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Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

I didn't perceive the author's comments to be discouraging but if anyone else is feeling bummed out by the Facebook juggernaut, keep in mind what happened to IBM, Microsoft, and Google.

When IBM built the original PC, they let Microsoft keep the rights to the operating system software. In hindsight, it was a massive miscalculation as Microsoft's "software-without-the-hardware" business went on to earn more profits than IBM's hardware. IBM's later weak attempt with OS/2 to beat Windows failed.

Microsoft's then CTO Nathan Myhrvold (who Bill Gates considered one of the smartest guys on the planet) was on a phone call with Larry and Sergei and yelled into the phone that "Search is NOT A PRODUCT!!!". (Probably their MSN hubris speaking.) Microsoft's later attempt with Bing has hardly dented Google's search marketshare.

Google didn't notice the importance of social networking before Facebook did. Google's later attempt with Google+ Circles failed to trigger a mass exodus from Facebook.

Facebook.... <story is yet to be written> but the same thing will happen to them. Somebody will come up with something that blindsides them. Or it might not even sneak up on them. Mark Z himself may look at the early-stage product and conclude that it's not anything special.

There are plenty of untapped business ideas that Facebook will misjudge and dismiss, leaving others to win that market.

But to the author's point, it will suck if you create a product that paints a bullseye and it lines up in Facebook's crosshairs. Microsoft couldn't beat Intuit Quicken with MS Money but they did crush Netscape with IE. They lose some, they win some.

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That's basically the wonder of capitalism. An accelerated form of Darwinism. People try random things, until someone tries the right thing at the right time, and it succeeds and takes over. That person is then labelled a genius, everyone think he knows what will happen next, he thinks of himself as a genius, and he will give his opinion on everything, until someone else hits another sweet spot and takes over...

You put into exact words what I always had in my head but hadn't articulated. So very true about all products and companies around us.

Just remember that Darwinism is a morally neutral process: evolution only cares about the survival of the entities in question. Likewise, capitalism thrives when businesses thrive; everything else is just a means to an end.

Not saying it's bad... just neutral. And it may have very good consequences for society as a whole. The only danger is believing the process is "good" in of itself.

Capitalism isn't morally neutral because it concerns collectives of moral agents (companies), their goals and the goals of their customers and those they interact with.

Evolution operates on genes, an amoral physical process.

Capitalism is the operation of people, a morally-laden process.

The only thing evolution and markets have in common is that the terms 'selection process' and 'organism' apply to both. And even then, they mean different things. Don't take the analogy too seriously.

Right, they are very different things. GP's point about morality stands, though: it's orthogonal to both markets and evolution.

I 100% Agree!

But, I also want to add that I believe you can start a very profitable business with careful planning that relies less on luck and more on your hard work!

In my opinion people behind high-profit-margin startups that were bootstrapped with no venture capital and were profitable from day 1 are the real business "geniuses".

Example: my good friends at basecamp.com

Edit: I like to add why I think Basecamp is a good example... first of all they are not my actual friends, I just like their take on how to do business.

In case you don't know one of the co-founders (David Heinemeier Hansson) is the creator of Rails. They are all about creating a profitable long-lasting business from start and I very much admire that.

Also Fogcreek and to an extent Atlassian.

I actually like reading about companies that set out to solve a genuine business need, make some money and treat staff well.

It's not as 'sexy' as billion dollar valuations for "Uber for Cats" though.

I actually think it's a lot "sexier."

Taleb nails this in The Black Swan. He describes how capitalism is NOT meritocratic, it's more like it encourages people to blow huge sums on improbable ideas and, occasionally, they work.

By Taleb you surely mean von Mises, by von Mises you surely mean Schumpeter, by Schumpeter you surely mean Karl Marx.

The speculative nature of capital has always been a core theme in economics. Yes, including "freshwater", "neoclassical" or "orthodox" economics.

If only people could realize the insane role (good/bad) luck plays in life. I believe it is often a difference between American and European culture: the former very strongly promotes individual responsibility, so when you succeed it's all to your merits, and when you fail you can only blame yourself.

