Internal emails show Zuckerberg and Facebook execs discuss cloning competitors | Hacker News Reader

Internal emails show Zuckerberg and Facebook execs discuss cloning competitors

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Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery

Don't most companies have these types of conversations? I haven't been at one yet that hasn't. Good startups look at their competitors and decide to clone some, and change other, features.

Were we not excited here yesterday on HN, that Cloudflare is cloning and undercutting AWS S3?

An adult stealing candy from a baby is illegal.

A baby stealing candy from an adult, well I'd like to meet that baby.

Most babies are pretty capable of stealing from their adults. We adults not particularly good at stopping them.

> Were we not excited here yesterday on HN, that Cloudflare is cloning and undercutting AWS S3?

I think there's a bit of a difference there.

1) There's an important difference between winner-take-all (or most) markets with very strong network effects and other markets. If most people use S3 and I use R2, it doesn't really damage my experience using R2.

Let's say that Facebook was cloning features, but all platforms could interact with standard, open APIs (like the S3 API basically is). Then we wouldn't care about Facebook copying. In a Fediverse-like world, we don't care about someone cloning the features of a competitor because their cloning doesn't stifle competition.

2) I think there's a difference between a new company challenging the 10,000lb gorilla and the 10,000lb gorilla crushing a new company. Cloudflare isn't tiny, but they're definitely tiny compared to AWS. When Facebook talks about cloning the features of a tiny competitor, it comes off as the giant trillion-dollar company trying to crush any tiny competitor that might serve customers better.

With Cloudflare's R2, we see a smaller company cloning something which adds competition and puts pressure on the larger competitors to treat their customers better. Maybe AWS won't respond, but at least we can use R2 when we want to. Maybe AWS will respond with free bandwidth. Even better!

When Facebook does this, it feels very different - especially given the antipathy that many people feel toward Facebook and its policies/behaviors. Let's say that NewSocial comes up with something that seems to be resonating with customers. They only have a million users right now, but people like the feature(s) and they like that NewSocial doesn't seem to have the baggage/policies/behaviors that people don't like about Facebook. Consumers might be getting a better option that treats them better...and Facebook wants to clone the features to blunt their growth and prevent that new option from getting the critical mass to be sustainable so it dies out.

Note: I'm not passing judgement on Facebook's policies/behaviors. I am simply noting that there does seem to be some antipathy in the public toward Facebook.

I don't think that people are against cloning features. I think that people are against large companies cloning features in an attempt to stifle competition and prevent consumer choice. When Cloudflare clones S3, it benefits us as consumers and as internet users. We see that R2 could allow new startups to offer cool things to us that might not be affordable given Amazon's bandwidth pricing. When we look at Facebook cloning features from tiny startups, we see our world being locked into the Facebook ecosystem while the company tries to destroy any competition that might offer us something better.

This punching down concern highlights how broken anti trust enforcement is. When companies have more resources than whole countries they're advantages make competing in any remotely related endeavors high risk. Unless of course being bought out is the only goal. But even in that case the 800lbs gorilla may still prefer to do it themselves and swallow the market.

>When companies have more resources than whole countries

This is the part that scares me. Not the amount of resources, but the shitty quality that still comes out of those processes.

I suppose scaling up organisations is even harder than scaling up infrastructure.

This example is actually great, because Whatsapp won the market anyway, with a small team against "more resources than whole countries". Facebook ended up buying it.

Remember how Google lost to youtube and had to buy it too?

To me it seems large organisations use anti competitive behavior to be able to compete against smaller entities, because when it comes to quality large organisations just can't compete against smaller ones.

Or why large chain restaurants generally don't win michelin stars.

And even the successful stuff by large companies tend to be small teams. Think Google Maps or Gmail, which were created by small independent teams. If the whole company could mess with those products they would have likely failed.

> Were we not excited here yesterday on HN, that Cloudflare is cloning and undercutting AWS S3?

Cloudflare provides services directly to its users, who pay for and use said services.

Facebook and Google avoid their users at all costs. They are in the business of selling their users to advertisers. Any services they provide are just carrots on sticks to generate more meat for the grinder.

They are nefarious in intent because they are Facebook and Google, not for any abstract or technical reason.

Amazon spun off a search engine company:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A9.com

Initially I think they were exploring competing more directly with Google, and they definitely set up offices down in Palo Alto to try to siphon off talent.

Google opened up offices up in Seattle at around the same time.

Honest question: Is this against the rules? If there's a market a company wants to enter, wouldn't they just analyze the cost to build (both product, and market/audience), vs. acquiring (both product, and market/audience), then pick the cheapest option?

