If I were in his shoes, I'd sell my shares in that website, take a few years off and then go a little Bill Gates, a little Elon Musk.
I guess this is why I'm not a successful businessman.
This reminds of something Vij Rajarajan(big boss in MSFT) told about - "I have realized almost everything in life is a paradox. If you want to grow in your current role you might think you have to not help out others and worry only about your job but in reality you grow by helping out others".
I think this also applies to Mark Zuckeberg - if he had wanted to make money the company would not have grown so much. He focused on the vision and now he has made money.
He gently pricked our arms with ads. When he didn't get much flack; he went hog wild.
This dude is all about the money. Mark didn't want to make a little money--he wanted it all.
Hell, he tried to weasel the original founder's fathers money out of FB. Why--because he wanted the money. Oh, the foreign dude didn't were a hoodie, and a tee shirt to the office?
Exactly what is Mark's vision? It's money. I thought I got him wrong when I heard Internet.org was going to set up as a California nonprofit, but found out that was just rumor. It's not even a Delaware nonprofit. It's for profit! He'll always have complete control.
Personally, I think FB is one of the worst/dictatorial things to happen to the Internet. Will it go away--maybe in certain demographic markets, like the Bay Area. I don't run into people anymore asking me to "FB them.", and when I do go on there a lot of people I know only activate on the weekends. Will the rest of the world ever dislike FB--who knows? They still like disco.
I've hero worshiped very few tech founders. Maybe it's just me, but I always seem to see there worst traights? Maybe because I was screwed over once?
As to all his philanthropic work--it has tax benefits. People lionionize Bill Gates too. I don't get it? We were forced into buying his operating system. It's our money in that nonprofit him, and his wife play God with.
And it's not just between me and my employer. It's an industry-wide problem, albeit not the biggest problem out there.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_of_Microsoft_Window...
And surprisingly, the missionary ends up making more money.
If he could take two months off he could probably take a few years off, but he would probably just be itching to go back to work on FB the whole time.
Won the lottery, not really. Bill Gates was a harsh businessman who relentlessly fought to kill off competition by all means possible - it was not by mistake that Microsoft became what it is.
And, I'd dare say that it has very little correlation with how "good" he/they were at all. Most Microsoft software was utter crap till recent history compared to the existing alternatives - the fact that they managed to secure the market and third party developers was much more relevant than anything else.
Don't get me wrong. Microsoft software was crap, it's just that the competition was even worse. The quality of modern software is much improved.
I personally disagree about Netscape 4 versus IE 5, and I can remember both.
You assertion about XP being better than Mac OS X, however, is hilarious. If that's true, why did XP die, and why was Mac OS X so radically more secure than Windows for the last 15 years running? Why was it more stable? Why did it work better? Why did it have a shockingly better UI?
XP was crap and we should all be glad it's dead.
Never heard about the Windows NT operating system series?
WinNT series:
WinNT 3.5 (1988-1994, based on VMS a bit on OS/2 designs) -> WinNT 4 -> Win2000 -> WinXP (August 24th 2001) -> WinVista -> Win7 -> Win8x -> Win10 (2015) [exluding all service packs]
MacOS X:
NeXTSTEP (1987-1989, based on Unix) -> OPENSTEP -> Rhapsody (1997) -> Mac OS X Server 1.0 -> Mac OS X Public Beta -> Mac OS X 10.0 (March 24th 2001, this is the first MacOS X you know) -> 10.1 -> 10.2 -> 10.3 -> 10.4 -> 10.5 -> 10.6 -> 10.7 -> 10.8 -> 10.9 -> 10.10 -> 10.11 (= El Capitan, 2015)
You assertion about XP being better than Mac OS X
OS X was a worse platform because it didn't support much software - games in particular. XP was extremely solid, coming after ME in the consumer space (I had switched to W2K after 98, I took until SP2 before I switched).
So no, I don't agree with you. Even today, I think Windows is a better gaming platform and Linux a much better dev platform - OS X is insufficiently similar to Linux to work well when Linux is used in production.
