14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook officially purchased WhatsApp a few weeks ago, but it turns out that the social networking company wasn’t the only investor interesting in taking over the famous mobile app.
Bill Gates, Microsoft co-founder and now technical advisor, said in an interview with the Rolling Stones that the Redmond-based software giant was also willing to purchase WhatsApp, but he refused to provide any specifics on how much the company was willing to spend for the acquisition.
“Yeah, yeah. Microsoft was willing to buy it, too… I don’t know if it was for $19 billion, but the company’s extremely valuable,” Gates said when he was told that Google was also looking at WhatsApp.
As far as Mark Zuckerberg is concerned, Bill Gates said that Facebook’s founder is “more of a product manager” than he was at his age, but in the end” that’s not that major of a difference.”
“We’re both Harvard dropouts, we both had strong, stubborn views of what software could do. I give him more credit for shaping the user interface of his product,” he said.
“He’s more of a product manager than I was. I’m more of a coder, down in the bowels and the architecture, than he is. But, you know, that’s not that major of a difference. I start with architecture, and Mark starts with products, and Steve Jobs started with aesthetics.”
Steve Ballmer, former Microsoft CEO replaced at the helm of the company by Satya Nadella in February, said during an event at the Oxford University that WhatsApp isn’t worth that much.
Although his statements were at first surprising given the fact that no one knew that Microsoft was interested in buying WhatsApp, it now makes a little bit more sense given that Facebook, Google, and the Redmond-based software firm were all involved in the talks.
“Sometimes, having a lot of people sign up represents usage, but it's a false metric [of value],” Ballmer explained earlier this month.
“Let's take WhatsApp. If you're goal was to sell the company they had the right goalset. Is it a fad, well probably not. I don't know if it will be successful or not. Will those 450m people ever generate enough revenue? Mark Zuckerberg [Facebook chief executive] believes so and [I have] no reason to doubt.”
A potential WhatsApp acquisition would have helped Microsoft with its mobile plans, especially because the company struggles to expand into this market area and continue its transition to a devices and services firm. Ballmer’s One Microsoft transformation plan was started in August 2013, but is set to be completed under the new CEO Satya Nadella.