Meta leadership have rarely had a vision beyond “how do we capture the success others are having in this space”. I suppose that’s a vision in and of itself but not a very inspired one.
This is the case for most of their successful products:
- Facebook itself started this way for Zuck
- Instagram and WhatsApp were purchases to corner that market against incumbents, as is Thread
- Oculus was a purchase to try and get their own app ecosystem after their phone project failed.
They have brilliant engineers and put out interesting stuff, but I don’t think there’s a top down vision.
Take oculus, their vision has been scattershot and even Boz says they basically make tons of different product directions and then decide what goes to market. Which sure, can work, but that also implies they don’t have a North Star to shoot for. Quest Pro was a failure and they released three types of Oculus lines close to each other (Rift, Go, Quest) before realizing the Quest was the real success path.
Similarly with AI, their approach has been to throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. Like their celebrity AI chatbots ( https://youtu.be/sfdzkHawZLo?si=oCKAbFHjiOlFRKKh ) or sticking GenAI in every product without a specific user story.
Again, great engineering work in all of their pursuits. But if you analyze any given product venture, it’s always throwing ideas at the wall and hoping one catches.
In general this all feels right, but I don' think that a lack of a grandiose vision is necessarily a problem for a company (Facebook's mission of 'make the world more open and connected' boiled down to 'senator - we sell ads'). Product design is about delivering things that people want. Observing trends and trying to get ahead of them somehow is a big part of what makes for a successful product. The bigger issue for Meta right now is that they are not as effective at this game as they used to be. To some extent this might be an issue of brand (the Facebook portal was a great product but nobody trusts the company). But based on my experiences with their products I feel like this gets things backwards. People don't like their brand because their products suck (Apple sucks up way more personal data, but thousands of Apple fans will crawl from the woodwork to defend them) If their core products were good experiences things would be different.
The engineering talent at Facebook is truly top notch and while they are good on recruiting I think a lot of it comes from a culture of excellence on the technical side. But the product and UX directions of Meta feel off. Accounts alone has personally burned me. I have an Oculus quest that was effectively reset because of Meta's accounts transitions. My Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook accounts were all separate, and are all now partially merged but transition sucked for all of them with no benefit to me the user.
Yes, part of successful product design is skating to where the puck is (what consumers want), but vision is thinking multiple steps forward to get it where it needs to be (what consumers need but don’t know yet).
That account issue is precisely because meta doesn’t have vision. At best, they’re slightly better than Google, but they very much are cut from the same cloth of throwing multiple takes of something at the wall to see what works. Other companies do so internally, Meta and Google do so externally and go through many deadends as a result.
I don't fault them for taking risks and failing (I think at the time there was still an argument for VR, could be possible they were ahead of the curve). I think the tipping point is when they're actively pushing for things that degrade user experience.
Ahead of the curve? Their "virtual meeting" software presentation had graphics that made you look like a Nintendo Mii avatar from 2006, and couldn't draw arms or legs.
I dont understand why meta didnt pair up with vrchat/gamedev/game engine dev at the time. Sure they got John Carmack, but their presentation is so much worse. Its so hard not to draw comparison with the other half baked crypto metaverse.
Meanwhile Vive Index not only have Alyx but they even bring out Portal themed toybox to showcase the hardware.
Their execution was indeed almost comically bad. I suspect it was because they had really wanted to focus on the B2B market, so they made the most sanitised virtual world possible. The overall VR direction was not entirely ridiculous, although it was clear on the ground people were much more in love with the idea of VR than the reality of it.
The vision is simple: drive engagement to get you to give up more information about yourself to sell to advertisers and get your eyeballs on their app to see ads made by said advertisers.
If they can get you to do that to an AI, well, why not?
... besides the obvious risks to society and mental health, which Zucc has never cared about before.
> To me that’s the clearest possible evidence that the product people over there have basically given up.
Is it really though? I had my annual bubble-breaker family visit for the holidays and at least two of my family members would have totally gone for that.
Facebook the app/website is already dead, as only boomers and people like me (not yet boomers but not young, either) are now its only remaining users, while IG is going into the same realm of irrelevance, mostly because millennials (its main audience) have spiritually become boomers-like themselves.
As such, Meta is throwing everything at the wall hoping that something, anything, will stick.
You mean it’s a social network that advertises exclusively to people in their prime spending years?
Sounds like a roaring success to me. Looking at their financials, I’m right about that: https://valustox.com/META.
Our culture is obsessed with youth. But economically the young are not a great demographic to have frequenting your site:
- fashions change quickly
- they can be demanding
- they have no money
Contrast to a 40-60 y.o. with a net worth 100-1000x what it was when they were 19, and who are set in their ways, and one of those ways is to go on Facebook every day.
