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Comment by basisword | Hacker News Reader

Other than the original few years of Facebook has Zuck actually succeeded at anything new? Metaverse was a failure. Instagram and WhatsApp were both bought and Instagram's biggest feature is a straight rip from Snapchat. Occulus was bought. Facebook itself is completely dead among all my peers and even the local business stuff I used to do on it is dead now too. It feels like he just falls from one mistake into another but gets away with it due to the company being a behemoth + his unique control of the company keeping him unaccountable.

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In Taiwan, Facebook seams like it's part of the Government and it seems that near all the small biz use it to communicate and advertize. Reminds me of the AOL days when people thought that was the Internet.

It feels like the only thing it's really big in now in the states for is facebook marketplace, which is just a slightly higher trust (but still scam and flake prone) version of craigslist using the existing user base. Feels like all his big swings have been strikes

Facebook marketplace also keeps people scrolling which means theres just way more prospective buyers.

Search is bad at finding what you want but good at keeping you searching.

Here in Canada, kijiji(ebay classifieds) was popular and has accounts and ratings. People still have moved to marketplace.

True, it is pretty bad at getting right to what I want. A genuinely useful integration of AI would be to process and classify listings on upload so that I can have more filters on attributes of items for sale. I'm not holding my breath for that though

Success from your perspective, or the market's? The market seems generally pleased that he's taken more than a quarter of global ads, and dominates in social media advertisement.

By practically any measure all of the things you've listed have been wildly successful.

The question wasn't if Zuck has been successful, it was if Meta has succeeded at anything new. When was the last time Meta made something original, brought to market and had success with it?

Thank you for being one of the few to actually read the question :)

Instagram Reels? Your measure of “innovation” is just not how large companies succeed. They are specialized at optimization, and take seeds of things and water them. Instagram had 0 revenue and like 13 employees when acquired. WhatsApp had 50 employees, no encryption, etc

Instagram Reels is just a TikTok rip off. It's not 'new'.

I think there's a measure of success in thought leadership and/or product.

Apple is wildly successful at both, arguably more so the leadership than the actual product. Amazon, despite its faults, has a ton of businesses many of which do well, and it continues to innovate. I'm biased but I think Google is also in that category, with many new products that are widely well regarded (yes some were acquisitions, but typically smaller ones).

Meta on the other hand... Facebook was huge, no doubt. Instagram too, but that was already semi locked in on acquisition, they already had product/market fit at least. WhatsApp has languished under Zuckerberg, having had their explosive growth independently.

Oculus? Nope. Metaverse? Nope. Crypto? Nope. AI? Nope, or at least not yet.

By business metrics, very successful. By innovation in ads, very successful. But building new consumer businesses? Not really.

They no longer need to. They have a core business to finance whatever stupid ideas ad infinitum. When was Oracle or IBM successful at anything new last time? Yet they chum along with 140k and 280k (!!!) employees.

280K is down from 400k+ when I worked at the latter 2 decades ago

Doesn't IBM still do high tech research? The only thing I know Oracle does is buy up companies to take over their products (and customers).

It really seems like its a testament to the other c-levels and higher management that facebook has managed to become what it is despite Zuck

According to my peers Microsoft has no market share, and literally nobody is willingly using PHP or Java. But that's obviously not true. Facebook is still dominant, Meta is an infinite money printing machine. The company can take a lot of risk for a very long time without problem

Always good to remember with large tech companies that they can have millions or hundreds of millions of people very vocally opposed to them and still have billions of users.

Instagram is an $80bn company right now. I’d call that a success.

Which, as I said, they bought. And then they ripped off the biggest feature. Most of the genuinely 'new' things they've tried with Instagram have failed.

They bought at $1bn and made it an $80bn behemoth. Meanwhile, I don't understand why a company has to innovate all the time like it's a piece of cake.

Zuck became one of the richest and most powerful people in the world by saying "what if Myspace but we make it elite and exclusive and no custom html"

No, he actually became one of the richest ppl in the world by stealing that idea from somebody else.

I suppose if your history started at the Social Network movie that would seem factual

I suppose if you observed every Facebook product development since those days it would seem like a founding value.

Didn't Zuck allegedly steal the concepts from those twins and claim it was his own? Something like that but at Harvard the idea morphed as people connected and I seem to recall a quote from Zuck that he couldn't believe people would give up all this data. So alleged plagiarism and getting lucky by the sounds of it.

Sure, other than being the dominate social media platform for the original few years (2 decades) he is a total failure I guess

They maintained the 2 decades dominance by either knifing the baby (vine) or buying (Instagram, whatsapp) every upstart.

The moment they couldn't do either they got their clock cleaned (tiktok)

They benefited greatly from the FTC not doing their job. Google too. Overall it has been extremely damaging to the industry but I suspect that it is the main reason for a small part of California (it not even American exceptionalism, it's Silicon Valley exceptionalism) completely dominating tech.

Wow, that sounds super easy. Why didn't you do it?

It's a weird assumption that the only thing stopping people from the ad business is the effort involved.

Lots of people don't want to sell ads, particularly not with a side of societal harm, even if it would be lucrative. There are other things to value.

I certainly didn't think it was effort

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