In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, the richest man on earth explains that Microsoft would have been willing to purchase WhatsApp.

Quoting the interview from Rolling Stone.

If there’s a deal that symbolizes where Silicon Valley is today, it’s Facebook’s $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp. What does that say about the economics of Silicon Valley right now?
It means that Mark Zuckerberg wants Facebook to be the next Facebook. Mark has the credibility to say, “I’m going to spend $19 billion to buy something that has essentially no revenue model.” I think his aggressiveness is wise — although the price is higher than I would have expected. It shows that user bases are extremely valuable. It’s software; it can morph into a broad set of things — once you’re set up communicating with somebody, you’re not just going to do text. You’re going to do photos, you’re going to share documents, you’re going to play games together.

When it was mentioned that Google was also looking into WhatsApp Gates responded that Microsoft would’ve been willing to snap it up as well, but probably not at that price:

Apparently, Google was looking at it.
Yeah, yeah. Microsoft would have been willing to buy it, too. . . . I don’t know for $19 billion, but the company’s extremely valuable.

It would be interesting to see what Microsoft would’ve done with WhatsApp, but saying that they already have Skype, which isn’t really cutting it as a mobile messaging app no matter how much Microsoft want it to succeed.

What are your thoughts on if Microsoft, not Facebook had purchased WhatsApp?

Source: Rolling Stone via the guardian