Comes down to software patents.

This is a damning doc if another company is suing them for patent infringement.

US rules against monopolies generally hold that the monopolist cannot clone competitors offerings.

Facebook is not yet a convicted monopolist

There’s no such rule. Even running a monopoly itself is not illegal, it’s only illegal if you leverage your monopolistic position to prevent competition such as temporarily cutting prices below cost to starve competition.

Yeah it is not like 'you are the only(/de facto) choice now, so now you are illegal!'; you also need to abuse this position to get this kind of attention.

It also varies by nation.

For example, in the US Microsoft bundling internet explorer with windows wasn't seen as a anti-competitive. In the EU, it was.

In another example, apple and android both bundle browser with their operating systems. However, the EU has not rule either to be anti-competitive. That's primarily because they aren't considered to hold a monopoly on their markets.

This is also a failing in the law (IMO). ISPs in the US clearly coordinate prices regionally, yet monopoly laws don't really touch them both because there are often at least 2 ISPs in most locations with relatively similarly sized customer bases and internet packages. Further, there really aren't a whole lot of national ISPs (unless you consider cell phone companies).

Most antitrust rules are in place to protect the consumer, not the competitor. You might be thinking of patents with the USPTO.

I'm not really sure I see the issue here, though I'm no expert. Isn't this what competitors do? If Facebook failed because Pinterest and WhatsApp overtook them, the comments would be full of "well, they stood pat while WhatsApp innovated". I think it would be neglectful not to see what works and attempt to replicate that success.

I don't think this is a condemnation of Facebook, it's just interesting to see how these conversations are being conducted at a very high level.

I've heard this strategy referred to as "follow the follower." Apparently it comes from sailing, where if you want to maintain a lead all you need to do is copy what the boat behind you is doing.

When I was at Netscape, marketing had every page of Yahoo up on a wall (printed out!), and there were teams assigned to recreating each and every one of them, verbatim. So, this isn't new.

But, like Steve Jobs said [1], good artists copy, great artists steal. It's one thing to take the essence, it's another to completely reproduce it with your own twist.

[1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/03/06/artists-steal/

Yahoo did not have a working business model. Google has a working business model. That is the difference.

> When I was at Netscape, marketing had every page of Yahoo up on a wall (printed out!), and there were teams assigned to recreating each and every one of them, verbatim. So, this isn't new.

Can you elaborate? Why is a browser vendor concerned with and copying what a web page is doing?

So - Netscape was three companies. Company #1 - Was the browser. Which they initially sold, but then had to give away for free. And search engines weren't really as much of a thing back then so, there was very little money coming from that, particularly after Microsoft decided to compete by giving their browser away for free. About all their was came in through stuff like banner ads and other advertising on the home page.

Company #2 was where they wanted to make their money - with all the amazing back office servers, web servers (back when web servers were something worth spending $$$ on), High Performance Multi-Master LDAP Servers (still an amazing technology, even today), Calendar Servers, Mail Servers, etc, etc.. They honestly could have done something there - but (A) they were going up against Microsoft who was a fierce competitor, and (B) Their commitment to open standards made lock-in really hard..

And then there was company #3 - www.netscape.com. Mike Homer I think was the one who realized that was where the real capturable value was in 1999. And he was probably right - definitely in the short term. The marketing team worked their butt off to drive as much traffic as possible - and then sold it off to AOL for $4B.

That's why they essentially duplicated, page for page, yahoo.com.

Is it really a Jobs quote if every time he mentioned it, he attributed it to someone else? I realize your link discusses this at length, but it seems Jobs himself would not say it is his quote.

Within the technology industry, he is the one most closely associated with this quotation, so I think it's fair to reference him.

Sad to see this so accepted.

Remix 3 seconds of a song without payment and you get hammered with fines.

Copy a paragraph of an essay in college and you get turfed out (assuming your parents can't donate a library).

Steal a few trinkets and face jail time; some have their kids taken away for it.

But a trillion dollar company systematically steals wholesale from innovating upstarts for a decade and it's suddenly the case that, oh well, everyone does it? What the actual fuck.

I think this is something that you have to live with unless you support broad patents. In the fizzy malt liquor market suddenly every beverage company had their own brand overnight. The same thing happened with snapchat stories, or with clubhouse. If you want a moat in social it can be made out of an easily lifted feature. Increasingly it can’t even be made out of “network effects” because FB has the king kong of networks that they can swing into your space. So if you’re a jobs site, dating, classified, or anything along those lines you’re also easily aped.

Why is this news? Is anyone even remotely surprised by this?

