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When we saw Zuckerberg in Barcelona saying “this is it, we’ll acquire other companies in a while”, we didn’t believe him, even though $19 billion were a lot and someone could have thought that Facebook was going to wait before getting another company. However one month later, Facebook acquired Oculus VR, not for $19 billion, but “just” for two. What has impressed us is not the fact that this company is acquiring other companies, but the cheques they are writing.
Facebook has been getting on board other companies with an average of 9 a years, for the last four years. The only thing that changed was the amount of money spent in purchasing these companies. The willingness to expand and add more value to Facebook hasn’t stopped Mark Zuckerberg who has acquired Moves, a fitness app, that recognizes activities (walking, running, cycling, transportation), routes and places.
The terms of the Moves acquisition haven’t been disclosed yet, but we can imagine that Facebook spent something less than 100 Million to get the Moves’ team on board. In the past months, it seemed that Moves was waiting for something, probably an acquisition. The app has received more than four million downloads, across multiple platforms, and the only way they were making some revenues was by purchasing Moves 2.0, which isn’t free.
Although they have a massive user base and are probably the best solution, if you don’t want to buy a smart and useless wristband, we haven’t seen many efforts to bring Moves to the next level and start generating revenues. As Whatsapp and Oculus VR have already done, the company has released the following statement:
Now, we’re joining Facebook’s talented team to work on building and improving their products and services with a shared mission of supporting simple, efficient tools for more than a billion people.
For those of you that use the Moves app – the Moves experience will continue to operate as a standalone app, and there are no plans to change that or commingle data with Facebook.
As Whatsapp was obliged to state, after the acquisition, the Moves’ team is forced to underline the fact that “the experience” will continue to operate as a standalone app; which means Facebook wants to grow its portfolio and diversify as much as possible, without adding more value to the platform itself. Further, with the same tone that Whatsapp’s co-founder used, Moves points out that they don’t plan to exchange data with Facebook.
Even in this case, the company is stating a non sense sentence. It seems the last three companies Facebook acquired were scared of being acquired. If you closed a million or even billion dollar deal with a tech giant, it means you have synergies in common and there is no problem in exchanging some data to build a better user experience. If you really don’t want to exchange data with Facebook, don’t close the deal.
In the past months, Facebook has assumed the big brother role in front of its users, probably because of the acquisitions of the things we care about, such as Whatsapp; but this won’t stop people from using Facebook, neither will stop them from chatting on Whatsapp. This expansion toward new trends and technologies was natural and expected, that’s why we will see more surprises from Menlo Park by the end of this year.
Snapchat is still there, waiting to be acquired, and I think Mark Zuckerberg is still thinking about Evan Spiegel and why he rejected a $3 billion offer. Life is not fair for those who want to control the world, but in other ways, they always tend to get what they want.
