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Comment by tdewitt | Hacker News Reader

I've been listening. His attempted answer was reasonable. Facebook doesn't have a single competitor because they don't have just a single product. Name the "biggest" competitors for Siemens or SAP or Google or Microsoft or Honeywell. They're companies of companies and each unit may have a single biggest competitor but asking for just one feels intentionally misleading.

Disclaimer: I hate Facebook and twitter and Pinterest and Snapchat and whatever the hell else and have no personal investment in this whatsoever. I'm listing purely for the entertainment value of watching zuck squirm.

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I fail to see what's misleading about asking for a competitor to Facebook.

Microsoft's competitors are Apple on the hardware and software front, Google on the search engine front, Atlassian on productivity tools front, GitHub on the repository/code storage front, AWS on the cloud storage front, etc. I assume Microsoft's core solutions are their OS, their productivity tools and cloud.

Google's competitors are Yahoo, Bing and Duckduckgo on the search front. Garmin, TomTom and others on the map front, etc. And perhaps everyone on the email front. Here I assume Google's core tools are search, email, and maps.

Facebook's competitors are... Instag- oh right. Uh, Snapchat, I guess?

Facebook is an ad company. The product they sell is targeted ads. As a customer who wants to buy ad space, you can go to Facebook, or you can go to Google, or a myriad of other players.

Yahoo and Bing are not significant Google competitors. They aren't even independent — Yahoo search is Bing.

As a social media user, you're not the customer, you're the product.

I don't believe your statement is complete.

Take a look at all of the companies where a court determined that the company abused its monopoly power.

Every single one of them had "a myriad of other players" in the market.

So the existence of other players doesn't mean that Facebook doesn't have market power, it doesn't mean that FB isn't a monopoly, and it doesn't mean that FB can't abuse its market power.

Only a few hours ago, jwz (who blocks links from HN - fwiw, we are HN products) at https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2018/04/10.html wrote:

> Advertising anywhere that is not Facebook simply does not work. We keep trying and keep getting nowhere.

> We hear that from other promoters and venues, too: everyone says "Yeah we only advertise on Facebook. Nothing else does any good."

> I hate that this is the case. A lot.

This is the sort of comment you see if a company has market power, where switching to other players is not an option.

If you use uMatrix, you can enable spoofing of your referrer header from HN so the link works :)

That's not the entire story though. Facebook has multiple products and multiple layers of folks to sell to.

On one layer, they offer a social networking site to people, who become users. Then they take the information and sell it to advertisers to make money. Without the social networking site, Facebook wouldn't have its advertising business. There are more, I'm sure (governments are sometimes customers, for example).

There is only light competition for the advertising right now, but I'm going to guess we'll figure that stuff out as time goes on.

As far as the social networking itself, there are options, but none that can replace facebook's user functionality. There isn't anywhere robust enough to make change feasible. Instead, you can replace parts of facebook with other things and get partial functionality Your mother probably won't download a weird app just to talk to you instead of using messenger, for example, and your sister probably won't send you the pictures of the kids as often.

I believe Google also supplies search services for Yahoo.

Snapchat and Twitter on the social media front.

Google on the ads front.

Telegram and Apple (iMessage) on the IM front. (Not sure this one really counts, though. Is IM a "front"?)

I agree that Google is competitor, but I'm not talking in terms of monetization spaces, I'm referring more to the core solution. In fact I'd amend my statement and say Snapchat isn't really a competitor, either. Facebook is basically a rolodex with messaging and storage built in. I don't see anything like it.

Inasmuch as IM is monetized I think it's a front. It's another aspect or facet of social media and we're already making the distinction between microblogging (Twitter Vs Facebook) and photo sharing (snapchat Vs Insta) so I don't see why not?

What's misleading is that the senator kept insisting on a single competitor, not N competitors.

The answers you gave for MS / Google would have gotten the same kind of interruption from the senator.

This, did no one watch it? I'm not even pro facebook, what happened to informed discussion.

You've made my (and his) point and that's what's misleading about the article. He attempted to make that point but was interrupted and pushed for one and only one. Companies of this scale don't have one and only "biggest competitor" because they don't do only the one thing.

