Sorry, I must have misheard. I thought you said ‘$1 billion’
I’m not usually one for quoting scripture, but recent events concerning the Internet had me racing to the Bible and into the deeper corners of the
Book of Revelation last week in search of answers.
Last month, Facebook announced it was buying the photo-sharing app Instagram, the latest online flavour of the second, for $1 billion. That’s billion with a ‘B.’ For effect, I’d like you to say that number again like Dr. Evil from those Austin Powers movies: “One . . . Beellion . . . Dollars!” I’ll leave it to you to decide whether to add, “Mwah, hah, hah, hah,” but it would be totally appropriate since Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg is involved.
What has shocked a lot of people about the deal, and in recent days prompted the launch of an investigation by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, is the ridiculously high price paid for Instagram, a company that at the time of the sale had just 13 employees, only recently bought office furniture and, get this, zero revenue. You can see why I might consult Revelations for signs of the end of days when companies without any actual income are selling for $1 billion. (Fun fact: A billion dollars is a stack of one-dollar U.S. notes nearly 101 kilometres high.)
The other depressing part, and I’ve got to admit there’s a lot of ugly intergenerational envy in this comment, the owners of Instagram only graduated from university in 2006. The CEO, Kevin Systrom, 28, is now worth $400 million.
Nerd. There, I said it. Envy makes me mean.
Clearly, Systrom is a smart guy, but there was a time not that long ago when you only got to be worth $400 million as an inventor after a lifetime of work developing something really, really useful like, oh, I don’t know, the telephone or penicillin. Perhaps agriculture.
And you certainly didn’t become that wealthy just 18 months after taking your product to market — or in the case of Instagram, started giving it away for free.
What did Systrom — with that cybername what hope did the guy have of avoiding a career in software design — add to the world of photography?
For $400 million you’d expect it to be the camera, but you’d be wrong.
All Systrom and his college buddies “invented” was to let people take square photos on their smartphones that looked like old Polaroids and share them with friends.
Apparently, nowadays that’s a $1-billion idea. I imagine poor ol’ Thomas Edison is rolling in his grave, muttering “Electricity? The light bulb? Have you frigging people lost your minds?”
To be fair to Systrom, I have to mention the other unoriginal thing about Instagram: it lets users apply various filters to their pictures to give them different looks, which brings us to Revelations:
“The horses and riders I saw in my vision looked like this: Their breastplates were fiery red, dark blue and yellow as sulphur. The heads of the horses resembled the heads of lions, and out of their mouths came fire, smoke and sulphur.”
Those words could come right out of Instagram’s advertising about how well those special filters give your snapshots a little extra pizzazz.
Further along I came upon this passage: “Then I saw a second beast, coming out of the earth . . . it exercised all the authority of the first beast on its behalf, and made the Earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast, whose fatal wound had been healed.”
The “first beast” is clearly Zuckerburg, who reportedly bought Instagram to improve Facebook’s now-mediocre, (fatally wounded?) presence on smartphones, which everyone — at least this week — says is the future of the Internet. Systrom exercising “all the authority” of the first beast and healing his “fatal wound” must be the second beast. Don’t believe me yet? Read on . . . “The second beast was given power to give breath to the image of the first beast . . . it also forced all people, great and small, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hands or on their foreheads, so that they could not buy or sell unless they had the mark.”
Images? Controlling whether people can buy or sell? If that doesn’t sound like the marriage of Facebook and Instagram, I don’t know what does. A billion bucks for a company with no revenue? It’s the end time, people, the end time.