Comment by disillusioned
16 hours ago
Yeah, but, just objectively speaking, look at how many _more_ business lines and units and actual PRODUCTS each of those other companies ship in comparison.
Meta has... Facebook. Instagram. Threads, if you want to count it. What'sApp. The ad-tech that powers those things. A black hole of a VR division that has since been eviscerated after billions burned. An AR/device divison that sells glasses. And a burgeoning supernova of an AI division, just one singular hire of which is responsible for $1.5B in pay (over 6 years).
Google/Alphabet has........ an entire consumer hardware family ranging from cameras to doorbells to smart displays to streamers, YouTube, YouTubeTV, Android, Chrome, Google itself, Gemini, GCP, Waymo, GoogleFi, Google Fiber, Ads, Infra/Analytics, Maps, dozens of other apps... on and on.
Microsoft has Azure, Windows, Office (each of which are obviously _suites_ of more complex software), Xbox, LinkedIn, Dynamics, Surface, etc.
If anything, Apple _might_ be a slightly closer analog to Meta in that they're just a bit more limited, but their hardware engineering side is obviously a massive part of that, supply chain, software, MacOS, iOS, all of their adjacent first-party apps, App Store, iCloud, AppleTV, retail...
Meta just... isn't in the same league in terms of pure surface area. Mark just leaned extremely hard into acquiring as much nascent talent as possible and hoped he'd have the use cases to make it make sense but was content to spend the money in the meantime on looking busy. Now that CapEx has to go to compute/DCs/GWs for their AI which... kind of no one wants? But he's going to bet as much of the company as possible to stay relevant and try to be a player in the space. He's just doing it in this tail-wagging-the-dog hyper-overpay-individual-researchers approach that, from the outside at least, seems extremely risky...
I am convinced Mark Zuckerberg does more harm than good for Facebook
like literally they lucked out on the landing the business model early but it feels it has been in an ongoing decline and everything else they have tried has failed spectacularly (and particularly things Mark has put his whole weight behind)
They never became anything more than the ad company
Alright, apart from Instagram, WhatsApp, Llama 1 & 2 and somehow managing to sell nearly 10M less nerdy google glasses what has Zuck done for FB?
Pretty sure they bought Insta and Whatsapp. I mean, that's not nothing, buying a successful business and keeping it successful for over a decade. But neither Zuck nor Meta made those platforms; they were both established successes in their own right before acquisition.
8 replies →
One step further. Besides Facebook itself whqt has zuck been visionary about ? Instw and WhatsApp was bought. He thought chatbots was the thing in ‘17, then abandoned it for VR and metaverse, all the while chatbots start taking off. Every time he’s in an interview he talks like he’s some savant, really he got lucky with fb and done nothing since
6 replies →
Lots of things, but he then chucked all the profits at a stupid idea that he even renamed the company for.
Look at Meta's profits by year.
1 reply →
build and tear down metaverse. zero sum.
The transition to mobile-first was a good call. Probably the last good call though. Oh, and buying Instagram.
And WhatsApp. And the VR glasses seem to be a success.
And whatsapp.
I think it’s hard to not have any kind of boss. There’s nobody to provide the critique needed to improve the products.
> to improve the products.
Meta had ~100B in EBITDA (or 60B in net income) for 2025. What critique does he need from a product/business standpoint?
Everyone has clients and if your employees aren't incompetent sycophants they can give you actionable feedback.
5 replies →
The only good things at Meta are the things they bought (Whatsapp and Instagram). They haven't made anything original in a long long time.
Besides selling democracy for pennies on the dollar, Zuckerberg knew what to buy before everyone else knew what it was worth.
In 2012, everyone around me was lauging at the absurdity of a 0 revenue photo app getting acquired for $1bn. My peers/superiors in the ad business thought Facebook would flail in digital marketing. Oops.
The metaverse might be a big pile of bollocks, but isn't the whole point of being a billionaire to indulge peculiar unpopular obsessions?
No he bought everything out of paranoia to shut out competition.
They tried organically to replicate instagram etc but they failed even though they had wayyyy more resources. Their attempts sucked. So their approach was to target for acquisition or copy features if they couldn’t.
There’s plenty of evidence of this re. His comms around those events.
1 reply →
Totally. I'm sure I'm not alone in saying that if I had to pick a FAANG to put all my retirement savings into Meta would absolutely not be my pick.
Heck, if I was forced to either short or invest Meta with all my retirement savings now betting on it's value in 25 years.. I'd short it.
Meta is going to have higher ads revenue than Google this year.
Social media is an extremely competitive landscape, with competitors rising overnight.
Google, Apple and Microsoft dominate the world with their products and platforms. Facebook & WhatsApp certainly doesnt.
6 replies →
> Heck, if I was forced to either short or invest Meta with all my retirement savings now betting on it's value in 25 years.. I'd short it.
Short of social media being classified as something like alcohol or cigarettes, you will lose money on this trade. You’re betting against ingrained human nature.
If you try and hold a short position for 25 years, you will lose all your money, even if you were right.
I'm convinced that 99.9% of folks online who claim they're going to "short a stock" have never actually shorted anything in their life.
> Heck, if I was forced to either short or invest Meta with all my retirement savings now betting on it's value in 25 years.. I'd short it.
Not a good idea. Meta has hundreds of leavers to find more profits from anywhere.
Apple also has an entire international retail arm.
And an entire desktop OS and desktop software suite in pretty much all categories to compete with Microsoft. Also their hardware business is roughly 50-100X the size of Google's hardware business in scale and distribution.
The headcount analog for Google is Apple. And if you subtract out the retail employees Apple looks surprisingly efficient, having much less non-retail staff than Google (although both heavily use contractors).
Meta on the other hand...is pretty much the definition of bloat.
It's been more than a few years since I worked at Apple, but they were always unique in the tech space in that their retail division dwarfed headcount. If I recall correctly all of OS X Lion was produced by around 3,000 engineers (and probably less, since I think that count included iLife and iWork).
1 reply →
> And an entire desktop OS and desktop software suite in pretty much all categories to compete with Microsoft.
Not even close, if you include Office and Mail/Outlook. And if you include corporate clients, Apple is just not on the map. I've gone from a Windows first company to an Apple first company, and it's a night and day difference when you see how well integrated things were for Windows.
I mean, individually you can say Teams sucks (terrible, really). And Outlook sucks as a consumer. But the way you can get all these things working with Office was very convenient.
> Apple _might_ be a slightly closer analog to Meta in that they're just a bit more limited
Seriously? Walk outside and see what people are holding in their hand.
Meta has Facebook which was OG enough. MySpace was the real movement although you could argue LiveJournal was before that. Instagram was bought, WhatsApp was too. So really all Meta has is Facebook, everything else has been synergy.
Apple / Google and as I hate to admit are innovators of the modern tech world. While they've bought their fair-share they still produce and create and have existed prior 00's. Two devices dominate the market and it's not going to change any time soon.
You either use iOS or Google. Urgh, this is how the world has become. Windows or Linux, X or Y; why did Z have to die.
By this logic you should factor that android was an acquisition, as were YouTube, doubleclick, deepmind and Waze
I forgot about that. Back to the drawing board.
Apple innovate in hardware.
What Google innovated during the last decade?
Apart from the Transformer architecture that enabled the AI boom/singularity/civilization-reshaping-event/whatever-this-is? Not much, I guess...