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Comment by bogomipz | Hacker News Reader

>"They produce software as a service."

No Salesforce, Box, Slack, Zendesk - these are examples of SaaS companies. Customer pay for those services, the service is the product being sold. With FB the user is the product being sold.

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Who is the "user" product being sold to? A business, right? And how do they buy the product? Thru a web browser, right? How is that not SAAS?

Because the product being bought isn't software.

>"Who is the "user" product being sold to? A business, right?"

Yes and you just illustrated my point. Advertisers aren't buying software from FB they're buying access to FB users.

> With FB the user is the product being sold.

This is not strictly true. FB makes Workplace, which is a sort of Facebook for internal and cross-company collaboration (competing with Slack): https://www.forbes.com/sites/kathleenchaykowski/2017/10/26/f...

You can be pedantic all you want but FB Workplace is many of the regular FB platform features repurposed without the advertising. Workplace is not their core product nor is it where the majority of their revenues or engineering efforts are concentrated.

Since they're using it internally to make facebook work, I'd say it's a core product and a lot of engineering efforts are being expended to make the company run better.

It just also happens to be something you can sell to others too.

Since you consider it a core product, what do you estimate the portion of Facebook's revenue comes from this core product in relation to the billions they receive elsewhere.

I don't know, how much do you estimate any given road contributes to the GDP of the US?

It's infrastructure that enables the rest.

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