[insert_coin]

Is it that crazy? It's the reason Google not only developed Android, but Chrome, ChromeOS, Fuchsia, the Google speaker thing and all that, and Samsung has Tizen, which is sort of their plan B, of plan F or whatever, and Amazon developed the Fire line, Alexa, AWS, the speaker thing, etc. They know they can't trust each other. Even Apple had to develop their own maps!

It's really a surprise Facebook was so blindsided by this, they should've known better.

[bredren]

When the initial FB OS attempt failed, I think Zuck realized the investment to make something work was beyond the capital he was willing to invest.

When FB released its first “phone” it was still unwilling to take mobile seriously. They left the head of mobile position open for a very long time. Zuck himself has said he missed mobile.

With the IPO around that time, making some major strategic investment in tech was not an option when the company was likely under a lot of pressure to make the stock price only go one way.

You give Apple Maps as an example, but that product was a major fumble at release. To the point Apple fired the exec in charge over it.

It’s taken major investment over many years to get that app sorted out and it still needs a lot of work.

I think FB did know better they just had a competing problem of revenue growth that was at odds with laying claim to the future.

If anything, I think FB is making an ongoing strategic mistake in lack of any obvious work to establish an Alphabet structure.

FB can recover by building a social network that monetizes via payments and subscriptions. This could be hooked up to a new fortnite-seeded metaverse and run exclusively through oculus.

The opportunity for a FB-parent Corp that distinguishes a new, private network away from the damaged brand of FB is still there.

Leadership just has to be way more daring now in what it’s willing to do.

It really has to or the ruling metaverse social network will be built by someone else for Apple hardware.

[spideymans]

>You give Apple Maps as an example, but that product was a major fumble at release. To the point Apple fired the exec in charge over it.

They fumbled, but that really didn't matter in the long run. Apple now has a perfectly competent mapping application. They've siphoned data away from Google and redirected it to themselves. Maps is now a key component to Apple's products and service, and has clearly become a cornerstone of Apple's AR roadmap. Apple Maps is now part of Apple's moat, and nobody can take that away from them. There is no situation in which Apple would go back to Google Maps. Sounds like a strategic win to me.

[bredren]

I’m in full agreement. My comment was to show just how much investment was required and how injurious it was early on.

I’m saying Zuck / FB could not stomach it at the time.

[dannyw]

FB more or less always had access to capital markets, and they could 100% have borrowed money and dumped billions into mobile. Subsidized, $100 phones that are comparable to flagships (but data-sucking for FB) would have beaten the market.

[bredren]

Yes, but they were not willing to. The environment for risky internet companies at that time was tepid still.

They knew money came from ads and tracking and the web and the other thing did not move the needle.

[lotsofpulp]

Same with Microsoft.

[tmccrary55]

Facebook's never done anything great or prescient. They were just at "the right place, at the right time" to be MySpace 2.0.

[pmontra]

I don't like FB as anybody else but FB was not alone there at that time. There were many other social networks and FB was the one that succeeded. Other social networks were born later on and FB is still here. Beating the competition and surviving almost 20 years is quite great enough IMHO.

[beagle3]

They weren’t prescient, but they were functionally equivalent: they were spying on users (e.g. through Onavo) and knew stats about Instagram, snap and WhatsApp very early on, that let them respond well early (and price an offer, or build a competitor).

I think Zuck, having taken the market from Orkut, Friendster and MySpace, decided he will not let anyone take it from him, no matter what.

E.g. Skype was still on every phone in 2014; it’s not about install base - it’s about potential to become a social network, which WhatsApp had, and Skype didn’t.

[pmontra]

I didn't know or didn't remember about Onavo. Thanks.

WhatsApp is a social network because of groups. I think I never had a group with Skype. I don't even know if they are a thing there.

I'm currently using WhatsApp and Telegram groups to chat and exchange pictures and links with groups of friends and colleagues. I'm trying to move from WA to Telegram starting with the most technical friends (as always has been with new things.) I'm basically not using Facebook anymore. I appreciate that those apps let me partition people in groups with well defined boundaries. I believe FB has something like that but the UI was more about posting something and let all contacts see it.

Anyway, everything I post there is meant to be lost. I'm backing up images, messages not so much. Definitely not on WA which is pretty much hostile to backups as it doesn't give us the key to decrypt the local databases. Maybe it is not to break E2E encryption and not let other apps decrypt messages, but I should be able to download the key from somewhere if I ask for it. Uploading to Google Drive an unencrypted database is not good.

On the other side Telegram has a kind of distributed database on all my devices. Probably bad for E2E encryption unless every devices has its own key and messages are encrypted for all of them, or another equivalent system. I didn't investigate how it works.

[tmccrary55]

I suppose it's an accomplishment but it's not really creating a new market or revolutionizing an existing one.

Also Facebook has only been top dog for a little over 10 years.