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Comment by filoleg | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, that’s the exact same sentiment I remember reading about Zuck on HN around the time Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions happened. People were saying it was one of the dumbest business decisions, that Zuck is just desperate and without any brain trying to spend his FB money on acquisitions before FB inevitably dies of irrelevancy, etc.

Look at today, and I think most people would agree that acquiring whatsapp and instagram back then was a great business decision on his end.

And, in my eyes, the whole Meta thing makes way more sense to begin with than those acquisitions did.

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They were great acquisitions because Facebook failed to compete in those markets. Facebook continues to fail to compete in the youth market. I don't think failing to innovate and then buying your way out of the hole is a sign of particular acumen.

And they're still failing to innovate. Facebook now will be "retooling" toward "serving young adults the north star, rather than optimizing for older people." https://twitter.com/sarafischer/status/1452744573084708869

In practice what this means is that they have the same problem they did before, but antitrust scrutiny means they can't buy their way out of it this time.

>I don't think failing to innovate and then buying your way out of the hole is a sign of particular acumen.

I mean this is classic moving of goals posts - the only measure of acumen the CEO of a publically traded company is that little number called the share price. whether he buoys that number by brain-genius innovations or by brain-genius acquisitions, he's still demonstrating brain-genius business acumen (the proof of this seemingly tautological claim is that there are plenty of other companies that have failed to acquire their way out of irrelevance).

Even granting him that WhatsApp and Instagram were indeed savvy purchases, I think it is fair to say that purchasing nascent competitors is no longer a tool available to Facebook. Both because antitrust scrutiny and because those competitors likely don’t fear Facebook’s copycat routine like they once did.

New product launches have indeed gone poorly. This certainly looks terrible to my eyes. Time will tell but skepticism is warranted.

Not at all.

I consider this in particular deeply incorrect: "only measure of acumen the CEO of a publicly traded company is that little number called the share price". And I'm hardly alone here. Indeed, the whole reason Facebook is in public doghouse right now is Zuckerberg's focus on dominance and profit without regard to little externalities like genocide. So you may have different goalposts for him, but that doesn't mean I've moved anything.

If I'm trying to understand somebody's acumen, I want to see what they can do on their own. As someone else pointed out, Zuckerberg didn't even really have the one idea that he successfully exploited. He's rich, sure, but, "He's so rich that he must be a genius" is pretty far from my criteria for genius.

>And I'm hardly alone here. Indeed, the whole reason Facebook is in public doghouse right now is Zuckerberg's focus on dominance and profit without regard to little externalities like genocide. So you may have different goalposts for him, but that doesn't mean I've moved anything.

you are moving goalposts you just don't see it. We're talking about business acumen, not scientific acument or mathematical acumen or ethics acumen. That FB is in the "public doghouse" is about as meaningful an observation as "the post office loses money every year" or "NASA can't afford to pay its engineers as much as FAANG" or "the ACLU has never successfully tried a personal injury case". The only public that matters here are the public markets and they think zuckerberg is a genius (this recent blip not withstanding).

>I want to see what they can do on their own.

I mean that's your definition and you're welcome to it but for the rest of the world there is M&A.

>"He's so rich that he must be a genius" is pretty far from my criteria for genius.

to which i leave you with a quote

>Why do you think the same five guys make it to the final table of the World Series of Poker every year? What, are they the luckiest guys in Las Vegas?

But that's exactly my point. Zuckerberg isn't starting fresh every year. That's the sort of comparison I'd love to see. He's a guy who won very big based on some lucky choices at 19. And he's never started a fresh tournament since.

In contrast, look at Steve Jobs. He's a fine example of "Once you're lucky, twice you're good." And more than twice, really. Started Apple, got pushed to the side Created the Macintosh and the LaserWriter and got booted. Helped get Pixar going. Started NeXT, which was a relative failure, but whose tech set him up nicely for an acquisition. Acquihired back at Apple and turned it into the juggernaut it is today. Say what you want about him, and I'll say plenty negative, but he clearly has skills.

That's the kind of writeup I'm looking for about Zuckerberg. That all I'm getting is bluster and "but he's very rich" is its own kind of answer, I guess.

> We're talking about business acumen

Yes, we are. But your definition is a relatively narrow one where dominance and profit are the only measures of business success. I get why that's a popular definition here. But even here, it's not the only one. If the public markets are all that matter to you, fine, but at least try to recognize their are other criteria.

>But that's exactly my point. Zuckerberg isn't starting fresh every year.

every morningl m-f, the markets open and FB starts fresh like every other ticker. every evening FB is either up or down. enough down days and zuck would be out. the fact that FB is up and to the right for almost 10 years exactly indicates that zuck wasn't just lucky.

Oh, starting with fifty billion in cash, a trillion-dollar valuation, and a monopoly on a key segment of a newly important industry is starting fresh, is it?

