7 ms·

Unlike Microsoft was to Bill Gates, Facebook seems to embody Mark's lifelong ideologies (connecting everyone in the world). He has often said he doesn't see him

Unlike Microsoft was to Bill Gates, Facebook seems to embody Mark's lifelong ideologies (connecting everyone in the world). He has often said he doesn't see himself doing anything with his life other than building the future of Facebook, just in a different form if Facebook hadn't taken off. On the other hand Gates just hit the lottery on one of the projects he worked on related to a field he was good at, when what he seems to really care about is more grassroots philanthropy work. If he could take two months off he could probably take a few years off, but he would probably just be itching to go back to work on FB the whole time.

ekianjo 11y ago
> On the other hand Gates just hit the lottery on one of the projects he worked on related to a field he was good at Won the lottery, not really. Bill Gates was a harsh businessman who relentlessly fought to kill off competition by all means possible - it was not by mistake that Microsoft became what it is. And, I'd dare say that it has very little correlation with how "good" he/they were at all. Most Microsoft software was utter crap till recent history compared to the existing alternatives - the fact that they managed to secure the market and third party developers was much more relevant than anything else.
- Joeri 11y ago
  Microsoft software was not 'utter crap'. Word won by virtue of being better than WordPerfect. Excel won by being better than lotus. IE 5 was a better browser than Netscape 4, though in that case its superiority was not why it won. Even in the windows vs mac contest windows XP was a much better OS than the contemporary Mac OS, and arguably the best desktop OS of its day. Don't get me wrong. Microsoft software was crap, it's just that the competition was even worse. The quality of modern software is much improved.
  - Bud 11y ago
    I can agree with you about Word and Excel. I personally disagree about Netscape 4 versus IE 5, and I can remember both. You assertion about XP being better than Mac OS X, however, is hilarious. If that's true, why did XP die, and why was Mac OS X so radically more secure than Windows for the last 15 years running? Why was it more stable? Why did it work better? Why did it have a shockingly better UI? XP was crap and we should all be glad it's dead.
    - russgray 11y ago
      XP came out the same year as 10.0, which was rubbish. OS X wasn't really worthwhile until 10.3.
      - 1stop 11y ago
        Didn't XP only get decent after a bunch of service packs? ... is that not the same thing as 10.3?
    - frik 11y ago
      > WinXP Never heard about the Windows NT operating system series? WinNT series: WinNT 3.5 (1988-1994, based on VMS a bit on OS/2 designs) -> WinNT 4 -> Win2000 -> WinXP (August 24th 2001) -> WinVista -> Win7 -> Win8x -> Win10 (2015) [exluding all service packs] MacOS X: NeXTSTEP (1987-1989, based on Unix) -> OPENSTEP -> Rhapsody (1997) -> Mac OS X Server 1.0 -> Mac OS X Public Beta -> Mac OS X 10.0 (March 24th 2001, this is the first MacOS X you know) -> 10.1 -> 10.2 -> 10.3 -> 10.4 -> 10.5 -> 10.6 -> 10.7 -> 10.8 -> 10.9 -> 10.10 -> 10.11 (= El Capitan, 2015)
    - zensavona 11y ago
      You assertion about XP being better than Mac OS X "windows XP was a much better OS than the contemporary Mac OS"
    - barrkel 11y ago
      Netscape crashed way more often than IE. That's what got me to switch. OS X was a worse platform because it didn't support much software - games in particular. XP was extremely solid, coming after ME in the consumer space (I had switched to W2K after 98, I took until SP2 before I switched). So no, I don't agree with you. Even today, I think Windows is a better gaming platform and Linux a much better dev platform - OS X is insufficiently similar to Linux to work well when Linux is used in production.
  - ekianjo 11y ago
    I come from the AmigaOS world in the first place, and AmigaOS was leagues ahead of Windows prior to Windows XP, years before - it was multitask, it had datatypes, Arexx scripting language and so on. It was not perfect (lacked memory protection) but nevertheless it was better than Windows 3.1 at the time. As for third parties software, you had better software on non-Windows machines (Photoshop for example used to be a Mac exclusive), not everything was widely better in a Microsoft environment.
    - xorcist 11y ago
      Amiga as a platform was proprietary end-to-end. One supplier of hardware, operating system, and even some applications. It's like IBM could have been if Microsoft was in-house to them. Had AmigaOS been cross-platform, things might have developed differently.
      - ekianjo 11y ago
        I totally agree with you. Just pointing out that AmigaOS was way more advanced than MS-DOS or Windows 3.1 at the time they both existed on PC.
  - EdiX 11y ago
    >Microsoft software was not 'utter crap'. it wasn't but... >Word won by virtue of being better than WordPerfect. Excel won by being better than lotus Excel and Word won by virtue of being bundled and thus cheaper than buying Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect separately. >IE 5 was a better browser than Netscape 4, though in that case its superiority was not why it won No, because the battle was won by IE 4, by being part of Windows 95. >Even in the windows vs mac contest windows XP was a much better OS than the contemporary Mac OS, and arguably the best desktop OS of its day. I don't think that Windows XP (august 2001) was better than Mac OS X (march 2001), Be OS (march 1998) or Linux distributions that were current at that time. But it doesn't matter because at that point Microsoft had complete domination of the PC market, something they got from a deal with IBM. What Bill Gates was good at was identifying threats early and crushing them before they got too big.
