The first week of Antinopopoly target test He brought new revelations on how the company previously known as Facebook approached the competitive threat that Instagram represented in early 2010.
The United States government is accusing the goal of violating competition laws by acquiring companies such as Instagram and WhatsApp that threatened the Facebook monopoly. If lawyers for the Federal Commerce of the United States (FTC) are successful, the government could force the goal of breaking their business selling Instagram and WhatsApp.
As part of the trial, the FTC shared convincing evidence to demonstrate that Facebook was very aware of the risk that Instagram created for its business as the application to share photos grew in popularity. In the documents containing the internal emails of Facebook, Facebook executives care about Instagram growth and discuss how much to pay for the application, if Facebook acquired it.
The company’s executives also discuss other strategies to limit the growth of Instagram, including the copy of its functionality and launch their own application, or buy the application and then not add new features while working in its own products.
The Facebook strategy to buy or bury its competence is exhibited in these conversations, according to government arguments. In addition to showing how the company was thinking about its competence at that time, messages are indicative of Cutthroat strategies that have allowed the goal to become the social networks giant that is today.
Some of the most prominent aspects of these messages are below.
Mark Zuckerberg and others care about Instagram’s rapid growth
- “Instagram seems to be growing rapidly. In 4 months are up to 2 million users and 30K daily photo loads. That’s a lot. We need to track this close. In addition, apparently the next great impulse of Dropbox will be to share photos.” – Mark Zuckerberg, February 2011
- “If Instagram continues to kick back on mobile devices, or if Google you buy them, in the coming years they could easily add parts of your service that copy what we are doing now, and if you have a growing number of photos of people, then that is a real problem for us. They are growing extremely fast at this time. It seems that they will double every two months, and their base is already 5-10 million users. of the people, which will take into account every two months, and its users of 5-10 million will already find it to the users of 5-10 million.
- “The Photos team now focuses almost exclusively on a new application of mobile photos, since we look at the simple application of Instagram photos (and even our own application sees the growth of fats … Mobile charges increased to 17.7m day, +5.3 p/p) Monolulated monololithic applications of monolutic monolithitic applications of monolulative monolules of monolulators..” – Chris Cox, product director, February 2011
- “A worrying trend is that a large number of people use Instagram every day, including all those ranging from non -high school non -technicians to FB employees, and only some of their photos are uploaded to FB. This creates a great hole for us and that I am sure that anything we do on the platform or with the social dynamics will completely solve.” – Mark Zuckerberg, February 2012
Facebook considers an Instagram acquisition, stopping its development and growth
- “I wonder if we should consider buying Instagram, even if it costs ~ 500m. At this time they seem to have two things that we do not do: a really good camera and a shared photography network.” – Mark Zuckerberg, February 2012
- “I think it is very possible that our initial thesis has been incorrect and yours is correct, than what people want is to take the best photos than put them in FB … we could consider paying a lot of money for this.” – Mark Zuckerberg, February 2012
- “I Actually 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 Running But Transition The Teams To Work on FB Proper; – Samuel W. Lessin (former Facebook product vice president), corresponding to Mark Zuckerberg in February 2012
- “I think what we would do is keep your product in operation and simply not add more features, and focus future development on our products, including the construction of all the characteristics of your camera in ours. Not killing your products, we prevent all of us from hating and ensure that we do not believe that we do not believe a hole in the market so that another person fills, but all the future development would be directed towards our main products.” – Mark Zuckerberg, February 2012
- “One way to see this is that what we are really buying is time. Even if some new competitors arise [sic] The purchase of Instagram, Path, Foursquare, etc. Now it will give us a year or more to integrate its dynamics before someone can approach their scale again. ” – Mark Zuckerberg, February 2012