It makes me believe Zuckerberg is completely surrounded by yes-men who never challenge him and only tell him what he likes to hear. He is truly detached from us normal people and our human experience.
I feel like the opposite. Zuck is the only one to believe in the metaverse and as a result people who worked on the communication did it badly without a lot of conviction. He is in a pretty comfortable position, one of the richest people on earth doing 20% of growth every year. And still he wants to make a big risky bet like this one. I'm not really in favor of the metaverse but history has shown us that Zuck is pretty successful at things he wants to do
Isn't hiring the right people an extremely large part of being "business savvy"?
People complain that he has too much control but then also, like you, complain that he isn't behind and "real" decisions.
He made that "vast vast wealth" by building Facebook. One had to come before the other.
And it's perfectly possible that he is more responsible for the bad choices than he is for the good ones. I've dealt with execs like that. I'd bet many others have as well.
It's not easy to win the lottery either, but that doesn't make a lottery winner "one of the savviest business-people in history".
But he has uncontested control because of an unusual dual-class share structure. And isn't the explanation for Facebook's founder-favoring structure basically that Peter Thiel wanted it that way?
My recollection is that founder-favoring share structures go in and out of fashion historically, and that Facebook rose during a period when that was popular. So yes, props to young Mark Zuckerberg for pushing for that when it was achievable.
But even Mark Zuckerberg describes himself as lucky in this regard:
“So one of the things that I’ve been lucky about in building this company is ... I kind of have voting control of the company, and that’s something I focused on early on. And it was important because, without that, there were several points where I would’ve been fired. For sure, for sure,” https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/03/zuckerberg-if-i-didnt-have-c...
I'm not big on people complaining about "idea stealing", but zuck is in a league of his own with this shit, so worth pointing out that he didn't have the idea for FB.
IIRC, the idea he stole wasn't "social networking," it was "social networking for elite kids at Harvard."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Facebook#Facebook:
> Just six days after the launch of the site, three Harvard University seniors, Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra, accused Zuckerberg of intentionally misleading them into believing that he would help them build a social network called HarvardConnection.com, but instead using their idea to build a competing product.[21] The three complained to the Crimson, and the newspaper began an investigation. Zuckerberg knew about the investigation so he used TheFacebook.com to find members in the site who identified themselves as members of the Crimson. He examined a history of failed logins to see if any of the Crimson members had ever entered an incorrect password into TheFacebook.com. In the cases in which they had failed to log in, Zuckerberg tried to use them to access the Crimson members' Harvard email accounts, and he was successful in accessing two of them. In the end, three Crimson members filed a lawsuit against Zuckerberg which was later settled.[21][22]
Building a company with 1000 users is a success. A million is another success. A billion is hundreds of successes.
I'd argue the 1st million users is much harder than the 3rd billion.
- Well, I wouldn't say that... what else did he do other than relativity?
And for what it's worth, Einstein did a lot more than one thing. Off the top of my head, Einstein's annus mirabilis had 4 papers that were all major accomplishments, including the E=mc² equation popularly associated with him: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annus_Mirabilis_papers
His work on relativity came later. As did a fair bit of other work, that I'm less familiar with but that I could easily look up and provide sources for.
And that's the kind of list I'm looking for here. People have claimed that he has other successes. I'm asking what they are. I've now given you the kind of list I wanted for Einstein, and I've given it elsewhere in this discussion for Steve Jobs. So will you give me that list for Zuckerberg? Because as far as I know it has one thing on it: Facebook.
Given that nobody has so far, and given all the handwaving like yours, I think you all have answered my question.
Remember when he bought Instagram for a billion dollars? That amount seemed unreasonable high back then. Looking back though ... I'd wish I could spend money as well as Zuckerberg.
If anything, it seems like young people ended up moving to Snapchat as their main social media platform of choice since the purchase. I had a ton of friends who used Instagram frequently but now almost no one posts there, other than occasional stories. The main feed is almost entirely ads now, and I can't remember the last time I had a conversation with someone who said they like Instagram still.
That's not to say it hasn't grown and isn't making them money, but I also don't think Instagram would have had the same trajectory if Facebook didn't buy them. They just integrated it with their existing platform that already had a lot of traffic.
b) having absolutely 0 moral compass
I would also suggest lack of conviction and lack of ability to complete the job look very similar, and you are likely to end up with the latter of you are surrounded by yes-men.
Another thing I think is at play is people confusing luck with genius. Zuckerberg is clearly smart, but Facebook was also a right-time, right-place thing. As FaceMash and Facebook showed, he understood his audience because he was his audience. But now, nearly 20 years later, Zuckerberg-the-billionaire has very little in common with the audience he needs if he is going to make the metaverse happen.