Microsoft only competes with Google on the search front? Is this analysis circa 2010?

Lot's of companies compete in lots of sectors. If you buy a Ford van you're not going to go to chevy. But that doesn't change the fact that Ford's primary business is normal cars and chevy competes in that industry. If I ask who MS's biggest competitor is it's Apple. If I ask whose Google's biggest competitor it's probably MS Bing.

Facebook is overwhelmingly known for its social network and it's biggest competitor is probably twitter who problem has ~10% of it's customers.

The point is that none of facebook's competitors come even close to facebook's size no matter which portion of Facebook's core functionality you're talking about. Plus, facebook is not diversified in the way that SAP or Honeywell is.

> Facebook is overwhelmingly known for its social network

But, while this is "how" they get information; twitter and facebook's business is actually in selling advertisements.

The intent of the question should be along the lines of "if a user is pissed off at Facebook as a result of the latest revelations, and wants to move to a competitor, what would they move to?" or a more accurate "Whom are you worried about users moving off of Facebook to?"

Facebook is defined by a single product, more so than even Google or Microsoft.

IRL human relationships.

What a tired trope.

> Facebook doesn't have a single competitor because they don't have just a single product.

Isn't their single product the Facebook website/app? Sure they sell ads but so does Yankee Stadium. From the consumer's perspective the stadium's competitors include Citi Field, not Google Adsense.

> Sure they sell ads but so does Yankee Stadium

But in this case, Yankee Stadium sells seats, and Tv rights (that the station puts ads on)

My point though is, you can call Facebook an advertising company, but when asked "What are Facebook's competitors?" as the Senator did, it makes sense to list social networks because that's the core product they offer their users. For the purpose of this discussion it doesn't help to say Facebook is an ad company or "You are the product" or anything else.

There are a ton of ads in Yankee Stadium (and every major sport stadium I can think of, for that matter): https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/44/Yankee_S...

no, users are their single product.

Then their main competitors are whoever those users would see as an alternative to their products, no?

That has to be myspace

I agree with this. Senator Graham went into this with the totally wrong mentality. Graham tried to determine the answer before the question was even asked. Non-tech conglomerates like PepsiCo, Anheuser-Busch, and Johnson & Johnson offer a huge range of different products in different sectors for different purposes.

I bet also that Zuckerberg might have "forgotten" that, in mainstream common sense, Facebook is viewed as "a website and mobile app". As CEO, he is trained to view Facebook as a giant company with a diverse selection of products, not just as a website. So his perspective on proper competition might be quite different from Senator Graham's.

>Senator Graham went into this with the totally wrong mentality. Graham tried to determine the answer before the question was even asked.

IIRC they all had ~5 minutes to ask questions. Not enough time to do a proper cross examination and it gives Zuckerberg the advantage (he can draw out his answers and play for time).

I watched for the some reason but instead of squirm he confidently answered some very poorly worded questions.

The only take away for me is that these senators are not even close to being capable of engaging MZ properly in debate.

It's not a debate.

Reminds me of the Peter Theil quote about monopolies https://youtu.be/bVV26yRjwq0?t=417

Every company which was broken up for abusing its monopoly power had more than one product.

This question, in this context, means something like "in the market where you have the most market power, who are your competitors"?

Competition law has defined what 'market' means for cases like this; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relevant_market .

The question becomes much clearer to answer when you understand that the end-users of Facebook are not its customers.

Facebook competitors are literally every other company that is trying to sell advertising.

Its like saying that "Vogue" is competitor to "Soldier of Fortune", since they both selling advertising.

Its much more nuanced. Advertising offered by facebook is VERY different from advertising slots during Superbowl.

i actually feel that fb and the superbowl are much closer than vogue and soldier of fortune... (but i think your point is reasonable.)

A monopoly determination is made on market power, not the existence of other people in the field.

If I start an advertising company which charges advertisers a blanket $1 per year, I don't affect FB's market power, because I don't have the same reach or same targeting capabilities.

Standard Oil's competitors might have been every other energy-provider company, but that doesn't detract from Standard Oil's market power in subsets of the energy-provider field.

Facebook's competitors might be every other advertiser, but that doesn't mean Facebook is immune from charges of abusing its market power.

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