    - mike_hearn 11y ago
      Bundling Excel and Word (and more) into a single MS Office product was a masterstroke that definitely helped them, but you can't claim that was some sort of evil monopolistic genius. They developed an integrated suite and that turned out to have value. IE 4 vs Netscape 4 was a lot more complicated. They were technically fairly equal but Microsoft did everything it could to kill off Netscape, including many dirty tactics. Windows XP was dramatically better than the first MacOS X iterations in almost every way except visuals. OS X had awesome graphics but the Mac hardware could hardly cope and it was dog, dog slow. It also had ~no apps and users frequently had to run productivity software in the Classic emulator. Desktop Linux was a joke at that time and has never caught up. Basic things like "how can I install this program" or "why does my sound not work" were FAQs for Linux users in 2001, and arguably the community never really overcame its internal political issues to solve them. BeOS had some interesting technical choices but its primary selling point was super-smooth multi tasking, which came at the cost of requiring app developers to all be expert at writing multi-threaded software, as the Be APIs practically required apps to be largely thread-safe. It turned out that requiring all your app developers to be in the upper percentiles of skill meant that you didn't get many apps and those that did exist were often unstable. For all its faults and Tellytubby like UI, Windows XP had built on a legacy of slavish devotion to app and hardware compatibility, it hadn't jumped too far ahead of what the hardware was capable of, it was very developer friendly and it didn't have bizarre technical quirks caused by endless techno-ideological wars over packaging file formats and the like. That made it pretty successful.
- Syrup-tan 11y ago
  I think GP's point was _why_ they were building what they were building. Gate's was just doing work in his field, whereas Zuckerberg was working towards his ideology. Gate's didn't have the strong sentiment towards his business that Zuckerberg did/does.
  - ekianjo 11y ago
    Well ZuckerBerg is still in his early 30s, it's probably too early to say that he will stay at Facebook forever. People change with age as well, no matter what he may be thinking about currently.
    - wobbleblob 11y ago
      Who knows, maybe some day he'll change his mind about people over 30 being too old to work for him.
wobbleblob 11y ago
My take on it is, why keep playing a game when you've already won, and the only way from here is down? I can't imagine running a website can keep feeling meaningful for more than a few years. As for parental leave, your kid is only a baby for a remarkably short time, two months is nothing. I was able to take two weeks off for each of my kids, and combining a full time job with small children can be very stressful. You never have enough time for the kids, and at the same time you never have enough time to keep up with your job.
loceng 11y ago
Mark Zuckerberg hit the lottery by fucking over the people who hired him, too; his careless ethics allowing him to "win the lottery." Not going to say more about this because the rabbit hole goes pretty deep when I've tried to get into discussion about this on fairness and the way people try to justify it is remarkable.
- tajen 11y ago
  The W brothers? Well finding a dev is a big problem for non-technical cofounders too. Also, I've already had my competitor trying to hire me for a small project and make me sign a non-competing agreement while claiming there was no problem. At that level of competiton, you can't be that naive.
gaius 11y ago
Gates ideology was "a PC on every desktop and in every home". He retired once he had pretty much succeeded.
jusben1369 11y ago
Don't forget age too. I suspect in another 10-15 years Mark might need a new challenge just like Bill did.
spinchange 11y ago
You can just as easily say it was the other way around: Bill Gates' was programming and using computers (even quasi-professionally) from the time he was a young child in 1960s. His stated vision was always a 'computer on every desk' going back to a time when people only read about computers in magazines, and he happily and dedicatedly helped accomplish that. So effectively, the US Government convicted him of being a monopolist. I can't read Zuck's mind or heart and he's clearly passionate about Facebook, but 'connecting everyone in the world' has always struck me as a kind of post-hoc mission statement made once they were already dominant (& the world already well connected) and more vitally, wanted to start making FB a lot less private by default to keep boosting & posting site engagement metrics. When they started FB, wasn't it basically an unauthorized interactive hack/mashup of the student directory of sorts? It all kinds of fits a pattern, doesn't it? It seems very opportunistic and a lot less like a grand vision, to me. That isn't to diminish the technical, business, and cultural accomplishment that is Facebook or Mark's contributions to it or leadership. I think it is great that he's taking this leave too. His child is his next startup and that's a great thing and a great example.

