Comment by danpalmer
2 days ago
Zuckerberg either doesn't have the resolve for changing the business, or just keeps picking the wrong directions (depending on your biases).
First Facebook tried to pivot into mobile, pushed really hard for a short time and then flopped. Then Facebook tried really hard to make the Metaverse a thing, and for a while, but eventually Meta stopped finding it interesting and significantly reduced investment. Then AI was the big thing and Meta put a huge amount of money into it, chasing after other companies, with an arguably novel approach compared to the rest of big tech... but now seems to be backing out or at least messaging less commitment. Oh and I think there was some crypto in there too at one point?
I'm not saying that they should have stuck with any of these. The business may not have worked in each case, and that's fine, but spending billions on each one seems like a bad idea. Zuckerberg is great at chasing the next big thing, but seemingly bad at landing the next big thing. He either needs to chase them more tentatively, investing far less, or he needs to stick with them long enough to work out all the issues and build the growth over the long term.
For the past 15 years, mobile has been the main revenue source for Facebook. As big as Facebook is, they're at the mercy of the 2 competitors: Apple and Google. Apple has been very hostile to Facebook, because Facebook make a shitload of money off Apple's platform and they refused to pay a certain percentage to Apple - unlike Google who is paying 20B a year to access iOS users. Apple tried to cut Facebook off with ATT on iOS 14, but it didn't work.
Because of this, Zuckerberg has to be incredibly paranoid about controlling his company destiny, to stop relying on others' platforms to deliver ads. It would be catastrophic for Facebook to not be a main player for the next computing platform, and they're currently making a lot of money from their other businesses. Zuckerberg is ruthless and he is paranoid, he has total control of Facebook and he will use all the resources to control the next big thing. I think it comes down to this: Zuckerberg believes it's cheaper to be wrong than to miss out on the next platform, and Facebook can afford to be wrong (to a certain extend).
> For the past 15 years, mobile has been the main revenue source for Facebook. As big as Facebook is, they're at the mercy of the 2 competitors
Before mobile was this big, Facebook tried their own platform and bottled it. This was during the period that the market was still diverse, with Windows phones, Blackberries, etc.
They also tried to make mobile web a thing for a few years past when it was obvious that native apps were the way forward.
Facebook certainly did not have the resources and experiences to make a mobile OS at that point. Microsoft tried and failed, there was no space for a 3rd mobile OS.
> They also tried to make mobile web a thing for a few years past when it was obvious that native apps were the way forward.
This was one of the first friction Facebook encountered with Apple. They wanted to make their own store in the Facebook app on iOS, but obviously Apple said no. Maybe doing Facebook app in HTML5 was a way to protest against the way Apple was moving things forward, but again it didn't work, their app was crap and they rewrote everything in native.
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Meta Quest Store charges the same cut as Apple with stricter control in many ways.
Don't forget gaming back in the day! Facebook games started taking off, then Facebook decided that the _only_ way you could get paid on the Facebook platform was with Facebook Credits, and to incentivize Facebook as the gaming platform of choice, Facebook would give out free Credits to players to spend on Facebook games. Of course, if your game was the one they chose to spend those Credits on, you wouldn't actually get paid, not with promotional credits, what, are you crazy?
No, I'm not still bitter from that era, why do you ask?
Cory Doctorow has a compelling theory that the megatech companies have to appear to be startups, or else their share price reverts to normal multiples. Hence the continuous string of increasingly over-hyped "game-changing technologies" they all (not just Meta) keep rolling out.
VR, blockchain and LLMs have their value, but it's a tiny fraction of the insane amounts of money being pumped into these bubbles. There will be tears before bedtime.
Indeed, for big valley tech companies it's crucial to have a new business developing in the wings which has plausible potential to be the "next big thing." They're desperate to keep their stock price from being evaluated solely on trailing twelve month revenue, so having a shiny, ephemeral hype-magnet to attract inflated growth expectations is essential.
