Zuckerberg’s Jealousy Held Back Instagram and Drove Off Founders
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
It paints a picture of what the author want the world to be like rather than reality. One of the biggest examples is how they view regulation as a risk to Facebook while Facebooks views it as a guarantee of market dominance.
Did you really expect anything better from bloomberg? Instagram is one of the largest social media platforms in the world. If zuckerburg "held it back", then he should "hold back" everything and become a trillionaire.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-net...
4 out of the top 6 social media platforms are owned by zuckerburg. Hate the guy for his greed and insatiable appetite for your data, but the idea that his "jealousy" held back instagram is laughable. The article reads like a silly gossipy teen manufacturing drama for attention. But that's the media for you.
Whatsapp now has a giant "whatsapp by facebook" advert right on the loading page of the application. There was a quite funny article a while back how it led to school children deleting whatsapp because they thought facebook was "uncool" but didn't even know it was a product of the company.
I'd also caution about "arguments from growth", given that it's totally possible that given better decisions it might have grown even faster. Sort of like the medieval physician who argued that blood-letting worked because the patient recovered. It'd be better to address the substance of the article.
Anything is possible and that's conjecture. Not news. Argument from proven growth/data/etc is far better than "argument from hypotheticals/what ifs/etc".
> There was a quite funny article a while back how it led to school children deleting whatsapp because they thought facebook was "uncool" but didn't even know it was a product of the company.
Seems like another of these manufactured nonsense from the industry. How many children? How old were they? Care to share the link so we can all have a good laugh?
> It'd be better to address the substance of the article.
So why don't you? You didn't mention anything substantive from the article in your comment. Is it because there is no substance. What objective, factual, relevant information did you take away from an article which is mostly subjective, gossipy and pointless.
I think one thing we need to consider about facebook is the classic middle manager wrangling. If you think that a priority you like is under the chopping block, you tie it inextridcably to something else and then go "Oh, well! Can't can this project because you'll be destroying our most important project". It is essential for Facebook to get to the point where it is so difficult to distinguish between Facebook/Instagram/Whatsapp that you can make a coherent argument that you can't split that company into 3 separate parts. That's a great reason for a lot of what was going on at facebook, but the article doesn't seem to consider it.
* Bloomberg, of course, is the publication that published “The Big Hack” in October 2018 — a sensational story alleging that data centers of Apple, Amazon, and dozens of other companies were compromised by China’s intelligence services. The story presented no confirmable evidence at all, was vehemently denied by all companies involved, has not been confirmed by a single other publication (despite much effort to do so), and has been largely discredited by one of Bloomberg’s own sources. By all appearances “The Big Hack” was complete bullshit. Yet Bloomberg has issued no correction or retraction, and seemingly hopes we’ll all just forget about it. I say we do not just forget about it. Bloomberg’s institutional credibility is severely damaged, and everything they publish should be treated with skepticism until they retract the story or provide evidence that it was true.
I see tons of articles from Bloomberg being posted on HN, where people care about that issue. Outside of this, no one cared and there are people on both camps as far as that story is concerned.
That particular story wasn't quite as fraudulent as Newsweek's exposé of a random retired Japanese-American guy as "Satoshi Nakamoto" a few years back, but it's close.
What matters is not people's opinions but evidence (or lack of it).
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/bloomberg-reporters-compensa...
(looks like it might be Bangladesh (see below for link))
They passed legislation that allows a RIVER to have rights and lawyers can sue on its behalf.
We need similar legislation for reality. We have about 50% of the country that literally doesn't give a shit about lying.
The truth should have rights to sue.
Now I KNOW there is a fuzzy ground but there are also things that are clearly, provably false.
If a politician says he was in the United States, yet there are records, showing he was in Germany, and you can prove damages, you should be able to sue.
We already have limits to the 1st amendment. You can't libel or slander someone for example. The truth needs to be protected. Otherwise we're doomed.
https://www.npr.org/2019/08/03/740604142/should-rivers-have-...
The overlap of the two businesses is likely counted in single digit percentages of revenue.
Sorry that I don't have numbers
They sell a software terminal at about $20k/yr subscription, and there are > 325,000 paying subscribers. It's nearly an essential tool in finance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomberg_Terminal.
It's pretty neat, there's some really interesting tech and history involved but it's all hidden away in a very insulated industry.
Although as qnt points out, this particular one sells terminal access. So I guess they can go ahead and throw the credibility thing overboard, and still do OK.