ekianjo 11y ago

> On the other hand Gates just hit the lottery on one of the projects he worked on related to a field he was good at Won the lottery, not really. Bill Gates was a harsh businessman who relentlessly fought to kill off competition by all means possible - it was not by mistake that Microsoft became what it is. And, I'd dare say that it has very little correlation with how "good" he/they were at all. Most Microsoft software was utter crap till recent history compared to the existing alternatives - the fact that they managed to secure the market and third party developers was much more relevant than anything else.

Joeri 11y ago
Microsoft software was not 'utter crap'. Word won by virtue of being better than WordPerfect. Excel won by being better than lotus. IE 5 was a better browser than Netscape 4, though in that case its superiority was not why it won. Even in the windows vs mac contest windows XP was a much better OS than the contemporary Mac OS, and arguably the best desktop OS of its day. Don't get me wrong. Microsoft software was crap, it's just that the competition was even worse. The quality of modern software is much improved.
- Bud 11y ago
  I can agree with you about Word and Excel. I personally disagree about Netscape 4 versus IE 5, and I can remember both. You assertion about XP being better than Mac OS X, however, is hilarious. If that's true, why did XP die, and why was Mac OS X so radically more secure than Windows for the last 15 years running? Why was it more stable? Why did it work better? Why did it have a shockingly better UI? XP was crap and we should all be glad it's dead.
  - russgray 11y ago
    XP came out the same year as 10.0, which was rubbish. OS X wasn't really worthwhile until 10.3.
    - 1stop 11y ago
      Didn't XP only get decent after a bunch of service packs? ... is that not the same thing as 10.3?
  - frik 11y ago
    > WinXP Never heard about the Windows NT operating system series? WinNT series: WinNT 3.5 (1988-1994, based on VMS a bit on OS/2 designs) -> WinNT 4 -> Win2000 -> WinXP (August 24th 2001) -> WinVista -> Win7 -> Win8x -> Win10 (2015) [exluding all service packs] MacOS X: NeXTSTEP (1987-1989, based on Unix) -> OPENSTEP -> Rhapsody (1997) -> Mac OS X Server 1.0 -> Mac OS X Public Beta -> Mac OS X 10.0 (March 24th 2001, this is the first MacOS X you know) -> 10.1 -> 10.2 -> 10.3 -> 10.4 -> 10.5 -> 10.6 -> 10.7 -> 10.8 -> 10.9 -> 10.10 -> 10.11 (= El Capitan, 2015)
  - zensavona 11y ago
    You assertion about XP being better than Mac OS X "windows XP was a much better OS than the contemporary Mac OS"
  - barrkel 11y ago
    Netscape crashed way more often than IE. That's what got me to switch. OS X was a worse platform because it didn't support much software - games in particular. XP was extremely solid, coming after ME in the consumer space (I had switched to W2K after 98, I took until SP2 before I switched). So no, I don't agree with you. Even today, I think Windows is a better gaming platform and Linux a much better dev platform - OS X is insufficiently similar to Linux to work well when Linux is used in production.
- ekianjo 11y ago
  I come from the AmigaOS world in the first place, and AmigaOS was leagues ahead of Windows prior to Windows XP, years before - it was multitask, it had datatypes, Arexx scripting language and so on. It was not perfect (lacked memory protection) but nevertheless it was better than Windows 3.1 at the time. As for third parties software, you had better software on non-Windows machines (Photoshop for example used to be a Mac exclusive), not everything was widely better in a Microsoft environment.
  - xorcist 11y ago
    Amiga as a platform was proprietary end-to-end. One supplier of hardware, operating system, and even some applications. It's like IBM could have been if Microsoft was in-house to them. Had AmigaOS been cross-platform, things might have developed differently.
    - ekianjo 11y ago
      I totally agree with you. Just pointing out that AmigaOS was way more advanced than MS-DOS or Windows 3.1 at the time they both existed on PC.
- EdiX 11y ago
  >Microsoft software was not 'utter crap'. it wasn't but... >Word won by virtue of being better than WordPerfect. Excel won by being better than lotus Excel and Word won by virtue of being bundled and thus cheaper than buying Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect separately. >IE 5 was a better browser than Netscape 4, though in that case its superiority was not why it won No, because the battle was won by IE 4, by being part of Windows 95. >Even in the windows vs mac contest windows XP was a much better OS than the contemporary Mac OS, and arguably the best desktop OS of its day. I don't think that Windows XP (august 2001) was better than Mac OS X (march 2001), Be OS (march 1998) or Linux distributions that were current at that time. But it doesn't matter because at that point Microsoft had complete domination of the PC market, something they got from a deal with IBM. What Bill Gates was good at was identifying threats early and crushing them before they got too big.
  - mike_hearn 11y ago
    Bundling Excel and Word (and more) into a single MS Office product was a masterstroke that definitely helped them, but you can't claim that was some sort of evil monopolistic genius. They developed an integrated suite and that turned out to have value. IE 4 vs Netscape 4 was a lot more complicated. They were technically fairly equal but Microsoft did everything it could to kill off Netscape, including many dirty tactics. Windows XP was dramatically better than the first MacOS X iterations in almost every way except visuals. OS X had awesome graphics but the Mac hardware could hardly cope and it was dog, dog slow. It also had ~no apps and users frequently had to run productivity software in the Classic emulator. Desktop Linux was a joke at that time and has never caught up. Basic things like "how can I install this program" or "why does my sound not work" were FAQs for Linux users in 2001, and arguably the community never really overcame its internal political issues to solve them. BeOS had some interesting technical choices but its primary selling point was super-smooth multi tasking, which came at the cost of requiring app developers to all be expert at writing multi-threaded software, as the Be APIs practically required apps to be largely thread-safe. It turned out that requiring all your app developers to be in the upper percentiles of skill meant that you didn't get many apps and those that did exist were often unstable. For all its faults and Tellytubby like UI, Windows XP had built on a legacy of slavish devotion to app and hardware compatibility, it hadn't jumped too far ahead of what the hardware was capable of, it was very developer friendly and it didn't have bizarre technical quirks caused by endless techno-ideological wars over packaging file formats and the like. That made it pretty successful.
Syrup-tan 11y ago
I think GP's point was _why_ they were building what they were building. Gate's was just doing work in his field, whereas Zuckerberg was working towards his ideology. Gate's didn't have the strong sentiment towards his business that Zuckerberg did/does.
- ekianjo 11y ago
  Well ZuckerBerg is still in his early 30s, it's probably too early to say that he will stay at Facebook forever. People change with age as well, no matter what he may be thinking about currently.
  - wobbleblob 11y ago
    Who knows, maybe some day he'll change his mind about people over 30 being too old to work for him.

