I’ll defend Brian Acton a bit here - he refused to sell WhatsApp until it got up to a ludicrous 19B$ for 30 full time employees? Few people are tested to that amount and then it becomes a legitimate question of opportunity cost (he gave 50M$ to signal after the sale). Even with that Meta has been a decent steward of it imo despite obvious conflicts of interest. 19B$ of character is more than most.

Slack failed to compete with Microsoft and then the CEO sold it to one of the worst possible acquisition companies in the industry (maybe only behind oracle?) not unlike his flicker sale, it’s not the same. I have a lot lower opinion of him (to the point I’d be less likely to join a company he’s running).

>>Slack failed to compete with Microsoft

I dont know that is a fair characterization, by most accounts Slack is a better product, however Microsoft has a vertical integration and with the strong push to bring most orgs on to Microsoft 365 it is hard to compete with "free" in the sense that Teams is included in the suite products you are already going to pay for anyway....

I highly doubt it Microsoft would have made Teams a stand alone product each company had to buy per user that it would have gotten anywhere near the adoption it did.

Slack had an in to expand and capture what eventually became 365, but they didn’t do it and Microsoft caught up and captured it.

> by most accounts Slack is a better product

Perhaps but it doesn't seem customers value it very much.

> I highly doubt it Microsoft would have made Teams a stand alone product each company had to buy per user that it would have gotten anywhere near the adoption it did.

To me the fact that people would pay for a chat app was an oddity in the first place. Skype (the consumer version) was mostly free.

Consumers maybe... Business pay for these things all the time.

Webex, Zoom, Teams, GoToMeeting, etc etc etc

Then if you add in other communications tools you can include many many other things businesses pay for

Two more facts tilt in favor of Brian Acton here:

1. Encryption made WhatsApp inherently more resistant to being polluted by Facebook. They still get access to highly sensitive metadata about contacts and groups, but they can't do the kind of things they did to rape and pillage Instagram.

2. He took his money and his free time, and has invested heavily in supporting Signal. While Meta lets WhatsApp rot and slowly becomes Yahoo, Signal is solidly on its way to become the OpenStreetMap/Internet Archive/Wikipedia of social communication apps.

There's always a number beyond which you cannot say no, regardless of your personal beliefs. Heck Stewart's investors and co-founders would have themselves overruled him if he hadn't pulled the trigger. $28B is a ludicrous amount of money.