I guess OP means that they are culturally dead. They will never again have the zeitgeist. TikTok has completely dominated in that regard. That doesn't mean it's not a good business.
The real kicker is if there's any sense of 'app loyalty' as people age do they move on to older social media, or do they stay with the one from their youth?
Certainly I and my 'cohort' went from myspace to facebook, and then everyone's parents got on facebook, so we went to snapchat and instagram and pretty much stayed on instagram.
I suspect the TikTokers will stay on TikTok and either a new app will emerge or TikTok will just completely clean up as the user bases of the the other apps 'age-out'.
The real USP for tiktok was being video-first and it's another level of addictive, targeted content, which is super easy to consume. I probably bet on video-first winning and therefore TikTok.
VR is not going to take off with current tech.
There's no new medium to exploit, we roughly went from text -> images -> video as people's mobile data plans and phones got faster and more powerful.
Yes, it’s in its BlackBerry 2005-2006 moment (optimistically), more like its 2008 moment (realistically). There was still lots of money coming in for both BB and Nokia around 2005-2006, too much money, for that matter, which eventually made them collapse.
Ask yourself this, who do you see still using Facebook (the app) in 5-10 years’ time?
But, then again, lots of people here which have a direct stake in Meta, either through owning shares or through direct employment (the same discussion applies to whenever other big US tech companies are discussed in here), so there’s no use debating.
As per the focus on youth thing, which you’re correct about, how do you expect Meta to pitch to potentially future 20-something employees in, let’s say, 5 years’ time? “Come work for us cause we’ve got the boomers’ market cornered?”. That won’t work, and, at best, it will attract only people chasing the big comps, which doesn’t help at all with innovation.
Granted, they still have “AI” in order to attract future worthwhile and non-mercenary talent, plus bringing in future revenues that are supposed to replace Facebook the app eventual demise, but imo that’s still an open bet at this point.
Look, every company goes through a lifecycle; tech companies go through them faster.
But I’m in my mid 30’s and will probably use Facebook (very casually) for life.
I’ve bought multiple products from their ads; they’ve got my profile zero’ed in, and that suits me perfectly.
Every week I go on it for 5 minutes, see my friends’ baby pictures and a handful of products that are perfect for me. That’s much better than most sites.
As to recruiting 20-somethings, I’m not convinced that’s crucial to any established business, and even if it were - there are tons of boring businesses that hire smart 20-somethings every day.
That's the thing, your "friends’ baby pictures" still being posted to FB is an US insularity thing, we used to do the same here in Eastern Europe until, I can't tell, 5 to 7 years ago but at some point that sharing of family photos on FB has just stopped.
As with other things internet related (see WhatsApp about 7-8 years ago, TikTok now), the US still seems to live in the past and isn't up to date with the newest stuff. As per WhatsApp, Facebook (the company) was lucky enough to be able to buy it back in the day (and, even then, lots of US users on this forum had never heard of it, which goes to show that insularity that I've mentioned), but with TikTok they don't have that option available for them anymore.
It has been mentioned here in the past several times, but many US-based people on this forum should take a step back, look at the outside world, and realise that, in many respects, they've been out-manoeuvred by said outside world when it comes to the internet. And I'm not talking about places like China, which is head and shoulders above the US when it comes to all things digital, but I'd be willing to bet that nowadays many people in Subsaharan Africa (several orders of magnitude poorer than the US) carry out more of their day to day tasks via their mobile phones and the internet compared to the people in the US.
What big US tech companies got going for them is a captive market (I don't think that the powers that be in DC will let any new TikTok-like non-American company to happen again) and, more importantly, lots and lots of money, both in their coffers/investors' pockets and, just as important, in their clients' pockets. But they don't have the edge anymore when it comes to innovation and to being relevant to people's lives (again, outside the US and some related markets).
I think you're letting your weird anti-Americanism colour (color?) your thoughts.
For instance:
- I'm not American
- Americans don't need Whatsapp because almost all of them have enough money to just buy iPhones
- Africans indeed do perform many tasks on their phones now, a phenomenon called leapfrogging. It's a big boon for them. I don't really get why you think that is better than the setup in the USA though. Africans are looking up agricultural market prices and paying one another by text; Americans have a totally different technological setup and get a far more efficient solution with futures markets for farmers and Costco / Walmart for consumers.
- America has new tech inventions and new big internet businesses coming out of its ears; not sure how you think they've fallen behind somehow.
- None of this is pertinent to Meta's long-term success; you can build a trillion-dollar business that will last for decades to come just based on American baby boomers bragging about their grandkids
To me that’s the clearest possible evidence that the product people over there have basically given up.
It reminds me of when Facebook went all-in on Live Video in 2016 — a product direction that pretty obviously came from the top.