The first week of the Meta Antitrust Test brought new revelations on how the company previously known how Facebook approached the competitive threat posed by Instagram in the early 2010 years.
The United States government is accusing the destination of violation of competition laws by acquiring companies such as Instagram and WhatsApp who have threatened the Facebook monopoly. If the lawyers of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) of the United States are successful, the government could force destination to break its business by selling Instagram and WhatsApp.
As part of the process, the FTC shared convincing evidence to demonstrate that Facebook was very aware of the Instagram risk created for its business while the photo sharing app grew up in popularity. In the documents containing and -internal Facebook, Facebook managers care about the growth of Instagram and discuss how much to pay for the app, if Facebook should acquire it.
The executives of the company also discuss other strategies to limit the growth of Instagram, including the copy of its functionality and the release of an app alone or the purchase of the app and therefore not adding more new features while working on your products.
The Facebook strategy to buy or bury its competition is exhibited in these conversations, according to the government topics. In addition to showing how the company was thinking about its competition at that moment, the messages are indicative of ruthless strategies that have allowed the destination to become the giant of social networks which is today.
Some of the salient points of these messages are below.
Mark Zuckerberg and others care about the rapid growth of Instagram
- “Instagram seems to grow rapidly. In 4 months up to 2 million users and daily photographic loads of 30,000. It is a lot. We have to trace it closely. Furthermore, apparently the next great push of Dropbox will be in sharing photos.” – Mark Zuckerberg, February 2011
- “If Instagram continues to kick your ass on the mobile phone, or if Google buys them, then in the coming years they could easily add pieces of their service that copy what we are doing now, and if they have a growing number of photos of people, then it is a real problem for us. No reason to use them. – Mark Zuckerberg, September 2011
- “The photo team is now focused almost exclusively on a new mobile photo app while we cling to the simple Instagram photo sharing app that takes off (as our app sees fat growth … mobile uploads increased to 17.7 m during the day, +5.3 p/p)..” – Chris Cox, Chief Product Officer, February 2011
- “A trend regarding is that a huge number of uses uses every day Instagram-compartment all ranging from non-technical high school friends to FB-E employees are loading only some of their photos in FB. This creates a huge hole for us and someone who am sure that something we will do on the platform or with social dynamics will solve completely.” – Mark Zuckerberg, February 2012
Facebook considers an Instagram acquisition, stopping its development and growth
- “I wonder if we should consider the purchase of Instagram, even if it costs ~ 500m. At this moment they seem to have two things we don’t do: a really good camera and a photographic sharing network.” – Mark Zuckerberg, February 2012
- “I think it is completely possible that our initial thesis has been wrong and theirs is right – that what people want is more to take the best photos than to put them on FB … we could consider paying a lot of money for this.” – Mark Zuckerberg, February 2012
- “I ACTULY THINK THAT There is a Serious Argument to Be Made That We Should Buy Path, Pinterest, Instagram, Evernote, And Whomever Else We Really Admire/Are Doing Great Things Right Now If (1) We can Struct It In Way That We Haep Their Products Up & Running But Transition The Teams to Team to Working on FB Proper; (2) We Think the People Deeply Care About Building Great Things And We Think We Can Lock Them Up For 4+ Years to Work On Our Platform. ” – Samuel W. Lessin (former product vice president of the product), corresponding to Mark Zuckerberg in February 2012
- “I think what we would do is keep their product running and not add more features, and focus on future development on our products, including the construction of all their characteristics of the camera in ours. Do not kill their products we prevent everyone from hating us and we assure we do not immediately create a hole in the market for someone else to fill, but all the future development would go towards our main products.” – Mark Zuckerberg, February 2012
- “A way of examining this is that what we are really buying is time. Even if some new competitors take (Sic), buying Instagram, Path, Foursquare, etc. will now give us a year or more to integrate their dynamics before anyone can approach you at their scale.” – Mark Zuckerberg, February 2012