wobbleblob 11y ago

My take on it is, why keep playing a game when you've already won, and the only way from here is down? I can't imagine running a website can keep feeling meaningful for more than a few years. As for parental leave, your kid is only a baby for a remarkably short time, two months is nothing. I was able to take two weeks off for each of my kids, and combining a full time job with small children can be very stressful. You never have enough time for the kids, and at the same time you never have enough time to keep up with your job.

loceng 11y ago

Mark Zuckerberg hit the lottery by fucking over the people who hired him, too; his careless ethics allowing him to "win the lottery." Not going to say more about this because the rabbit hole goes pretty deep when I've tried to get into discussion about this on fairness and the way people try to justify it is remarkable.

tajen 11y ago
The W brothers? Well finding a dev is a big problem for non-technical cofounders too. Also, I've already had my competitor trying to hire me for a small project and make me sign a non-competing agreement while claiming there was no problem. At that level of competiton, you can't be that naive.

gaius 11y ago

Gates ideology was "a PC on every desktop and in every home". He retired once he had pretty much succeeded.

jusben1369 11y ago

Don't forget age too. I suspect in another 10-15 years Mark might need a new challenge just like Bill did.

spinchange 11y ago

You can just as easily say it was the other way around: Bill Gates' was programming and using computers (even quasi-professionally) from the time he was a young child in 1960s. His stated vision was always a 'computer on every desk' going back to a time when people only read about computers in magazines, and he happily and dedicatedly helped accomplish that. So effectively, the US Government convicted him of being a monopolist. I can't read Zuck's mind or heart and he's clearly passionate about Facebook, but 'connecting everyone in the world' has always struck me as a kind of post-hoc mission statement made once they were already dominant (& the world already well connected) and more vitally, wanted to start making FB a lot less private by default to keep boosting & posting site engagement metrics. When they started FB, wasn't it basically an unauthorized interactive hack/mashup of the student directory of sorts? It all kinds of fits a pattern, doesn't it? It seems very opportunistic and a lot less like a grand vision, to me. That isn't to diminish the technical, business, and cultural accomplishment that is Facebook or Mark's contributions to it or leadership. I think it is great that he's taking this leave too. His child is his next startup and that's a great thing and a great example.