So far, it appears the psychology of investors allows the new thing to fail to deliver big revenue and be tacitly dropped - as long as there's a new new thing to replace it as the aspirational vehicle. Like any good mark in a con game, tech investors want to believe.
> as long as there's a new new thing to replace it as the aspirational vehicle. Like any good mark in a con game, tech investors want to believe.
Yea, but it seems like the new new thing needs to get progressively bigger with each cycle, which is why I think the shell game is almost over.
They really can't overpromise much more than they did with the AI hype-cycle.
It feels like a startup valuation in that having a down round is...not favored by investors; I feel like having a step-down in promises would also be problematic.
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Or every investor just expects the other investors will fall for this, but the result is the same: number go up so buy more. It could be no one really falls for it at all.
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> Cory Doctorow has a compelling theory that the megatech companies have to appear to be startups, or else their share price reverts to normal multiples.
Meta's P/E is about the same as S&P 500.
Nicely spotted.
I regard Meta and Google as ad agencies.
(I'm not smart enough to break out Amazon's and Apple's ad biz P/E separately.)
My quick spot check says Meta's P/E is more than "legacy" ad agencies and (much) less than Google's.
Just observations. I have no insights.
My opinion, based solely on vibes, is the online ad biz (Meta and Google) is more fraudulent than not. If true, than both are grossly overvalued, in that castles in the sky sort of way.
This may well be true, but my point is more that Facebook/Meta/Zuckerberg seem almost uniquely unable to turn the startups into great new businesses, when compared with the other big tech companies.
Amazon added cloud and prime, Microsoft added cloud, xbox, 365, Google added Chrome, Android, cloud, Youtube, consumer subscriptions, workspace, etc. Netflix added streaming and their own content, Apple added mobile, wearables, subscriptions.
Meta though, they've got an abandoned phone platform from years ago, a half-baked Metaverse that is being defunded, a small hardware business for the Quest, a pro VR headset that got defunded, a crypto business that got deprioritised, and an LLM that's expensive relative to open competitors and underperforms relative to closed competitors... which the tide appears to be turning on as the AI bubble reaches popping point.
> Facebook/Meta/Zuckerberg seem almost uniquely unable to turn the startups into great new businesses, when compared with the other big tech companies.
Really? Instagram, WhatsApp... the two most used apps & services in the world?
> Google added Chrome, Android, cloud, Youtube,
It's arguable how GCP is profitable, but chrome/android/yt are money-losing businesses if you exclude ad revenues.
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Maybe he can work on making Facebook not be such a piece of shit. I feel like he got his one lucky break and should just give up on trying to make more money. He already has billions. Is he proud of Facebook as a product? Because as a user it feels sluggish, buggy, inconsistent, and just full of low quality trash. I would be embarrassed if I was him.
That really seems to be the defining characteristic of the 21st century elite: they’re shameless and proud of it.
Only 21st century? Have you read any history at all?
Metaverse was a flop maybe, but meta makes something like $1 billion a week from its mobile apps, it'd be crazy to say that is not successful.
The fact that it was so successful, and that zuck picked mobile to be the next big thing before many of his peers and against what managers in the company wanted to do is probably what has made him now overconfident that he can do it again
By "pivot into mobile" I suspect the other poster is referring to Facebook Home, an ill-fated Android skin and line of smartphones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Home
No. Back when smartphones were still in the process of taking over the market, Zuck saw the adoption curve and realized that future ad revenue would be from phone scrollers.
At the time most features were designed and implemented first for desktop and later ported to mobile. He issued an edict to all hands: design and build for mobile first. Not at some point in the future but for everything, starting immediately.
Maybe this doesn't sound major, but for the company it was a turn on a dime, and the pivot was both well informed and highly successful in practice.
Call me classic and old school. But I call a company succuessfull if it actually does make more money than it spends. Everything else is just driving dept and economy but no actual success
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I think Meta's real talent is to make niche tech mainstream, and then as a result they get their ass kicked in that sector. They're getting pretty good at that.