Yes, but I think there's also something to be said for learning to swim in life's ocean of ups and downs, making the most of your situation. For me, a successful person is someone that knows how to swim, not someone that caught a once-in-a-lifetime tidal wave. Usually it isn't very glamorous, but it's what I personally aspire to.

Quite true, and it's also important to make the most of your breaks when you get some, or roll with the punches when you need to. So there definitely are skills to gain and efforts to make. You got to play the cards you are dealt, and you can play them well or not, but at the end of the day, on a short timespan as human life, the dominant factor remains luck, by far.

The key for me was to change my personal definition of success from winning the lottery to simply doing things well on a consistent basis.

> not someone that caught a once-in-a-lifetime tidal wave.

Those often celebrated in the media as whiz kids or geniuses often do just that.

In addition, even if you are a "legitimate" business/founder, there is still a massive amount of luck, way beyond your control. Imagine for example if Elon Musk had founded X.com slightly later that he did - probably wouldn't have the funds or track record to do Tesla and SpaceX due to the lack of exit opportunities with PayPal. Or if Paul Graham had founded ViaWeb slightly later, perhaps no YC.

At the very least I think Musk would have been a good engineer, and PG would be inspiring young people to try.

Most likely, and I think both would've been successful regardless. But their success and impact would've likely been greatly diminished if they were not in the right place and right time before the dotcom bubble popped.

Capitalism, darwinism, stratification (in geology), etc. are probably special cases of a more general "selection + fixation" process.

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

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

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1780937997?keywords=intensi...

Another excellent book on this topic that echo's your viewpoint in Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers.

I could imagine Mark Zuckerberg yelling into a phone that "Privacy is NOT A PRODUCT !!!".

IDK for him it may be more of a commodity: he buys it low and sells it high. Unfortunately once you've traded yours to him for some beads and colorful trinkets, you can't buy it back.

I mean let's not crucify Zucky for being a faithful adherent of the Google Gospel on Privacy.

Everything Facebook learned about mining and selling -- they learned from Googs.

"Beads are worth more than money on Bourbon Street."

They don't buy low-sell high like a simple trader, they are more like a manufacturer buying the raw material and processing it by adding context and selling the material as a finished product.

"Facebook.... <story is yet to be written> but the same thing will happen to them." -amen! Their big screw up is not supporting a vibrant market for apps. Zuck says he wants "to be electricty" but it seems he also wants to tightly control what is plugged in and how it's used. How come I can't access messenger with a 3rd party app? Why can't all kinds of cool startups build their business on the FB "platform"? Why not be more open, when Apple allowed Google Voice in the App Store all the carriers had to hasten their move to data based pricing... it was a revolution but Apple allowed it. Facebook will not ever let their power, position or business model be challenged by apps in any serious way.

As soon as your software becomes a platform your ad revenues disappear. See: Twitter.

Twitter is a full step worse to developers than FB is. Sure it's rough for Zynga, but can you name anyone who's built a real business on top of twitter?

buffer

bit.ly

Hootsuite

A lot of companies have, and then Twitter shut down their access. Twitter is the poster child for "Don't build software in another company's backyard."

Great example: Datasift.

Tweetbot

Klout, and they were never shut out.

paper.li

> How come I can't access messenger with a 3rd party app?

Can't you? Adium claims it supports FB: https://adium.im/

The real question is whether I can access and present a Facebook newsfeed via 3rd party application. For example: Can I create a "1337h4x0rbook.io" that contains a hacker-focused social network, but feeds / filters based on things that are tech-y.

Can I?

Should be possible with FQL I think? Just query the stream table.

FQL has been deprecated since Graph API v2.1 (https://developers.facebook.com/docs/apps/changelog#v2_1), and will only be usable with <=v2.0 apps until October 30th 2016 (https://developers.facebook.com/docs/apps/changelog).

The Graph API has not longer the ability to retrieve the /home endpoint which contained the newsfeed, since v2.0. The only this a app can retrieve is the user's own posts.

The graph API has a feeds and posts endpoint that gives you the posts from any public Facebook page

A lot of groups with significant utility are private - e.g. groups surrounding car part sales

And users can remove themselves from the group's feed provided by the Graph API, even if the group is public.

