It turns out that the internet search giant wasn’t interested in acquiring WhatsApp in the first place.
WhatsApp’s $19 billion acquisition by Facebook has got a lot of people talking, and it even got the rumor mill churning. It was rumored that Google was planning to outbid Facebook for WhatsApp, but the truth is the company didn’t even want to buy the popular messaging service.
At first it was believed that Google offered $10 billion but WhatsApp didn’t budge. When it heard that Facebook was about to get the deal done for $19 billion, apparently it made one last ditch effort to acquire WhatsApp. Reports claimed the reason why Google was bidding for the company was just to keep Facebook away from it, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Google senior vice president and Android head Sundar Pichai revealed during a talk at the Mobile World Congress 2014 that Mountain View did not bid for WhatsApp. Seeing as how this comes from someone of Pichai’s stature, it would be hard to contradict him. While Pichai calls WhatsApp an exciting product and said that the two companies did talk about working together more closely at some point, “we never made an offer to acquire them,” he firmly stated, adding that reports in the media about a bid are completely false.
So there you have it, Google wasn’t interested in burning a monumental amount of money just to keep Facebook from getting its hands on WhatsApp, one of the biggest cross platform messaging services, if you take Pichai’s words at face value. On the other hand, WhatsApp itself never revealed if it had or hadn’t received an offer from Google, so even if something did take place behind the scenes, we’ll probably never come to know about it for sure.
Source: The Telegraph
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