What would happen if Mark Zuckerberg hadn't bought Instagram and WhatsApp?

In 2012, when facebook executive director Mark Zuckerberg reduced a $ 1 billion check to <a target="_blank" class="css-yywogo" href="https://archive.nytimes.com/dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/04/09/facebook-buys-instagram-for-1-billion/” title=””>Buy the application to share instagram photosMost people thought they had lost their marbles.

“One billion dollars of money?” <a target="_blank" class="css-yywogo" href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2012/04/11/jon-stewart-on-facebooks-billion-dollar-instagram-purchase-really-lame/” title=”” rel=”noopener noreferrer” target=”_blank”>joined Jon Stewart, then presenter of “The Daily Show”. “For something that ruins your photos?”

Mr. Stewart described the “really lame” decision. His audience, and much of the rest of the world, agreed that Mr. Zuckerberg had paid excessively for an application that highlighted a lot of photo filters.

Two years later, Mr. Zuckerberg opened his wallet again when <a target="_blank" class="css-yywogo" href="https://archive.nytimes.com/dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/02/19/facebook-to-buy-messaging-start-up/” title=””>facebook agreed to buy WhatsApp for $ 19 billion. Many Americans had never heard of the courier application, which was popular internationally but not well known in the United States.

No one knew how these offers would result. But the retrospective, apparently, is 20/20.

On Monday, the Government argued in a historical antimonopoly trial that both acquisitions, now considered among the greatest in the history of the Silicon Valley, were the actions of a monopolist who protects his grass. Mr. Zuckerberg, in turn, argued that if it were not for these agreements, his company, which has been renamed goal, would be a last moment idea in the panorama of social networks.

But the case, which could cause the rupture of one of the most powerful technology companies, is largely involved in hypothetical. Neither the Government nor Mr. Zuckerberg could have predicted how technology would progress from its $ 1 billion check for instagram, or what would have happened if regulators had not approved purchases. That means that the antimonopoolium case of Meta is one of the most slippery in a technological industry that has been defined by unpredictability.

“It was a very, very different moment in Silicon Valley,” said Margaret O'Mara, a technological historian from the University of Washington, about facebook's acquisitions. “There was an atmosphere of 'Oh, Wow, facebook is really just a group of children who spend extravagantly!'”

It happened to me a front row in facebook's treatment at that time, especially with instagram. As a reporter of Wired magazine, he had an office next to the instagram headquarters in San Francisco. I frequented the place of Burrito Kimchi on the other side of the street near South Park Commons, a portion of green in the city, and ate on a bank out of the instagram office.

Kevin Systrom, 6 -foot 5 instagram co -founder, was 28 years old. I often walked around the wood and iron swing in the common ones of South Park while receiving calls or spoke ideas of products with employees. Jack DORSEY, twitter co -founder who identified himself as an art child rather than a technician, also came out in the same South Park recreation courtyard and reflected friends about ideas that finally became its application of social networks.

This was the era in which social applications were ruled out as plays, for publishing art in Latte or telling people what I was having breakfast. WhatsApp, which was growing rapidly internationally, was an application of text messages without a business model. And the clones of these applications abounded, such as color, Flickr and VSCO in the exchange of photos, and Kik, Skype and Viber in messages.

Even facebook faced questions about whether it was a viable business. Two months after the Silicon Valley company announced that I was buying instagram, it had one of the most <a target="_blank" class="css-yywogo" href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/may/24/facebook-ipo-mark-zuckerberg-nasdaq” title=”” rel=”noopener noreferrer” target=”_blank”>Initial Public Disastrose technology Offers Since the end of the Dot-Com was from the end of the 1990s.

By the time Mr. Systrom testified three months later to the California Corporations Department, a condition of closing the agreement with facebook, facebook actions had fallen almost half of the price of his IPO.

But in Silicon Valley, fortunes rise and fall quickly. Companies go from frivolous fantasies to giants in just a few years. And what may seem like a cunning commercial movement of an executive at one time can quickly ridicule as a false step to the next. (Half of the aforementioned applications are dead or dying or sold for a long time ago. My favorite place of Kimchi Burrito is also <a target="_blank" class="css-yywogo" href="https://sf.eater.com/2023/6/29/23778447/san-francisco-hrd-coffee-shop-closure” title=”” rel=”noopener noreferrer” target=”_blank”>no longer around.

At that time, Mr. Systrom took a positive turn in the instagram agreement, since the future seemed increasingly gloomy for facebook.

“They have taught me throughout my life that there are advantages and inconveniences in all public markets,” he said at the Hearing of the California Corporations Department in August 2012, which I attended on the sixth floor of the department in downtown San Francisco. “I still firmly believe in the long -term value of facebook.”

It turned out to be right. Today, instagram and WhatsApp are two of the most important parts of the finish line. Publications, videos and communications on platforms regularly drive global conversations for sports, news, politics and culture. Applications have billions of users.

Somehow, the antitrust essay is competitive versions of what could have been the history of technology. What would have happened if, for example, Mr. Zuckerberg would have lost instagram's offer to Mr. Dorsy, which was <a target="_blank" class="css-yywogo" href="https://archive.nytimes.com/dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/12/17/before-facebook-deal-instagrams-talks-with-twitter/” title=””>Also trying to buy the application to share photos For twitter? What would happen if WhatsApp had sold to Google, which was defending To add the messaging application to your own portfolio?

What would happen if other competitors had created higher applications to share photos that could have prospered if facebook had not used instagram to crush them? And what would happen if facebook had ruined both agreements, or could not follow the pace of competition applications and be left behind even after buying instagram and WhatsApp?

These are unknowable and can only be answered by someone with a time machine. Each side is discussing its version of what would have happened if the goal acquisitions would never have been approved.

In the same “Daily Show” segment of 2012, Jessica Williams, the upper youth correspondent, said the tongue completely on the cheek, that the purchase of instagram on facebook made a lot of sense.

“Before instagram, if I wanted my photos to seem taken in the 60s, I would have to invent a time machine and travel 50 years again,” he said. “Do you know how much a time machine would cost?

“Easily one billion dollars.”