[013a]

There's too much evidence to support the conclusion that companies like Facebook are far more bloated than they need to be for their core experiences. The reason is all about laws of diminishing returns, in every cross-cutting concern of the business.

Two engineers can't do twice as much as one engineer. Perfecting the ordering of the news feed is significantly less valuable to users than just having a news feed in the first place. Building a speech-to-text engine that works 99% of the time costs hundreds of millions of dollars more than one that works 95% of the time, but is it worth that much to users? Think of the number of engineers at Facebook or Twitter who just work on infrastructure, or supporting other engineers, or perfecting ad placement to improve CTR by 0.5%. All of these are tangential to the core experience, in many cases required or at least valuable only because Facebook is so big.

I can't just pick on Facebook here; this is why all companies will always get disrupted. Massive layers of scale behind the scenes to support products that are fundamentally simple, combined with advancing publicly available technologies helping newcomers.