>Then Facebook tried really hard to make the Metaverse a thing, and for a while, but eventually Meta stopped finding it interesting and significantly reduced investment.
That's a charitable description of a massive bonfire of cash and credibility for an end product that looks worse than a 1990s MMORPG and has fewer active users than a small town sports arena.
Compared to other recent bubbles (crypto, nfts, and ai), its practically quaint and lovable by comparison. About the only person it hurt is mark Zuckerberg and the marketing grifters that tried to start companies around it.
> Then Facebook tried really hard to make the Metaverse a thing...
An unforced error on the scale of HBO switching to MAX, except likely far more expensive. What is the Metaverse anyway?
man hbo's name changes are just so funny. I just searched, 4 name changes are wild.
It's the future!
The same as Zuck's bet on VR (remember Oculus?).
Similar to Zuck's promises of superintelligence.
Just one of the many futures wherein Meta poured a lot of money and achieved nothing.
I hope in their real future there is bankruptcy and ruin.
Short sighted. I wouldn't count VR out until the fidelity is good enough and cheap enough that everyone who has a smartphone can experience VR/AR.
If it still doesn't take off, fair.
But I bet the form factor will be glasses because now you can have a screen way bigger than a phone or monitor and the interface is way smarter (ai).
It's just a matter of when everyone can afford one
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It's important to analyze decisions within the context at the time, not the modern context.
When Facebook went into gaming, it was about the time they went public and they were in search of revenue. At the time, FB games were huge. It was the era of Farmville. Some thought that FB and Zynga would be the new Intel and MIcrosoft. This was also long before mobile gaming was really big so gaming wasn't an unreasonable bet.
Waht really killed FB Gaming was not having a mobile platform. They tried. But they failed. We could live in a very different world if FB partnered with Google (who had Android) but both saw each other as an existential threat.
After this, Zuckerberg paid $1 billion for Instagram. This was a 100x decision, much like Google buying Youtube.
But in the last 5-10 years the company has seemed directionless. FB itself has fallen out of favor. Tiktok came out of nowhere and has really eaten FB's lunch.
The Metaverse was the biggest L. Tends of billions of dollars got thrown at this before any product market fit was found. VR has always been a solution looking for a problem. Companies have focused on how it can benefit them but consumers just don't want headsets strapped to their heads. It's never grown beyond a niche and never shown signs that it would.
This was so disastrous that the company lost like 60%+ of its value and seemingly it's been abandoned now.
Meta also dabbled with cryptocurrencies and NFTs. Also abandoned.
Social media really seems to have settled into a means of following public figures. Individuals generally seem to interact with each other via group texts.
Meta has a massive corpus of posts, comments, interactions, etc to train AI. But what does Meta do with AI? Can they build a moat? It's never been clear to me what the end goal is.
> Meta has a massive corpus of posts, comments, interactions, etc to train AI
I question whether the corpus is of particularly high quality and therefore valuable source data to train on.
On the one hand: 20+ years of posts. In hundreds of languages (very useful to counteract the extreme English-centricity of most AI today).
On the other hand: 15+ years of those posts are clustered on a tiny number of topics, like politics and selling marketplace items. Not very useful unless you are building RagebaitAI I suppose. Reddit's data would seem to be far more valuable on that basis.
> Social media really seems to have settled into a means of following public figures. Individuals generally seem to interact with each other via group texts.
I wish Google circles were still a thing.
You're right about Instagram, I did forget them. That was a huge get. Was that skill or luck though?
Didn't they just buy it though? Then they proceeded to fuck it up just like they did to Facebook.
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He, as many other billionaires, confused luck for skill. Just because they were at the right time in the right place to launch something, doesn't mean their other ideas are solid or make sense.
Wouldn't it have been sexually exploiting the initial idea would have just been just a closed Myspace clone with not much path to success.
He never tried his secret sauce again. He never realized where his actual success was
Oh, I'm sure one day he'll chase the next big thing, but like the proverbial dog who chases the car, what will he do once he catches it?