interrupted (I
use iOS “Do Not Disturb” all the time).

------
bvi
This was possibly done to simply anchor [1] Whatsapp's value, should it seek
to be acquired in the future.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring>

------
jahabrewer
I'm not familiar with WhatsApp, but from their front page blog article[1], it
sounds like they could be at loggerheads with Google over privacy/advertising.
You can't buy an ideologue.

[1] [http://blog.whatsapp.com/index.php/2012/06/why-we-dont-
sell-...](http://blog.whatsapp.com/index.php/2012/06/why-we-dont-sell-ads/)

~~~
shmerl
Whatsapp has several severe problems. Firstly it's proliferating non
interoperable instant messaging networks. While it uses XMPP underneath, it
modifies it in an incompatible fashion, and can't communicate with XMPP
compliant clients and naturally it's not federated with any XMPP networks, so
it reverses the point of XMPP completely, while using it.

Secondly, that it was created to exploit people's laziness - i.e. it skips
registration step (one time thing) presenting it as a "convenience feature",
but it does it at the cost of sacrificing security (i.e. it offers no way to
choose user ID and password, instead of that it uses hardcoded information
derived from the phone hardware ID), obviously not letting the user know about
this downside. So it's a wicked trick which is used to attract unaware users.

~~~
conradfr
Registration step is huge and annoying. I had to add my friends in ICQ, then
MSN, then Facebook, then Skype, then Google+ (well no, not this one ...).

I use Whatsapp once per month and I'm not even sure what it does or how it
does it. I just know I can send group messages to everyone in my contact list
who have it and it WORKS.

~~~
shmerl
"Huge and annoying" one time deal, which later allows you changing your
password and also allows you choosing the ID of your liking, so you'd appear
to your contacts with some recognizable name, and not as some numeric
#########@whatsapp.com

When you sign up for e-mail, do you think it's normal to skip the registration
step and to give you some random ID and password? Why is IM any different?
Also, do you think it's normal for your e-mail ID to be tied to one device, or
you'd expect to be able to access and read / send it from multiple devices /
computers? Why should IM be any different? That's what XMPP is about. Whatsapp
tries to create a crippled service instead, but somehow manages to wrap it as
a "convenience".