As for third parties software, you had better software on non-Windows machines (Photoshop for example used to be a Mac exclusive), not everything was widely better in a Microsoft environment.
it wasn't but...
>Word won by virtue of being better than WordPerfect. Excel won by being better than lotus
Excel and Word won by virtue of being bundled and thus cheaper than buying Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect separately.
>IE 5 was a better browser than Netscape 4, though in that case its superiority was not why it won
No, because the battle was won by IE 4, by being part of Windows 95.
>Even in the windows vs mac contest windows XP was a much better OS than the contemporary Mac OS, and arguably the best desktop OS of its day.
I don't think that Windows XP (august 2001) was better than Mac OS X (march 2001), Be OS (march 1998) or Linux distributions that were current at that time. But it doesn't matter because at that point Microsoft had complete domination of the PC market, something they got from a deal with IBM.
What Bill Gates was good at was identifying threats early and crushing them before they got too big.
IE 4 vs Netscape 4 was a lot more complicated. They were technically fairly equal but Microsoft did everything it could to kill off Netscape, including many dirty tactics.
Windows XP was dramatically better than the first MacOS X iterations in almost every way except visuals. OS X had awesome graphics but the Mac hardware could hardly cope and it was dog, dog slow. It also had ~no apps and users frequently had to run productivity software in the Classic emulator.
Desktop Linux was a joke at that time and has never caught up. Basic things like "how can I install this program" or "why does my sound not work" were FAQs for Linux users in 2001, and arguably the community never really overcame its internal political issues to solve them.
BeOS had some interesting technical choices but its primary selling point was super-smooth multi tasking, which came at the cost of requiring app developers to all be expert at writing multi-threaded software, as the Be APIs practically required apps to be largely thread-safe. It turned out that requiring all your app developers to be in the upper percentiles of skill meant that you didn't get many apps and those that did exist were often unstable.
For all its faults and Tellytubby like UI, Windows XP had built on a legacy of slavish devotion to app and hardware compatibility, it hadn't jumped too far ahead of what the hardware was capable of, it was very developer friendly and it didn't have bizarre technical quirks caused by endless techno-ideological wars over packaging file formats and the like. That made it pretty successful.
..by means of not having packaging file formats available at all, in true spirit of Microsoft. Hell people couldn't open zip archives on out-of-the-box XP.
Windows was plain not ready for desktop in 2001, but you use what you have to use.
But I didn't
>Desktop Linux was a joke at that time and has never caught up. Basic things like "how can I install this program" or "why does my sound not work" were FAQs for Linux users in 2001, and arguably the community never really overcame its internal political issues to solve them.
Are we really going to rehash 15 years old arguments? It's a lot easier to give a smooth hardware support experience to the user when you do it for them, if you had to install windows from scratch back then it would have been different.
Windows XP was successful for the same reasons Windows ME, Windows 98 and Windows 95 were successful, backwards compatibility and you got it preinstalled on every computer.
As for parental leave, your kid is only a baby for a remarkably short time, two months is nothing. I was able to take two weeks off for each of my kids, and combining a full time job with small children can be very stressful. You never have enough time for the kids, and at the same time you never have enough time to keep up with your job.
I can't read Zuck's mind or heart and he's clearly passionate about Facebook, but 'connecting everyone in the world' has always struck me as a kind of post-hoc mission statement made once they were already dominant (& the world already well connected) and more vitally, wanted to start making FB a lot less private by default to keep boosting & posting site engagement metrics.
When they started FB, wasn't it basically an unauthorized interactive hack/mashup of the student directory of sorts? It all kinds of fits a pattern, doesn't it? It seems very opportunistic and a lot less like a grand vision, to me. That isn't to diminish the technical, business, and cultural accomplishment that is Facebook or Mark's contributions to it or leadership. I think it is great that he's taking this leave too. His child is his next startup and that's a great thing and a great example.
Probably why you're not.