This is the choice of the group so, of course, the content is not publically available via API. If a user logs in to your app with facebook credentials, you can access private group contents via API.

What's the problem here?

this is not the choice of the public group... any user of a public group can choose to have their data not available when someones query the API of that public group...

It used to work with Jabber, it doesn't work now.

It still works with XMPP. I'm connected with bitlbee right now.

Stopped working with Pidgin for me, switched to Trillian and it works fine. Caveats being it doesn't work with messages that include links and also group messages. 99% of cases it's fine.

> Zuck says he wants "to be electricty" but it seems he also wants to tightly control what is plugged in and how it's used.

So really he wants to be AT&T circa 1965. Nice work if you can get it.

I'm actually getting pushed away from Facebook. Nothing in my feed is particularly interesting anymore to me, it's about 50% political opinion, 20% ads, and the rest is usually nonsense. Facebook is generally a place where people post to show off about something, it's not entertaining anymore. I'm sure over the next few years, there will be alternatives that will schism the markets so there is always an opportunity for a startup with a good, catchy idea.

After I unfollowed all the irritations, I too found myself simply irritated with my facebook feed. I started asking myself, "Did this experience make my life better in some way?". After a few uses, I determined quite quickly that my life was indeed not better with it.

I haven't deleted my account, but I did remove it from my phone because it started aggressively notifying me of bogus status updates after it noticed my absence.

After a few days, I asked myself, "Is my life better without it?" Yes, no irritations from ego, politics or ignorance anymore.

Facebook has its uses (acquaintance address book, private message with people you know or knew, local groups) but don't try to make sense of the feed because it's hopeless, no matter how many tweaks they do to their algorithm it can never be more than an amalgamation of the lowest common denominator, IMO. Though I guess YMMV if you have extremely interesting acquaintances, but I'd be surprised.

Heh, I still remember how much I disliked the Feed when they introduced it. In retrospect, of course, I was wrong: no matter how much I thought it was a disaster, it was a huge reason for Facebook's rapid growth.

It'd be a bit amusing if what has been the reason for their growth eventually ends up being the reason for their decline.

I imagine even if you have extremely interesting acquaintances with interesting things to say, they are more than likely saying those things places other than Facebook.

I only follow groups where people post pictures of their pets. After a few weeks of exclusively interacting with posts from those groups, my feed is 95% cute dogs/cats and 5% close friends. My life is __definitely__ better for seeing all those animals, the happiness I derive from it is palpable.

Similarly, FB has kept me due to its platform for music. Not music itself, but most artists use FB as a central hub. Further, the events are spectacular for me. I have found no better way to discover events than crowdsourcing it, aka scrolling my FB feed.

> Facebook.... <story is yet to be written>

That WhatsApp acquisition ($19 billion) must have been made exactly because Facebook was thinking that WhatsApp really could have been their Facebook (for Google), their Google (for Microsoft) and their Microsoft (for IBM).

I would argue that was more of an expensive land-grab. Whatsapp was/is not an existential threat to Facebook.

If a messenger could overcome FB, snapchat might actually have a chance, but the key value proposition that FB offers is that it's your online persona. You have pictures up from all the years you been around, you have your friends' profiles to go check out at will, you can start a group, or make an event and know all your friends are already on Facebook to see it.

So why buy? Messengers have the highest retention rate. You can see them expanding upon it by integrating FB profile + allowing you to install "apps" or "plugins" that do X/Y/Z. There is a Chinese company, WeChat, that has made billions on this model. I'm sure FB would like to as well, but with it integrated with FB login etc..

Downvoters: Genuinely curious how I'm wrong if you feel like throwing in your 2 cents.

I think you mean tencent/ wechat

Thanks, yes I did (edited)

I don't know, WhatsApp actually has mostly replaced Fb in my friends and family circle at least. I think it was a smart and timely acquisition (whether overpriced, I cannot say.)

> You have pictures up from all the years you been around,

In practice, people care very little about this - they want the world to know they were in the Taj Mahal last Sunday or their baby started walking yesterday, but older pictures are generally forgotten, and sometimes even a nuisance for various reasons.

