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Comment by paulsutter | Hacker News Reader

This article is vastly more informative:

https://www.recode.net/2018/5/8/17330226/facebook-reorg-mark...

This is part of a major reorg. David is on the board of Coinbase, which could explain his interest, but by any reading he’s getting much less responsibility (going from 1B daily actives to 0)

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Sometimes projects like this are spun up to merely retain executives/high performing employees. I've seen this happen before where employees at large tech companies are encouraged to start things inside the company instead of leaving to go to startups.

Or you could be D Marcus having dinner with Mark, telling him how you are looking forward to your next big adventure, one that FB is not doing. Mark who values you and wants to keep you asks why not do it in house. It will essentially be like starting your own company from scratch, only you won't have to raise money, hire employees, etc... Oh and you get X% of it too. Yes that is smaller than XY%, but at this point it is not even about money. Win win.

These guys don't think like that. They think about the future - not the past. By any means, David Marcus was killing it at Messenger.

I remember a presentation where he shared that messaging will become the primary way we get information and transact.

Rather than going to Amazon - you could just tell a chat bot to buy you a book. I don’t think the vision has come true at all.

you mean like "Hey Alexa, order me this book ?"

I mean like "Hey Facebook Messenger, order me this book". The vision was about bypassing Amazon (and the Internet) and having Messenger at the heart of commerce.

If Facebook becomes a middleman for Amazon (or some other retailer), they're going to want a cut of the transaction, so going directly to Amazon would probably get you a better deal (or at least fewer ads). And it's no easier to buy something through a Facebook app than through an Amazon app. (If people really want to type "buy me book X", Amazon can add that to their own app very easily.) So it's not clear what value Facebook would be adding here.

(I don't think that Facebook would actually want to be the retailer in this transaction - that would involve competing with Amazon at something that Amazon is very good at and Facebook knows nothing about, like warehousing, shipping, purchasing, etc... and requires billions of dollars to build. So I don't see Facebook having any role except being a middleman.)

Why would I want to buy a book through a user interface that doesn't even allow me to browse the book or the reviews?

I can understand asking Alexa to restock the cereal if I buy the same brand all the time, but buying anything unique like a book, or an item of clothing or electronics, would seem to require much more interaction than such an interface is capable of.

I always got the sense that they were always just trying to copy wechat and were envious of all the commerce it captured.

some would construe this as a gesture of more faith -- not less. it's generally wiser to put the best people on your biggest opportunities, not your biggest products. sometimes, they are one and the same, but often they diverge.

the roadmap and strategy for messenger are defined. marcus oversaw a bunch of experiments, and it seems like the results are in and the experiments over. what you need now is someone who can execute the messenger strategy.

bitcoin, however, remains undefined. it could be a blue ocean of opportunity and reshape the world; it could also be a wasteland and memorialized as digital tulips. the last thing zuckerberg wants is fb degenerating into ballmer-era microsoft or fiorina-era hp, ignoring tomorrow's dollars for today's dimes.

someone like marcus could retire and do whatever, so if he's staying, it's likely because he both likes it and sees the opportunity. what's more impressive is zuckerberg convincing marcus to stick around.

This article better still:

https://www.recode.net/2018/5/8/17329696/facebook-blockchain...

Looks like several heavy hitters on the blockchain project

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