You aren't even trying to understand my point here, and you have reduced yours to absurdity, so I'm done.

Not that I want to compliment Zuckerberg, but "buy what you can't build", "know what you can't build", and "reasonably estimate the value of a young company" all seem like business savvy to me. Warren Buffet could be accused of simply buying his way into a huge conglomerate, but instead he's celebrated as a wise investor...

> I don't think failing to innovate and then buying your way out of the hole is a sign of particular acumen.

I guess Apple failed to compete and innovate when they acquired NeXT and Beats. Or Microsoft failed to innovate as soon as they acquired GitHub and Xamarin. /s

Very senseless acquisitions that have no long term strategy or reason behind it to sustain the future of the business or to compete in the market. /s

The reason that Apple had to buy NeXT was that they were absolutely failing internally to innovate. They tried for years to build a next-generation OS and were incapable. The acquisition was not a sign of success, but desperation.

Indeed, part of that acquisition was firing the then-current CEO. So as an example, I think it better serves to point out why we should question Zuckerberg's performance.

IG and WA were already wildly popular on a global scale when they were bought, though. People clearly wanted those. Is anyone on board with this “metaverse” thing outside of SV? To me this seems less like the IG and WA acquisitions, and more like the much hyped Facebook Phone and Facebook Home projects (RIP).

I think it's even worse... does anyone outside of Facebook and the press take their Metaverse demos seriously?

Everyone I know and work with universally thinks they're a joke. They've spent how much money on this janky uncanny nonsense? You'd think they'd at least stumble into one redeeming quality, but it escapes them.

I think a version of the meta verse will arise eventually, but when have you ever known a major innovation to come from a tech company that is already huge in a relatively unrelated area? They just get bogged down and start eating themselves.

> when have you ever known a major innovation to come from a tech company that is already huge in a relatively unrelated area?

Xerox (modern computer), AT&T (Unix), Sony (PlayStation), Google (Maps, GMail), Apple (iPhone), Amazon (AWS)

I don't think this is that unrelated. There are certainly plenty of examples of things about this related to a company's primary focus. There are several Amazon products that are pretty huge since they started as just "books" (Echo, Kindle, AWS), Netflix streaming after DVDs, the entire ecosystem of iOS devices after starting with Macs.

I agree that Facebook and Zuch can't be that stupid.

But for me, I can't see this working. There is no VR game that really killed it. I also don't see which generation would actually be into this.

So it's not a "idiots!", but more of a "what am I missing here?".

Will be interesting to see this play out

I've got a group of 6 of us that play Echo Arena on the Quest 2 about 3 hours every week. Beat saber is also a fun game, but does get a bit stale for most people after a couple weeks.

None of these are VR's Halo, but it seems that VR is getting out of the tech demo/hobbyist space and into a broader market appeal. If facebook keeps iterating and pushing out quality improvements at the current price point it's just a matter of time.

> I also don't see which generation would actually be into this.

Roblox has more than 200 million daily active users; 67% of them are under 16 [1]. Where will they go when hormones hit and blocky avatars no longer seem all that compelling?

[1] https://backlinko.com/roblox-users

> Where will they go when hormones hit and blocky avatars no longer seem all that compelling?

To college, where actual humans will be available for porking at all hours. If this Meta thing is a success, there might not be a following generation.

My kid plays Roblox. We have all kinds of devices here: xbox, Pc, tablet and mobile phones. Guess where he plays it on... yeah, on his mobile phone.

And how he communicates with his friends, no video, no calls, but just chat text.

I honestly don't see this generation move to intense communication/experience, when they now prefer the most casual tech.

> the exact same sentiment I remember reading about Zuck on HN around the time Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions happened

Don't want to downplay it, but having access to all the info users give to FB is like insider-trading. They know very well what is trending, what is growing and what is going nowhere.

The main difference is that Metaverse is something the want to build from scratch, not something that already exists like Insta and WhatsApp, so they don't have that insider-trading info.

>To be fair, that’s the exact same sentiment I remember reading about Zuck on HN around the time Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions happened. People were saying it was one of the dumbest business decisions, that Zuck is just desperate and without any brain trying to spend his FB money on acquisitions before FB inevitably dies of irrelevancy, etc. Look at today, and I think most people would agree that acquiring whatsapp and instagram back then was a great business decision on his end.

>And, in my eyes, the whole Meta thing makes way more sense to begin with than those acquisitions did.

That's a fallacy. It doesn't matter if Zuck had 2 consecutive successful predictions because his 3rd can be unsuccessful. Each event(situation) is specific and different.

Zuck and The Book have a lot of dumb, cringeworthy, failed initiatives that have nothing to do with those surprisingly high valued acquisitions a decade ago.

Also reminds me of all the skepticism surrounding the iPhone launch. I remember those joke ad spoofs making fun of the actual phone feature. Yet here we are and who uses actual voice calls anymore?

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