> you have your friends' profiles to go check out at will,

and yet almost never do

> you can start a group,

as you can on WhatsApp

> or make an event and know all your friends are already on Facebook to see it.

This is one use case that is indeed better on Fb, though just posting and gathering replies on WhatsApp seems to suffice in 80% of cases.

(Btw, I'm not among the downvoters.)

You make solid points, but just as people's attics become cluttered with crap that they never use but are reluctant to throw out, I think you could argue users innately feel the same with their personal photos / friends / posts on FB.

I was confused about downvotes because I was at -2 for awhile (maybe I offended snapchat employees ;), but I appreciate you rebutting me. I do believe if there was to be a huge contender to Facebook, it would need a messaging component to grow out of. However, I still do not believe FB made the purchase primarily out of fear of competitive threat. I think FB Integration in a tencent model can make them more money than FB ads (while driving more targeted FB ads).

Why couldn't WhatsApp just (yes, the tech is hard, but getting massive amounts of subscribers is way harder) build a social network for all it's subscribers? Migrate photos, don't abuse your users like Facebook....I think it was a legit threat.

WhatsApp is huge in India. Most of the friend use it more often then facebook. If there is any conversations going on then its on whatsapp.

I think it also addresses a very crucial point often overlooked: the market will adopt & adapt the easiest tool to satisfy a need, rather than the best tool for the job. Databases are far better suited to maintaining - say a membership list, and FB Groups are far inferior, but are much easier - hence will be adopted, tweaked and repurposed in a hacky way to accomplish the task. The tool is adapted to the job at hand because you already know how to use it. Yes, it is true - when you have a hammer everything does look like a nail.

> Google didn't notice the importance of social networking before Facebook did.

Google Buzz? Wave? Orkut? Don't remember the exact timeline for all of those (maybe some were slightly after Facebook?) but I find it difficult to suggest they were late to the game. It was more like they didn't figure out how to play it well.

slightly? Wave was 6 years later, Buzz was 7.

You left out the one that was founded the same year as FB.

Google launched Orkut at almost exactly the same time as Facebook, and it was initially much more successful. (Google was a huge company, not a dorm-room start-up, and nost people couldn't join Facebook even if they wanted to.)

Friendster and, later, MySpace were popular before Orkut and Facebook, so social networking was already a thing.

Facebook was just much better than MySpace, Orkut and G+. And it still is.

>[M]ost people couldn't join Facebook even if they wanted to.

This was the brilliance of early Facebook. By initially limiting membership to only hip young influencers, and only gradually expanding to less hip/young/influential groups, they successfully created scarcity and huge word of mouth. It made the news every time a new group was allowed to join Facebook. People were coming banging at the gate to be let out of the "MySpace ghetto." People want what they can't have; Bernie Madoff created the most successful Ponzi scheme ever by making people have to come to him and beg to be allowed to invest.

The other brilliant idea of early Facebook, unlike Friendster/MySpace/Orkut, was that it was a disguised dating app (remember pokes?), but one that eliminated the gender ratio issue by being disguised, and the creepy old guys problem by limiting its membership to young people and limiting most interactions to "friends." Later, only after it had built up a critical mass of a large and loyal userbase, it was able to become even bigger by gradually pivoting to becoming a more traditional social network/blogging platform. And Instagram now exists to fill the disguised-dating-app role in their product portfolio. Snapchat is pivoting much the same way, albeit more jarringly.[0]

[0] http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-how-snapchat-built-a-...

> limiting membership to only hip young influencers

That may have been an unintended consequence, but the genius move was to bootstrap the online social network with existing offline social networks (and getting the date integration - email addresses - for free!). Somewhat ironically, privacy (such as it follows strict exclusivity) was a central feature of early Facebook. No other social network did anything like it, they were all free-for-alls.

It actually wasn't limited to "hip young influencers".

It started with people who had a Harvard email address (including staff). It expanded via Ivy League universities, then all US universities and colleges, then US high schools, before finally opening up to the public.

It seems like you just listed off the segments of the population that tend to be considered the "hip young influencers". Did you not? College and high school students. My guess was the parent probably was speaking in generalities a bit, students were the vast majority of users.

