Google to buy Wiz for $32B

Re:Google to buy Wiz for $32B by ChicagoBoy11 on Tuesday March 18, 2025 @10:17AM (#43399729)

I'm marginally in the IT space... Is there anything to my reaction that at least in dollar terms this is a multiple of the dollar amount of what Whatsapp was acquired back in the day, which was a large consumer facing product that I could see was quite literally taking over messaging all over the world, and this is a... platform I've never heard of?

I'm just trying to make sense of the numbers.

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Re:Google to buy Wiz for $32B by zck on Tuesday March 18, 2025 @10:33AM (#43399932)

Whatsapp was $1/person/year for a license. Wiz is "contact sales for pricing". Presumably that's more than $1/year.

According to Amazon's Wiz integration (https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/prodview-ibgbkrqusncsm), the lowest cost they have is $24,000/year.

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Re:Google to buy Wiz for $32B by craigkilgo on Tuesday March 18, 2025 @10:49AM (#43400126)

It's based on your workload you are using it for basically. So its not a set price.

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Re:Google to buy Wiz for $32B by Cthulhu_ on Tuesday March 18, 2025 @11:33AM (#43400674)

Wiz is enterprise software aimed at and popular with large companies that need to check all the compliancy boxes, and according to sources used by >40% of the Fortune 500 companies. It's also only 5 years old, so that's a ridiculously fast growth.

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Re:Google to buy Wiz for $32B by yen223 on Tuesday March 18, 2025 @10:28AM (#43399864)

I don't think WhatsApp had the same kind of revenue that Wiz has, even normalised for 2014 numbers.

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Re:Google to buy Wiz for $32B by disgruntledphd2 on Tuesday March 18, 2025 @10:31AM (#43399900)

Revenue and profit are very different. Like, it's easy to pump revenue at a loss.

I don't really see the benefits of this acquisition for Google, but congrats to the Wiz team!

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Re:Google to buy Wiz for $32B by noboostforyou on Tuesday March 18, 2025 @10:54AM (#43400205)

> I don't really see the benefits of this acquisition for Google

At the very least it's a giant book of sales leads.

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Re:Google to buy Wiz for $32B by disgruntledphd2 on Wednesday March 19, 2025 @05:42AM (#43409888)

Yeah, I see that but it doesn't really feel like $32bn worth of value.

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Re:Google to buy Wiz for $32B by atemerev on Tuesday March 18, 2025 @10:39AM (#43399997)

WhatsApp purchase was for that sweet sweet data of everyone's contact lists (this was their original innovation for onboarding — just give us access to your phone book and we'll tell you who else is on WhatsApp). Their earnings were completely irrelevant in price discussions. The billions were paid for the dataset.

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Re:Google to buy Wiz for $32B by WhyNotHugo on Tuesday March 18, 2025 @10:41AM (#43400029)

Indeed. It's not just an incredible dataset, it's a self-updating one too.

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Re:Google to buy Wiz for $32B by dataflow on Tuesday March 18, 2025 @11:36AM (#43400703)

Any idea what profitable things they do with that data?

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Re:Google to buy Wiz for $32B by atemerev on Tuesday March 18, 2025 @11:56AM (#43400959)

Mostly ad targeting (you can infer a lot of things from the global graph of contacts). Meta is an attention routing company.

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Re:Google to buy Wiz for $32B by guappa on Wednesday March 19, 2025 @12:07PM (#43413842)

How do they spend insane amount of money in targeted ads and all the ads I get are useless?

I constantly get ads to learn how to code. Ok I've been doing that professionally for over a decade and I have a real degree from a real university… why would I do some online programming course?

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Re:Google to buy Wiz for $32B by atemerev on Saturday March 29, 2025 @04:20AM (#43513762)

There are much more ads than viable targets.

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Re:Google to buy Wiz for $32B by Marsymars on Tuesday March 18, 2025 @10:44AM (#43400067)

I'd expect a lot of the money was also to prevent a competitor with WhatsApp's ubiquity from existing. (Or selling to another competitor.)

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Re:Google to buy Wiz for $32B by atemerev on Tuesday March 18, 2025 @10:53AM (#43400189)

That too, of course. WhatsApp itself was a work of art at that point, its success should be studied and hopefully emulated.

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Re:Google to buy Wiz for $32B by seanhunter on Tuesday March 18, 2025 @11:00AM (#43400263)

Valuation multiples for a free direct to consumer messaging company are very different to a paid-for b2b cybersecurity company. It doesn't really matter whether you've heard about Wiz, the important thing is every CISO has heard of it and many of them are prepared to pay actual money for the product.

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Re:Google to buy Wiz for $32B by IshKebab on Tuesday March 18, 2025 @10:31AM (#43399895)

True, but the vast majority of people spend zero money on WhatsApp. I actually have no idea how I would give them money. There are no adverts, the metadata is not valuable, and no companies even use WhatsApp business, at least in the UK. Their UK revenue is basically 0, despite 100% market share.

This is an enterprise product in a space where companies spend millions of dollars.

Still seems like an insane amount though.

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Re:Google to buy Wiz for $32B by quantumwannabe on Tuesday March 18, 2025 @10:34AM (#43399934)

Whatsapp when it was acquired cost $1/year (with a year long free trial) and had a billion users and 55 employees. They were printing money.

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Re:Google to buy Wiz for $32B by IshKebab on Tuesday March 18, 2025 @11:40AM (#43400758)

As far as I remember they didn't ever really collect that money though. I certainly never paid it. I'm not sure they ever even implemented payment on Android.

Obviously hard to source this old stuff but I found an old Reddit comment that backs up my recollection: https://www.reddit.com/r/whatsapp/comments/xesw29/comment/io...

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Re:Google to buy Wiz for $32B by SushiHippie on Tuesday March 18, 2025 @05:02PM (#43405078)

I'm fairly certain that I paid once for WhatsApp back in the day (on Android)

EDIT: just checked my payment history and in November 2013 I paid €0.89 for "One Year Service"

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Re:Google to buy Wiz for $32B by guappa on Wednesday March 19, 2025 @12:04PM (#43413798)

They were collecting. Everyone I knew was paying.

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Re:Google to buy Wiz for $32B by zck on Tuesday March 18, 2025 @10:36AM (#43399970)

Just to respond to the Whatsapp part of the comment, apparently Whatsapp made about $1.7 billion in 2024. https://www.businessofapps.com/data/whatsapp-statistics/

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Re:Google to buy Wiz for $32B by steventhedev on Tuesday March 18, 2025 @11:15AM (#43400447)

That is suspiciously equal to the "Other revenue" line in Meta's 10-K.

Given that likely rolls up other products I doubt it's all coming from Whatsapp.

[0]: https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001326801/1f8bf8e...

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Re:Google to buy Wiz for $32B by guappa on Wednesday March 19, 2025 @12:03PM (#43413784)

Like for whatsapp, they're buying the database, not the product.

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