Comment by joenot443
6 days ago
> that is the kind of mentality that pushed subpar products on the web for so many years
Famously, some of those subpar products are now household names who were able to stake out their place in the market because of their ability to move quickly and iterate. Had they prioritized long-maintainable code quality rather than user journey, it's possible they wouldn't be where they are today.
"Move fast and break things" wasn't a joke; Mark really did encourage people to build faster and it helped cement their positioning. Think of the quantity of features FB shoveled out between 2009-2014 or so, that just wouldn't have been possible if their primary objective was flawless code.
The code isn't the product, the product is the product. In all my years of engineering I've yet to have an end-user tell me they liked my coding style, they've always been more concerned with what I'd built them.
Facebook didn't solved any real problem, "Move fast and break things" is for investors not hackers.
Famously gmail was very good quality web app and code(can't say the same today) surely not the product of today's "fast iteration" culture
Meta has a 1.79T market cap, they definitely solved some very real problems to get there.
There are lots of companies doing well producing high quality products out of the gate today though, look at Linear.
Both approaches are valid for building sustainable enduring businesses.
> Meta has a 1.79T market cap, they definitely solved some very real problems to get there.
Sure exploiting human attention to sell them ads, it's not technological marvel, I'd say psychological
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Phillip Morris has a 238B market cap. What problems are they solving?
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Earlier than that, Facebook became ascendent because of quality. It was better than MySpace, the only real competitor at the time. The issue here is Facebook is not primarily a software product. It's a community, and the community was better than MySpace because it was restricted to pre-existing networks rather than taking any comer. I don't think Mark did that on purpose as a calculated decision. He just got lucky. When they eventually opened up and became just as shitty as MySpace had been, they were big enough to simply acquire better products that might have been competitors, and network effects locked them in for probably decades until their users die off and don't get replaced by younger people who never used Facebook.
I don't really see it as an example of what you're saying so much as an example of success as a product having to do with far more than explicit product features. You can see a similar dynamic in other natural monopoly markets. The NBA didn't necessarily do anything particularly right product wise, for instance. They just got the best players because basketball was historically more popular in the US than other countries, and the ABA made some stupid decisions that let the NBA win out in the US.
Hell, the US itself didn't do a whole lot "right" aside from not being in Europe when Europe decided to destroy itself, being better-positioned than other potential competitors like Canada, Mexico, and Australia simply because North America is best positioned to trade with both Europe and Asia and the US is more temperate than Canada or Mexico. But we sure like to tell ourselves stories about everything we did right.
Quality of product - Not quality of coding.
Yes, both impact each other, and if facebook was just shoddily coupled together it probably wouldn't be a great product, but so many engineers get into this mindset of needing finely tuned clean code vs a working product.
When people were switching, how many decided to use facebook because the coding style of the backend was really clean and had good isomorphism?
There's a balance with this, but so much of it's success was being at the right place at the right time, and if you spend a massive amunt of time not building product and just building good code, you're going to hit a failure.
Total side note, it's interesting seeing "Move fast and break things" become the dominant phrase vs what I remember initially as the "MIT vs New Jersey methods". Both describe the same thing where fast and sloppy wins vs slow and clean.