Well, there are nightclubs that you can only get into if you are a hip young influencer. Facebook didn't require anything like that, just an .edu email address. That let in a lot of very un-hip people, and a smattering of oldies.

If you were running a nightclub, I think you'd appreciate the distinction between "let in hip young influencers" and "let in anyone with a student library card". ;-)

Google didn't launch Orkut. Orkut did. Google only acquired it later, from what I recall. And then they let it rot and failed to see what they had.

Friendster was initially quite popular and not a bad product. But again, it was left to rot and it became slow, like unusably slow, and uncool. And then MySpace took its audience.

> Google didn't launch Orkut. Orkut did. Google only acquired it later, from what I recall

nope: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orkut_B%C3%BCy%C3%BCkk%C3%B6kt...

Facebook won, because Murdoch (Time Warner) bought MySpace and started to milk it, instead of investing more money. MySpace was written in the ill-fated Coldfusion language and web framework and porting MySpace to a newer dotNet based Coldfusion version paved their way to a slow unstable server platform, years long stagnation, very high Microsoft product license costs and so. MySpace stagnated, that's why Facebook had the chance to win. And MySpace had the chance early, because Friendster stagnated because they could scale their website to keep up with their growth.

As someone who uses both Facebook and G+ occasionally, I find Facebook to be vastly inferior in terms of interface, functionality, and mobile applications. The main reason G+ or any other company will have trouble competing on features (which are easily added) is simply userbase and lack of interoperability.

With something like webmail you can switch providers based on your preferences but nobody else needs to do anything. You can keep emailing the same people like you always have. But with Facebook-style communications networks, you have to use their service to communicate with people on it. And since Facebook was the first to really get everyone to join (not just the teens and twentysomethings who had Friendster and Myspace pages), it has that critical mass of users.

So even if I think the G+ app runs better and looks nicer on my phone or the service does a better job of letting me specify who sees my posts, it won't make a bit of difference if I want to have a group chat or event planning page with 10 friends and Facebook is the only platform we all have in common. I don't own Google stock and I'm surely not going to start pestering friends and family to pull up stakes and move to G+ because I like it better. And that will be the case for a while I think...at least as long as the closed-network Facebook-style services are concerned.

I don't see them being unseated until something new really takes off the way the current form of social networks replaced mass email chains for people sharing links, pictures and weekend plans with friends and family.

I remember getting pulled into Facebook because classmates tagged me in photos. Then when I signed up, it was extremely useful because you could see and meet other people in classes for study groups, etc.

It was also great at delivering status updates, well at least until people started saying "John Smith is." lol.

The other powerful thing Facebook did that no other social network did was handle growth. Friendster and Orkut, they were painfully slow to use even in their early days.

Very very true. Orkun was HUGE in Brazil. I had immigrated to Australia when it became popular and no one in Aus had heard of it, Facebook started surfacing a least 18 months later and for a time I had Brazilian friends on Orkut and everybody else on Facebook. What convinced most of my Brazilian friends to switch was the ability to tag people in photos and poke people.

Yep, poking was really important.

Orkut was hugely succesful in some places. Yuuuge.

> "Search is NOT A PRODUCT!!!"

I suppose they were right in one way. Google's product is search advertising.

Yep. In an absolute sense, Google's search engine is nothing but the honey that attracts what Google is actually selling. More or less a tourist attraction (albeit useful in its own right). This is supported by the fact that Google has started to diminish the integrity of the results to "sell" more to advertisers (by adding more sponsored results over time).

No, their (main) product is search. Advertising is how they monetize it. The Tribune Co.'s product is news, monetized through advertising. Conde Nast's product is magazines, monetized through advertising.

Just because advertising pays for the operation of a service, doesn't make the service not the product.

And yeah, I understand that Google also sells advertising as a separate item from their search engine, but that's not what parent anecdote was referring to.

Not really - their search product is optimized to be better for advertisers - not for consumers. If it wasn't about advertising, search would put a lot more advanced capabilities for analyzing the index and the results into the hands of users.

What search features are you missing?

searching for special characters, e. g. ~=

In the early days of Google, they used to be a `link:URL` option which returned pages that link to URL. e.g. `link:https://news.ycombinator.com` would return search results of webpages that link to HN.

