1) "Connectivity, so getting everyone in the world on the Internet."
2) "The next one is AI. I think that that's just going to unlock so much potential in so many different domains."
3) "[The next computing platform] - I think that's going to be virtual reality and augmented reality."
For all the flack that Zuck is getting in this thread he lays out a pretty concise vision of what he needs to do to continue the FB's juggernaut run.
It's pretty safe to ignore most of the flack in this thread. Most people vote with their feet (or wallets, or eyeballs, or attention), and they've voted that they love Facebook, regardless of what a minority of people in this thread say or upvote.
Nerds have a cantankerous side and are as prone to virtue signalling as any other group. Those of us who read Slashdot ages ago may remember the Microsoft hate it hosted and the way every year was going to be the year of Linux on the desktop. Well, Microsoft is still here; Linux on the desktop is still a minority pursuit; and most people never cared that much about the OS they used.
The specific target nerd derision has changed some, but the form of the attack and disdain has not. Any company or country or person's haters is proportionate to its size. Look at what people do and how they behave rather than what they say.
Facebook sucks, not just because of confusing UI, or because of silent changes to privacy settings, or because it's one stop shopping for scary three-letter-agencies, but because the network effect is so damned strong, it will take a monumental misstep for it to become the next Myspace.
Not to Facebook.
Coercion - even subtle social coercion - only works up to a point. If you piss off people enough they'll reward you with zero loyalty, no matter how popular you think you are.
FB is vulnerable unless it keeps its users very happy. Currently it has a monopoly on a product that's actually quite mediocre and frustrating in many ways, and not seen as particularly cool.
If it has to face real competition, it's going to have issues.
There are specific times when you can unseat a behemoth, and those times are when new markets and new platforms arrive.
How is FB doing in China? How are the Chinese doing with AI, AR/VR, and mobile?
Anyone looking at China can see that it's becoming competitive with the US. So far the software markets are largely separate, but I think it's naive to believe that's still going to be true 10-20 years from now.
Also, hating Facebook makes jumping ship so much easier - my wife uses Instagram primarily now instead of Facebook. Yes I know Facebook owns Instagram, but there are other social platforms people are jumping to.
Google and Microsoft gave us tools that enabled us to work faster and do things we couldn't do before (esp. Google); Facebook is just addictive but doesn't enable anything.
I would rather "the future" didn't include more of Facebook.
Imagine a textbook 500 years in the future (there won't be physical textbooks of course, but whatever students are using as a learning tool then)... Who do you think will be profiled in that textbook? Bill Gates? Warren Buffet? Larry Ellison? Steve Jobs? Mark Zuckerberg? Maybe any or all of those people, but then again, maybe not, I bet Elon Musk will be there.
Plenty of people in the HN demographic also vote with their feet by quitting FB.
You don't have to be a billionaire to see those being important. Hopefully we'll have a more benevolent entity than Facebook bringing us into that future.
You have to listen to Zuckerberg on this, because he's good at understanding what people will put up with. I never expected that a sizable portion of the population would walk around looking at smartphones, totally losing situational awareness. Even when not playing Pokemon Go. But that became socially acceptable.
The failure of Google Glassholes seemed to indicate that artificial reality was going to be socially unacceptable. But Zuckerberg might be able to sell it to society. Microsoft talks about it as an office tool (see their "HoloLens" stuff) but that may be the wrong vision.
The right vision may be "Hyperreality".[1] This is a must-see for anybody thinking about artificial reality. These people are much closer to a realistic vision than Microsoft is. (Watch at 1080p if possible.)
Technology isn't the problem. It's "why bother"? Zuckerberg is thinking of AR as a social system. That implies something much more like Hyperreality than Microsoft's system. Remember, there is not, as yet, a killer app for VR, even though good hardware has been available for years now.