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Comment by c2 | Hacker News Reader

All companies take risks, including Microsoft and Amazon. I could argue Microsoft has taken numerous more high profile risks then Facebook has. Beacon vs. Zune, Facebook Messaging vs. Microsoft Communicator.

There is nothing special about the risks that Facebook takes.

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Facebook also benefits from not having any real competitors (in the US, at least). If they fuck up and make a terrible UI change, it's not like the user base will protest and move to Myspace. If Apple fucks up the iPhone, there's a strong chance that the customer will switch to Android or WP7 or something as a result.

Facebook is special because if Facebook breaks the site for a release or two, it doesn't really matter, since the product is not business-critical to users (Microsoft software) and has a moat protecting against immediate revenue-losing defection (Amazon shopping).

At most large companies, if they break their main product (Vista, or a site outage), they will lose a lot of revenue.

More importantly, Amazon deals with real stuff. As in, if something goes wrong, real physical things and/or other people's money go missing. What're the consequences if Facebook status update gets dropped?

I say this all the time, Facebook's experience (and Google's, and whoever's) is simply not relevant unless you do what they do. All the people who would love to work at FB would be up in arms if their bank was run like that.

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