I had to abandon a project when they stopped supporting that...

They claim to provide link: functionality within Info: operator. https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?p=adv_op...

Edit: Actually link: still works also

Indeed, there seems to be some support for `link:HASH:URL` search operator, but only works for very large volume websites, e.g. it works on news.ycombinator.com but not on small and medium websites.

still... it could be partially useful.

Search is not a product for Google since they do not sell it. No matter how much everyone in the world might (including Google) categorize it as such. Products are sold. The only product they sell in relation to their search engine is an advertising platform. That is by definition the product.

So what is NBC's product? Ads?

I would guess that's not the common perception.

Their product is advertising, their delivery mechanism is television content.

A TV network's product is television content, their monetization strategy is advertising. The delivery mechanism is cable / airwaves.

Sure there are secondary economic effects and markets that complicate the picture. But the basic business model of a television network isn't all that different than a regular company that sells their products directly.

Yes, but the product being sold is broadcast time slots, not audio/video.

If that's true, then what's their programming called?

Programming is their product, and customers buy it by paying attention (or to netflix, hulu, comcast, etc more directly). Attention is the currency, and ads let them exchange attention for USD.

They don't even make the ads. Their product, like Google's is eyeballs.

So AMC and HBO are making different things? No, of course not. They both produce content and distribute it through cable networks. One of them charges advertisers to deliver the product to viewers, while the other one charges the viewers directly.

To be fair, if you're an advertiser, then the product is eyeballs. But if you're a pair of eyeballs, then the product is the content. They're not mutually exclusive. Same with google. If you're a searcher, then the product is results. If you're an advertiser, then the product is relevant searchers.

Don't I pay with my attention to their ads?

Granted I don't hand cash over, but the user is still paying if you really want to stick with "products are paid for" argument

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe a product is something produced. They produce a search engine, they serve ads on the search engine. Advertisers produce the ads. The ads are a product other than googles unless it is a Google ad.

Advertising "slots" are google's product, just like physical billboard installations are a product of ClearChannel etc. AdWords is the mechanism Google uses to sell this product.

Search is not a product, users are. The product they sell is searcher eyeballs. That product is sold to advertisers.

Yeah, I've heard that line before, but it's about as useful as insisting that movie theaters' product is overpriced popcorn and soda. The movies just happen to be there to drive traffic.

Yeah, all of that is true, but it misses the point entirely. The product that is 100% responsible for people going to the movie theater is movies. The product that drives everyone to Google is search. The fact that the revenue isn't directly related to the product doesn't make the product not the product.

> The fact that the revenue isn't directly related to the product doesn't make the product not the product.

That is exactly what makes it a product.

Product - Definition - an article or substance that is manufactured or refined for sale. e.g."dairy products"

In this case, the product refined for sale is the users.

Search is one of Google's products and not all products are sold directly as a revenue source.

A product is anything that can be offered to a market that might satisfy a want or need. That nobody actually pulls out their checkbook and pays for a Google search doesn't mean it's not a product and that there's not a market for search.

Not worth responding to because it's all semantics. You define product as something that must be sold. Others define it differently.

Okay folks, Google's one and only product is TRAFFIC.

Search, Maps, Mail, Android are given away free as their competitive strategy of generating huge volume of traffic.

Google's business model is to charge their customers the possibility to redirect some of that traffic. And because advertising is speculative they can reach high profit ceilings.

It's an old-school dot-com point of view. Own eye balls, monetize clicks.

Facebook went and ate Google's lunch by following their playbook and improved upon it by focusing their product around SOCIAL ACTIONS.

Facebook produces huge volumes of interactions. Every like, every heart, every comment, every follow. By the time Google got around moving the battleship they've already lost.

You want to be the next big thing?

What is that one thing everyone does all the time? Catch that.

A product is something that is produced. You don't have to sell it.

Search is a product. In economic terms, it is called: A Loss Leader.

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

Search is sold at $0, to drive customers into the Store where they can see the real product.

People I know under 18 seem to barely even use Facebook. They instead heavily use more segmented apps like Snapchat and Kik to constantly engage with their friends. This is just my observation, but perhaps Facebook will soon be thought of as something only used by the out-of-touch older generation.

