I've been consistently impressed by Zuckerberg in recent years. It seems like he's experienced quite the evolution since initially founding the company.
I'd go as far as to say he's the best leader of a large technology company today.
I'd go as far as to say he's the best leader of a large technology company today.
As always, the YouTube comments section delivers.
I worked at Facebook in 2010-2011 and I must say that the gap between what was really going on inside, and the hysterical, least possibly charitable interpretation and scrutinizing of every single product decision by the press, public, and politicians was insane. By far the worst I'd ever seen.
As an engineer, I actually learnt to appreciate the job of a PR team during that time (I previously assumed they were professional hypocrites paid who put a positive spin on indefensible corporate decisions), and was impressed at how professional they managed to remain as they had to counter some truly insane shit with facts, and still nobody believed them because Facebook is the devil and obviously lying.
Of course there were obviously some large fuck-ups at Facebook over the past decade (some of which even originated from good intentions, like the Cambridge Analytica fiasco : "people accuse us of being anticompetitive as we sit on a treasure trove of data, let's be more open and create a platform !")
In my view, these were more the product of Zuck's failure to rein in bad ideas from some executives due to his inexperience, rather than any indication of strategic malevolence and cynicism on his part.
In other words, he's not perfect but I've always seen him as the rather decent guy that more people can see now, like in this interview. If there's one area where he has changed a lot, it's probably in his ability to show it.
They have the same problem as Google, an initial cash cow and not really able to invent something new, which leaves them very vulnerable to shifts in market behavior (TikTok) or other things.
I don’t think he’s a great leader, there’s a reason why Sandberg was so important to the company.
Which I would also add means they chase fads and have to buy their way into these developing markets, hoping they essentially find their own "facebook" to invest in that then hits big.
I definitely think Satya is a good leader, but I don’t know if he’s a great leader. He’s more like someone who has kept Microsoft going, in both the good and bad ways. It’s easy to enter all these markets by using your existing cash flow and access to users. It’s a totally different challenge to build something from scratch and survive without those advantages. I also think people unfamiliar with Microsoft’s past often ignore Ballmer’s contributions and instead give Satya credit. But Bing began under Ballmer, and Bing’s service infrastructure was the birthplace of Azure.
Sadly it seems like Meta is also anticompetitive. I didn’t know about this, seems embarrassing:
“v. You will not use the Llama Materials or any output or results of the Llama Materials to improve any other large language model (excluding Llama 2 or derivative works thereof).”
https://github.com/meta-llama/llama/blob/b8348da38fde8644ef0...
Also even if you did use Llama for something, they could unilaterally pull the rug on you when you got 700 million years, AND anyone who thinks Meta broke their copyright loses their license. (Checking if you are still getting screwed is against the rules)
Therefore, Zuckerberg is accountable for explicitly anticompetitive conduct, I assumed an MMA fighter would appreciate the value of competition, go figure.
As much as the dark patterns are annoying, Satya also turned around Microsoft's complete inability to build software. It got so bad that virtually no progress was made on any Microsoft products from 2000 through 2010. Many of their developer tools today are... nice.
The stock price was the same in 1999 as in 2016. Today, it's up almost 10x.
No organization is perfect, and acknowledging everything Microsoft is doing wrong, it's a world of difference from Ballmer. Ballmer was on the far end of the incompetence spectrum, the abusive management style spectrum, and the hardball antitrust spectrum (which no longer even worked with real competition from mobile, iPad, and web apps). A lot of the reason you see so much praise is the comparison. It's easy to ignore Ballmer's contributions, since there weren't any. The ones you give are... a stretch.