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Comment by joezydeco | Hacker News Reader

Intelligently growing up with a generation, or just trying to stay ahead of plain 'ol American competition?

McDonalds got it's kickstart because it was cheaper and faster (self-service) than drive-ins. Happy Meals kept parents from choosing other burger chains. Salads and low-carb choices came in response to dieting trends. Coffee was upgraded to avoid losing breakfast business to Starbucks.

But I'd wager none of these innovations would have come as quickly if there wasn't a business threat to the company.

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You make it sound as if it was bad of them to do so. Any financial organization responds to only one stimulus very quickly, that is financial. If they are responding to such stimuli and moulding their services accordingly where is the harm? The customers are at a net gain anyway.

No, it's not bad to do at all. Never tried to imply that.

But let's not give credit to "vision" and "foresight" when in reality it's just a company trying to keep up with the world as it changes.

The author of the original post was saying that Facebook was failing to do exactly that.

Using the McDonald's example, it could be akin to McDonald's making all of their burgers out of ground turkey because they got a huge deal with a turkey meat distributor, the customers saying "no, give us hamburger!" and McDonald's saying "fuck you."

What happens to those customers wanting hamburgers? They go to Burger King.

I appreciate your point, but you are confusing users with customers. For Facebook users are a product, advertisers are customers. Same is true for Google.

Yes,

The problem is: suppose they weren't making a profit on the hamburger and so serving the turkey was the only way they knew how to make profits. But also suppose that it would be quite hard for customers to switch to Burger King.

Then you have characterized something of the paradoxical condition of the Facebook. Making money while accumulating ill-will.

Well, to make the analogy a little more accurate, suppose they weren't making as much profit on the hamburger as they are by serving the turkey...

Facebook and Twitter both have the problem that they have to justify the amount of investment they raised, and both are doing things that are unpopular with their community (users for Facebook, developers for Twitter) to make a bigger business than the original things that got them popular can sustain.

Thirty-five or forty years ago, McDonalds got caught out serving kangaroo in their hamburgers. Much more recently it was found flavoring the french-fry oil with a bit of tallow, to the great offense of vegetarians and I think a few Hindus.

However, it has always been much smoother at the apology business than Facebook now seems to be.

The kangaroo thing is an urban legend. Think about it, why would shipping kangaroo all the way from Australia be cheaper than locally sourcing beef? Hell, kangaroo in Australia costs more than Australian beef.

And, kangaroo is actually a very lean meat, much better for you than beef. Plus kangaroos are much better for the environment, the don't fart methane, like cows do.

The real question is: in this metaphor, who is Burger King to Facebook's McDonalds?

You don't need 'vision' or 'foresight' to listen to your customers.

The introduction of healthy choices on the menu back this up. People don't want to eat food that's bad for them. McDonald's can either respond to this or wither away.

The point is that Facebook doesn't have the same competition...

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