I mean, I too read and like Snow Crash, so I get the emotional appeal. But a middle-aged guy's favorite dystopian novel from 30 years ago may not be a useful blueprint today.
You do not know him, you have not met him and it does not make sense to try to diagnose a public figure based on what you've been presented by either his own press releases or media coverage of him. You and the person you have replied to have bought into the idea that no one at Facebook challenges him despite having not worked at Facebook or personally witnessing this.
It's more an expression that "I think this idea is so bat shitty that I don't want to know jack about how someone came up with it, just seems like a narcissistic idea to me."
I vouch for the parent commenter’s statement.
What I said was that it's a concept I find useful. Whether a trained professional who was given the necessary access to diagnose him is beside the point. Indeed, any qualified professional who did examine and diagnose him couldn't talk about it like this, so it seems bizarre to me you have mistaken an internet forum comment for some sort of ironclad medical claim.
And I find the concept useful and relevant here because it helps make clear how the rarefied world billionaires live in can over time distort cognition whether or not it crosses the line into an actual disorder.
That's my take on it too. I don't really feel the metaverse in Snow Crash was something that I'd like to replicate. I mean, it's a cool idea, but that world is not one that I'd intentionally try to make.
Whether or not we are on our way that direction is another question entirely...
Look at today, and I think most people would agree that acquiring whatsapp and instagram back then was a great business decision on his end.
And, in my eyes, the whole Meta thing makes way more sense to begin with than those acquisitions did.
But for me, I can't see this working. There is no VR game that really killed it. I also don't see which generation would actually be into this.
So it's not a "idiots!", but more of a "what am I missing here?".
Will be interesting to see this play out
None of these are VR's Halo, but it seems that VR is getting out of the tech demo/hobbyist space and into a broader market appeal. If facebook keeps iterating and pushing out quality improvements at the current price point it's just a matter of time.
Roblox has more than 200 million daily active users; 67% of them are under 16 [1]. Where will they go when hormones hit and blocky avatars no longer seem all that compelling?
To college, where actual humans will be available for porking at all hours. If this Meta thing is a success, there might not be a following generation.
And how he communicates with his friends, no video, no calls, but just chat text.
I honestly don't see this generation move to intense communication/experience, when they now prefer the most casual tech.
Everyone I know and work with universally thinks they're a joke. They've spent how much money on this janky uncanny nonsense? You'd think they'd at least stumble into one redeeming quality, but it escapes them.
Xerox (modern computer), AT&T (Unix), Sony (PlayStation), Google (Maps, GMail), Apple (iPhone), Amazon (AWS)
And they're still failing to innovate. Facebook now will be "retooling" toward "serving young adults the north star, rather than optimizing for older people." https://twitter.com/sarafischer/status/1452744573084708869
In practice what this means is that they have the same problem they did before, but antitrust scrutiny means they can't buy their way out of it this time.
I mean this is classic moving of goals posts - the only measure of acumen the CEO of a publically traded company is that little number called the share price. whether he buoys that number by brain-genius innovations or by brain-genius acquisitions, he's still demonstrating brain-genius business acumen (the proof of this seemingly tautological claim is that there are plenty of other companies that have failed to acquire their way out of irrelevance).
I consider this in particular deeply incorrect: "only measure of acumen the CEO of a publicly traded company is that little number called the share price". And I'm hardly alone here. Indeed, the whole reason Facebook is in public doghouse right now is Zuckerberg's focus on dominance and profit without regard to little externalities like genocide. So you may have different goalposts for him, but that doesn't mean I've moved anything.
If I'm trying to understand somebody's acumen, I want to see what they can do on their own. As someone else pointed out, Zuckerberg didn't even really have the one idea that he successfully exploited. He's rich, sure, but, "He's so rich that he must be a genius" is pretty far from my criteria for genius.
you are moving goalposts you just don't see it. We're talking about business acumen, not scientific acument or mathematical acumen or ethics acumen. That FB is in the "public doghouse" is about as meaningful an observation as "the post office loses money every year" or "NASA can't afford to pay its engineers as much as FAANG" or "the ACLU has never successfully tried a personal injury case". The only public that matters here are the public markets and they think zuckerberg is a genius (this recent blip not withstanding).
>I want to see what they can do on their own.
I mean that's your definition and you're welcome to it but for the rest of the world there is M&A.
>"He's so rich that he must be a genius" is pretty far from my criteria for genius.
to which i leave you with a quote
>Why do you think the same five guys make it to the final table of the World Series of Poker every year? What, are they the luckiest guys in Las Vegas?
But that's exactly my point. Zuckerberg isn't starting fresh every year. That's the sort of comparison I'd love to see. He's a guy who won very big based on some lucky choices at 19. And he's never started a fresh tournament since.