The under 18s eventually become the older generation ;-)

They leave college, get married, and within a few years they are posting baby pics.....

But will they do that on Facebook, if none of their friends are on it? Possibly, but that's not a given. Hm, maybe, they will get on Facebook because that's what the grandparents know and use, and Facebook will draw in a generation of parents that way??

Hard to say. I can actually see it happening at the moment (my son's school friends are having babies now). Whether that will transfer to the next generation is another matter, but Facebook's user base and engagement levels are still growing.

Something with 1.5 billion users isn't likely to disappear in a hurry.

Since Facebook already owns Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus Rift, and can afford to buy any startups it wants, even a decline in core Facebook use wouldn't be terminal.

> Mark Z may look at the early-stage product himself and conclude that it's not anything special.

I think he already did and bought Instagram & Whatsapp. Yea real threat is when they miss the opportunity.

Good point!

Of course, Microsoft itself bought into many markets once upon a time. While Excel isn't one where that was the case, its sister app PowerPoint started as Microsoft's first major acquisition.

The point is, you can have that vision for a while, but eventually the market changes such that the threat (or opportunity) to your business isn't so direct to be obvious like Instagram was to Facebook.

> but eventually the market changes

Yup. Classic example of innovator's dilemma. These are the opportunities startups need to constantly find and solve.

Proof that simple ideas seem so simple on the surface yet become these big opportunities. What you do with the idea/initial success is what separates these successful companies.

> Bing has hardly dented Google's search marketshare.

Bing has 21% market share vs. 64% for Google.

This is surprising, I guess having it has an IE default really has more of an impact then I expected. I wonder how much the amazon gift card thing helped as well.

Not really. Before Bing had 20%, Yahoo had 20%. Now Yahoo search is powered by Bing. MS pretty much bought the marketshare with the Yahoo deal and Yahoo was happy to have someone else do the heavy lifting on search. I believe Yahoo search is also the default on Firefox now.

IE defaults can only take you so far.

As far as I'm aware of the data, Bing's mostly been eating non-Google market share, e.g. Yahoo, rather than denting Google significantly. Back in 2008 Google was also at 64%, but Yahoo was at 20%. Now it's Bing.

default windows search. people who never change it because it just works (well enough)

Only in the US. World-wide, Google's search market share is around 90%.

Yup. I don't know if anyone researched it, but I bet it highly correlates with browser usage. On a couple of websites I run, I notice that IE market share is much higher in the US than Europe.

> Microsoft couldn't beat Intuit Quicken with MS Money but they did crush Netscape with IE.

Microsoft tightly integrated IE with Windows, leveraging their OS monopoly in order to beat Netscape. I don't believe MS built a superior product.

>I don't believe MS built a superior product.

Whether you do or don't believe it, it's whether they did, and yes they did. Users overwhelmingly chose to not purchase Netscape products which killed their revenue and shut down the company. The competition was free vs paid, and as often happens, paid will fail. If it was free vs free, maybe Netscape would have had a shot.

Microsoft had the luxury of offering it for free because of revenue from Windows and Office.

I could agree that the browsers were at least comparable, until Netscape disappeared and MS had little incentive to improve IE.

Which led to feature stagnation until the Firefox rose from the ashes...

It has a well-deserved bad reputation now, but Internet Explorer 3-6 were, pretty indisputably, far superior products to the competition from Netscape. And not just because they were free and bundled with Windows. Of course the undead Netscape-as-Firefox would later end up for its own part becoming far superior to IE6 back in IE's near-abandonware period.

IE won the competition on Apple Macintosh where both browsers were competing on even footing. (Neither was associated with the OS maker; Apple shipped both on system CDs.)

I 100% believe IE 5 was a far superior product than the competing Netscape 4.x. Previous to IE 5, maybe it's debatable.

I don't know if you were around then, or just speaking out of MS hate... but in the late 90s IE was the superior product. So much so that I often missed it because I was a Linux user and so didn't have access to it; Netscape had gotten really really terrible. Until Firefox came out the better option was IE.

