Facebook has been late on jumping on to the mobile bandwagon, admits Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg
New Delhi:
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg says the $19 billion WhatsApp acquisition was the right decision as the mobile messaging service has huge potential for growth and will soon have a billion users.
"Real time messaging is really important and WhatsApp is one of the very few companies in the world that is on a path to a billion users. Even since the acquisition they've hit over half a billion users. They are hugely important here, everywhere in the world. We're excited to work with them".
Speaking to NDTV in New Delhi she insists, Facebook will soon prove all critics who argued against its expensive WhatsApp buyout wrong. "I think we'll prove them wrong. It's just going to take some time."
Ms Sandberg says Facebook is making a big shift from a desktop company to a mobile company. "Facebook is now the most used mobile app on almost any platform, almost anywhere in the world. Certainly in India, our usage dwarfs any other, as it does in the United States.
Talking about the future of Facebook, Ms Sandberg says "We have done a lot of innovations in India that we now export globally around feature phone use. A lot of people who get first phones get features phones and making our products working on feature phones wasn't really something that we were able to do even a few years ago. And so we have really innovated to make that work."
But she admits that Facebook has been late on jumping onto the mobile bandwagon. "Had we started as a company even a few years later, we would have started this as a mobile company. We are started as a desktop company and so we really had a transition. We had to re-train all our engineers to do mobile programming. And actually transition was hard and we did see it coming late. But I think we are fully there."
"Real time messaging is really important and WhatsApp is one of the very few companies in the world that is on a path to a billion users. Even since the acquisition they've hit over half a billion users. They are hugely important here, everywhere in the world. We're excited to work with them".
Speaking to NDTV in New Delhi she insists, Facebook will soon prove all critics who argued against its expensive WhatsApp buyout wrong. "I think we'll prove them wrong. It's just going to take some time."
Ms Sandberg says Facebook is making a big shift from a desktop company to a mobile company. "Facebook is now the most used mobile app on almost any platform, almost anywhere in the world. Certainly in India, our usage dwarfs any other, as it does in the United States.
Talking about the future of Facebook, Ms Sandberg says "We have done a lot of innovations in India that we now export globally around feature phone use. A lot of people who get first phones get features phones and making our products working on feature phones wasn't really something that we were able to do even a few years ago. And so we have really innovated to make that work."
But she admits that Facebook has been late on jumping onto the mobile bandwagon. "Had we started as a company even a few years later, we would have started this as a mobile company. We are started as a desktop company and so we really had a transition. We had to re-train all our engineers to do mobile programming. And actually transition was hard and we did see it coming late. But I think we are fully there."
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