In contrast, look at Steve Jobs. He's a fine example of "Once you're lucky, twice you're good." And more than twice, really. Started Apple, got pushed to the side Created the Macintosh and the LaserWriter and got booted. Helped get Pixar going. Started NeXT, which was a relative failure, but whose tech set him up nicely for an acquisition. Acquihired back at Apple and turned it into the juggernaut it is today. Say what you want about him, and I'll say plenty negative, but he clearly has skills.
That's the kind of writeup I'm looking for about Zuckerberg. That all I'm getting is bluster and "but he's very rich" is its own kind of answer, I guess.
> We're talking about business acumen
Yes, we are. But your definition is a relatively narrow one where dominance and profit are the only measures of business success. I get why that's a popular definition here. But even here, it's not the only one. If the public markets are all that matter to you, fine, but at least try to recognize their are other criteria.
every morningl m-f, the markets open and FB starts fresh like every other ticker. every evening FB is either up or down. enough down days and zuck would be out. the fact that FB is up and to the right for almost 10 years exactly indicates that zuck wasn't just lucky.
You aren't even trying to understand my point here, and you have reduced yours to absurdity, so I'm done.
New product launches have indeed gone poorly. This certainly looks terrible to my eyes. Time will tell but skepticism is warranted.
I guess Apple failed to compete and innovate when they acquired NeXT and Beats. Or Microsoft failed to innovate as soon as they acquired GitHub and Xamarin. /s
Very senseless acquisitions that have no long term strategy or reason behind it to sustain the future of the business or to compete in the market. /s
Indeed, part of that acquisition was firing the then-current CEO. So as an example, I think it better serves to point out why we should question Zuckerberg's performance.
Don't want to downplay it, but having access to all the info users give to FB is like insider-trading. They know very well what is trending, what is growing and what is going nowhere.
The main difference is that Metaverse is something the want to build from scratch, not something that already exists like Insta and WhatsApp, so they don't have that insider-trading info.
>And, in my eyes, the whole Meta thing makes way more sense to begin with than those acquisitions did.
That's a fallacy. It doesn't matter if Zuck had 2 consecutive successful predictions because his 3rd can be unsuccessful. Each event(situation) is specific and different.
Remember the Snapchat Spectacles? They still sell them but I don't think they were ever popular. Google glass? Popular, but discontinued. Apple's ARKit? Definitely much less adoption than their commercials would have led you to expect.
It seems like this is an experiment bound to fail, so good luck to the execs at f̶a̶c̶e̶b̶o̶o̶k̶ meta who have to clean this up in the end.
You already see practical use of this technology with HUD-tech (Heads up display) in cars, but beyond that you'll find great applications for it within medicine/operations, transportation (directions), marketing (product information, authenticity verification), and the list goes on and on...
VR is much more likely to either become the new TV or to die an obscure death, like 3D movies.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/12/16272904/apple-arkit-demo...
And what commercial applications of this have we seen in the last 4 years?
This is all pretty inaccurate. Glass wasn't even a VR/AR headset. The released Spectacles were just cameras. They're releasing a new Spectacles devkit that's actually an AR headset soon. Snap filters are still very popular and ARKit is also quite popular although it hasn't really hit a killer business case.
They told me that when Facebook's (or maybe it was Instagram's...) stories came out with video support, Zuck posted a super bizarre video introducing it, being the first one and all. And I guess it was just him awkwardly staring into the camera, not really saying anything. Almost like someone who thinks it's a photo but it's a video instead - though he was fully aware it was a video. His wife was in the background waving and stuff too.
The person I was seeing I guess texted him and said something to the effect of "hey this is super awkward, maybe you should re-post it with you talking about it", which I guess Zuck did.
So it's my impression that he's not exactly surrounded by yes-men, but instead that he's not really in touch with the social aspect of running one of the largest social networks on earth and how people really behave. I know a lot of people say it's autism but as far as I was told it's not - he's just strange.
This is hearsay of course, but I'm pretty confident that I was told the truth given who it was that I talked to about all this.
Maybe that was the point. People scrolling think it's just a selfie but then you realize his wife is moving in the background!
https://i.imgur.com/AGklzd2.png
Using a low quality virtual background might have been a poor choice when it's fundamental to the idea.
From watching his mannerisms and facial expressions, I get the feeling that he is high functioning but very much on the autistic spectrum, and emulates many subtle movements/behaviors during communication that come naturally to "normies". That's why he comes off as a robot deep in the uncanny valley.
I like to think of it as partly emulating with software some of the communication hardware that neurotypical people have innately. Which is why social interactions can be taxing for those with Asperger's, the extra cycles are draining and distracting, in addition to the necessary self consciousness which also costs some amount of compute.
That's what I think happens, yes. They should have learned something from the failure of Google+, after all they were directly involved in that, apparently they haven't.