I worked in a shop in 2000/2001 that was doing early Ajax type stuff (for a dashboard that controlled some embedded hardware.) It wasn't possible to port it to Firefox even at that point, even at that point IE had some leg up.

Later, MS let IE6 bit rot forever. And it was loathsome.

I remember well when IE 5 came out. I really, really wanted to use Netscape 4 but IE 5 was just so much better.

But this does not mean that the Facebook will fail in its current use case.

You are most likely currently using an IBM-compatible PC running Microsoft Windows on which you run Google for searches and Facebook to reach friends.

There are some losers in those stories and they are losing to direct competition: IBM is losing on profits because they made their system open and anyone can build IBM compatible PCs, Microsoft is losing because people were for some strange reason ok with Apple creating a closed operating system (iOS) where they take 30% of any transaction that runs on it. Microsoft are trying to change this with Windows 10 and UWP, but hopefully it will fail just like Bing.

Facebook has been doing a good job trying to disrupt itself. I"m talking about the acquisitions of Instagram, WhatsApp, and, probably most importantly, Oculus.

You're right -- this has always been true. The only people bummed out by it are the people trying to recreate Facebook's core value proposition (maintaining a digital representation of our meatspace relationships) themselves. But the reality is that the available market space for "social" is very small because Facebook occupies so much of it with a very general purpose product.

This has always been the case in the startup world too: you always look at markets over $10B with caution, because that's big enough to interest AGAF (Apple/Google/Amazon/Facebook) if they're already in an adjacent market. Your only hope is to target a less-profitable sub-sector of that market, develop expertise and hope that AGAF didn't bring their A game to that market (in which case, your company makes an excellent acquisition target at crazy valuations as AGAF bid against each other!)

Facebook is already being displaced by Snapchat, people don't want to share their lives with every single person they meet, Snapchat solves this problem. It's also a mobile-first social network and difficult enough to keep the older crowd away, while building a massive user base of the younger generation. The facial filters feature will 100% try to be copied by Facebook with their recent acquisition of MASQRD, but it's too late, because they don't fundamentally think of social networking the same way. I was at the airport and I spotted at least 3x as many people using Snapchat over Facebook. If you don't have it already, do yourself a favour and read this http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-how-snapchat-built-a-...

> Mark Z himself may look at the early-stage product and conclude that it's not anything special.

And maybe he is even using it right now... I am thinking about Slack...

I wonder if every time Nathan Myhrvold googles something he thinks, "... fuck".

The Innovator's Dilemma:

http://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Chang...

> In hindsight, it was a massive miscalculation as

Assumes the OS would have been as widespread as it was w/o the licensing that MSFT ended up doing (and it would not have been). That is what it made it the defacto standard operating system.

Meh? Their business is getting your attention so they can sell it to advertisers. They're also not stupid. That attention doesn't have to exist on FB. They can just acquire it - whatsapp, instagram, etc.

Still a fan of OS/2!

Yea, the fiasco with OS/2 2.0 in particular is more complex than this, with both Microsoft and IBM being involved. It used to be my favorite topic.

"blindsides [Facebook]"? How about brain-playback of emotional states with VR experiences to relive your friend's lives?

What's your source for that "Search is NOT A PRODUCT!!!" quote?

I read a dozen books about Google's origins many years ago and I thought I got it from that. Searching for it today, the closest equivalent source I could find was Myhrvold talking to Joe Kraus in 1995[1]. It's possible that Myrhvold repeated that lecture again to Larry and Sergei which I read in the Google books, or I misremembered and shifted the target of that quote from Excite to Google. I didn't read any book specifically about Excite so not sure why I would have done that. However, it's also possible the authors writing about Google weaved in a side note about Excite which my brain merged into the "Google story". Hopefully, my imperfect recall does not detract from the point that the smart guys at Microsoft misjudged what "search" could become.

[1]https://books.google.com/books?id=ktm885vGIXEC&pg=PA68&dq=go...

> Facebook.... <story is yet to be written> but the same thing will happen to them.

One thing to consider is that Mark is very aware of this based on his purchases of companies like Instagram. At the moment it seems like facebook wants to try and buy anything they perceive to be that new up and comer.

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