Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by nabla9 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

nabla9

Of all big tech companies Fb is

- the least innovative,

- has the worst corporate governance,

- purest advertising company,

- The CEO is not good but has dominant share of votes.

Facebook is relevant only because they spend their way out of trouble and buy competition. The US and EU regulators are going to remove that tactics. Good luck getting EU approval for any new Whatsapp, Instagram acquisition.

There is no clear avenue for them to stop doing the negative things they do, but they are not even trying. They just treat it as PR problem.

View on HN

> the least innovative

While I'm not a Facebook fan, there are some counterpoints:

- they have singlehandedly saved the VR industry by going all in on cordless / standalone VR which has increased the accessible market by at least an order of magnitude.

- almost the entire world are using React and Pytorch as de facto standards / defaults now

I don't know how you would measure these against outputs from other tech companies but it is clear to me that a bunch of innovation is happening inside Facebook (whether you like it or not of course is another thing).

First is example of buying innovation from outside. Fb acquisition did not add innovation to Oculus. It was just throwing money to get into business.

Second is not their business innovation. It's open source. They do also good research.

Oculus was making a dumb tethered headset. Go and Quest was after Facebook.

Go was based entirely on Google's Daydream efforts. Hell, the Quest 2 still throws very Android ANR errors when a game crashes. Oculus's innovation into cordless and standalone is copied at best and outright plagiarism at worst. On top of this, the hardware itself it heavy on the head because they try to put it all in the visette. Sure, it might be aesthetically pleasing to just have one pair of goggles, but as a user I would much rather have a compute pack on my belt with a beefy heatsink to cool better hardware. If they did this they might even have the option of cordless body tracking in standalone VR before anyone else, but they won't because evidently Oculus still think they are making cardboard boxes.

Go had absolutely nothing to do with Daydream. It was based on their collaboration with Samsung.

> The CEO is not good

According to what? FB has had a tremendous growth.

According to every ethical standard there is. Zuckerberg bullied the Instagram and Whatsapp founders out of the company and now even Carmack is openly going against this ridiculous Metaverse idea

Network externality in social networks creates a situation where success is almost automatic once you cross certain threshold. FB did the initial growth well, then it has been mostly coasting and buying and shutting down competition using their market power.

Is the EU allowed to have a say when a US company buys another US company?

Yes. Alternative it to exit EU markets.

If a company wants to be international, they must do what regulators in their main markets say.

Yes, for a slew of reasons, including that the US wants its companies to have favorable access to the EU market.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com