The rules exist to be skirted by those who have the power to shape them.

Not really. But, to me, it was interesting to learn more about the details and the conversations behind the scenes.

> Why is this news? Is anyone even remotely surprised by this?

> The rules exist to be skirted by those who have the power to shape them.

I know places I've worked before have seen features in competitor products and scurried to implement new features to reflect them. I work on some open source that takes its lead from closed source alternatives. Is this considered skirting the rules? Genuine question, I don't actually know anything about anything.

And this is why Zuckerberg will never be one of the great titans of Silicon Valley.

He's really nothing but a boring and defensive cloner/acquirer at heart. The world would be no worse off, and probably better off, had he never created Facebook. Unlike Apple, Amazon, Google, Intel, and many of the other SV companies that truly moved the world forward.

Oculus is the only thing he's bought that is actually doing something important in technology, and he seems to have done a pretty mediocre job running it so far.

Is this considered anti-competitive or competitive under the new standards (which seem primarily focused on harm to other businesses) vs the older standards around consumer harm.

6 man week for a "message read" animation. What the hell? Am I reading that right ?

It looked like for a general purpose animation library for Android, rather than using the native capabilities

It was one hell of a well-engineered rabbit-hole though :)

Zuck's gotta talk to the product owner who schedules it as a priority item in the backlog for the next sprint; the architects and the UX people will draw up some sketches but this is all the way from the top so there's no time to waste, so the developers start at the same time. Schedule four daily status meetings to make sure everything progresses as fast as possible! Of course the developers don't have the requirements yet so they need redo everything the next sprint. Then a sprint for QA and that's about 1200 man-hours of work in a large organisation.

Can someone explain to me why Facebook Messenger sucks so bad? The search function barely works, lags most of the time and scrolling up on conversations takes forever.

Discord is orders of magnitude better in those aspects.

Do you expect reliability from a company who's motto is "move fast and break things"?

Everyone commenting that this isn’t wrong/illegal/bad. But it sure is a sign that an organization no longer believes they can sufficiently innovate. Is this inevitable?

It's a well-known business strategy to let smaller players in the market shoulder the risk for new ideas/innovation, since they have less to lose. Patents exist to protect the rewards for the success of these smaller players.

WhatsApp is cloning Telegram, and no one bats an eyelid. I guess Telegram is the kryptonite of HN forums only because WhatsApp has supposedly "e2e" conversations- which stay intact even in the most repressive regimes, but Telegram is routinely blocked in the same places - read Iran etc.

They're talking about how their internal ways of working slows them down in comparison to the competition, and what to do to address it.

Is there anything else to take away from these emails?

It's not even that bad. About half of the mails are talking about how other companies are cloning them.

Copying has been in an other nation's playbook for a long time.

TikTok (Douyin really) is really just a copy of Vines for instance.

Facebook would be foolish not to look outward at the competition.

Interface, maybe, but the secret sauce (if it can even be called that) for TikTok is the content discovery (recommendation) system. (Vine used a traditional friend-follower SNS design, and anecdotally all of my interactions were from off-platform links so...)

Also I feel like the problem with Facebook is not that it's copying, but rather their copies often seem subpar. Remember the function to send/receive money in Messenger? Back in the day it seemed like one of the worse instantiations of this feature out of the various messenger systems...

I find it disturbing that everyone acts like it's normal that private correspondence gets leaked and now is discussed in public.

What gives you the right to read those emails?

These emails are part of the public record [1], subpoenaed on behalf of the House Judiciary Committee's Investigation of Competition in Digital Markets [2].

[1] https://judiciary.house.gov/uploadedfiles/0006754900067553.p...

[2] https://judiciary.house.gov/uploadedfiles/competition_in_dig...

Thanks for providing this background. Still somehow it feels not right to read it. But I suppose it may be some cultural difference. In country I live in correspondence secrecy is a constitutional right, so maybe people value it differently.

I don't know that American's don't value it, it's not like everyone's emails are part of the public record after all. The HJC has (probably good) reason to believe that large companies are engaging in anti-competitive practices and it's their responsibility to investigate that and this is one of the major tools to do so.

Do they just not have awareness of these sorts of mails finding their way out?

I would have expected them to be more careful with what they say

Isn't this what we aimed for with capitalism? Either way, the better product wins. Yes, potentially it's going to be Amazon. But the consumer will get to choose between Amazon and something else and pick the better and cheaper one. That's at least the goal. Then Amazon will revert some of the changes and someone will come back and do better what they do.

> our graph

It's the user's graph. The rest of this I have no problems with.

Cloning competitors is legal in most cases.

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