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by avichal 4796 days ago
It's really not that hard to understand why Facebook "actually" bought Parse. Parse has a great product that developers like to use. Facebook has a platform and that requires making users and developers happy. Buying a product that makes developers happy and making it a part of Facebook's platform is a pretty straightforward strategy.
1 comments
swombat 4795 days ago
That's an incorrect explanation.

Facebook has a platform and that requires making users and developers happy.

No, Facebook has a platform that requires extracting as much personal data from people as possible in order to sell ads to advertisers. The developer platform, apps, etc, are all subordinate to this objective. There's no business model for Facebook to "make people happy". It is absolutely an advertising company, and Parse is/was not. So, the question remains, how does Parse fit into Facebook's advertising-driven business model?

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avichal 4795 days ago
That is a pretty big misunderstanding of how Facebook operates. If Facebook put advertisers ahead of users, it would not be at 1B users and it would not have been around for 8 years, and dominant for many of those years. The business model is primarily to make people happy to make sure to have their attention, and secondarily to sell ads against this attention.

I've worked at Amazon, Google, and Facebook. The core characteristic of each of these companies is that they are all ruthlessly focused on their primary customer as the user, not as the retailer or the advertiser. And it is for this reason that they get to massive scale and become dominant. If you don't get this, then you won't understand why Parse is a clear fit.

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swombat 4795 days ago
Ah, that ruthless focus on keeping the users and the developer community happy must be why Google killed Reader and will probably kill Feedburner soon, and why so many great products got acquired and then killed by their new owners a few years later.

You're right that if you believe what you just declared, then Parse's future at Facebook seems reasonable. You're also right that we won't convince each other of our views on this, so I guess time will tell whether Parse continues to thrive or gets shitcanned in a few years.

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