Over the past three years, WhatsApp has received many updates and brought forward new features and capabilities for its users. However, despite whatever change was made, the app pretty much remained the same. This might be the reason for which many people still don’t know that Facebook purchased WhatsApp three years ago for a mind-boggling sum of $22 billion. It’s hard to notice change in leadership when there is no actual change in direction. But since WhatsApp was successful enough that it had generated such an offer from Facebook, the previous people in charge were probably doing a good job, right?
In the concept of “don’t fix what isn’t broken”, Facebook pretty much just rolled with the app as it was. That is, however, until now. What has changed now, you ask? Something pretty important, actually. Facebook hired one of its senior executives in marketing and advertising to play the role of COO for WhatsApp. COO stands for Chief Operating Officer, and that’s what Matthew Idema will be for WhatsApp for the foreseeable future.
If you are asking yourself what exactly will he be doing in that position, your guess is as good as Facebook’s at this point, because they didn’t completely outline the job description either. But according to them, his role will be to help WhatsApp monetize itself. It will be interesting to see how exactly that will come to pass, and how it will impact the over 1 billion people currently using WhatsApp right now.
One thing is for sure: Facebook is finally making some moves that affirm the fact that it is in charge of WhatsApp. Whether that is a good or bad thing remains to be seen although Facebook has a pretty good grasp on business since it managed to come up with $22 billion to spend on a tiny piece of software in the first place.
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