14 DAY TRIAL // Eric Schmidt is used to keeping company secrets over at Google and he managed to keep up the trend this morning at CBS.
The Google exec was present there for a quick interview where he discussed several topics, including WhatsApp, the messaging app that Facebook bought just last week, shocking the entire tech world.
It’s been reported that Google itself had been interested in WhatsApp, making a bid way ahead of Facebook. The offer got turned down, but sources said that Larry Page had been adamant about buying the company, offering to overbid anything Facebook was willing to shell out.
When asked whether Google did actually offer $10 billion for WhatsApp, Schmidt refused to discuss the topic. “Let me not talk about this specific conversation with WhatsApp. Let’s just say that we like WhatsApp… and we like some other things too, including our own products,” he said.
One of the things that shocked everyone was the high price that Facebook was willing to pay – a total of $19 billion. Everybody’s surprise stemmed from the fact that WhatsApp can’t really monetize on its 460 million users since the subscription fee is extremely low and there are no ads. Since Facebook said it wouldn’t change any of these things, the question remains whether this will be just a huge hole in Zuckerberg’s pocket.
Eric Schmidt, Google’s chairman, actually believes that the price was actually low if Facebook ends up making “gazillions of dollars” off the customers it is getting. On the other hand, however, the price can be too high if it cannot monetize the deal.
This begs the questions – what would Google have done if it had managed to buy WhatsApp and what will Facebook do from now on. Only time will tell, but users are already starting to flee WhatsApp as they feel the company sold out when it accepted Facebook’s offer.