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Comment by bink | Hacker News Reader

Their focus on making Facebook for mobile platforms was smart, their efforts to make a mobile phone were late and substandard. By critical acquisitions I assume you mean Instagram and WhatsApp. Both were anti-competitive attempts to stave off becoming the next MySpace (but also successful). Everything else on the list of acquisitions looks like gambles that did not pay off.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...

Google, Microsoft, and Apple have never bet such a huge chunk of their spending on a single tech that has been so resoundingly mocked. The amount Meta is spending on VR makes the Windows phone look like a drop in the bucket. It's not that they are speculating on a moonshot, it's that they are wasting so much of their money on a single moonshot.

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Apple's famously very secretive, so who knows what they've spent money on internally that has never seen the light of day.

There have been rumours for the last 10 years that a bunch of people are working on a self driving and/or electric car, with little to show for it so far. I doubt anyone outside a select few in the company would know how much.

I remember hearing that rumour when they were building a tech center in Yokohama. But all the job listings never mention anything related to self-driving so I always wondered what they actually do there.

Facebook had no real efforts to make their own mobile phone.

https://nypost.com/2023/03/21/mark-zuckerberg-asked-facebook...

They did a brief collaboration with HTC on a custom Android skin back in 2013 but that appears to have been their only major effort in the handheld device space.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_First?wprov=sfla1

This is wrong, I worked there at the time and a lot of people were working on the phone project. It got kind of scrapped before it saw the light of day though.

> Apple have never bet such a huge chunk of their spending on a single tech that has been so resoundingly mocked.

I guess the 90's don't count anymore.

Apple in the 90s didn’t net itself on a single product.

Apple bet on a ton of products. Then they almost all failed to generate good returns, whether good, bad or average.

I mean...not really?

It's not particularly helpful to think of Apple before Jobs' return as iCEO and Apple afterward as the same company. His leadership philosophy and his vision for the company were so completely different than Gil Amelio and his fellow suits, any attempt to draw conclusions based on things that happened during that period is going to be an exercise in futility.

Unless, of course, all you want to do is score points dunking on Apple. Which has been a beloved pastime of many tech people for about 40 years now.

> their efforts to make a mobile phone were late and substandard

Meta was in its infancy when the mobile hardware revolution was happening. Do you really think they stood a chance of creating their own hardware platform while simultaneously adapting their existing software platform to the new paradigm? According to a google search they had 850 employees in 2008. Apple had 32000.

> It's not that they are speculating on a moonshot, it's that they are wasting so much of their money on a single moonshot

And yet Google is constantly trounced on this very site for never committing and constantly shutting down promising products. Armchair critics will never be satisfied and Zuck is wise to ignore them.

> Do you really think they stood a chance of creating their own hardware platform while simultaneously adapting their existing software platform to the new paradigm?

Then they should have realised that it was a bad idea.

They did, and therefore never made a phone.

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