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> FB & Twitter are a prime example. They increased headcount and costs by 10X-100X, after becoming massive platforms scaled to serve everyone in the world. The

> FB & Twitter are a prime example. They increased headcount and costs by 10X-100X, after becoming massive platforms scaled to serve everyone in the world. The product twitter and Facebook serve is still the same product they served with a 10th of the employees. I think you're vastly underestimating the complexity of running a product like Facebook or Twitter. At scale, every minor problem gets magnified in both product-terms, and raw technical-terms. This requires investment of people and resources. As a simple example, consider that Facebook has to build, and evolve its own php-esque language runtime. This has properties tuned to the specific traffic patterns of Facebook, thereby saving many millions of dollars in server costs. So, no, I vehemently disagree that a handful of resourceful people can clone Facebook, beyond the most obvious high-level features that you may be familiar with from your personal usage. Similar arguments will apply to Twitter.

dalbasal 8y ago
If you cloned every single detail, I suppose you'd have an exact clone, including all the people. But cloning the main features is cloning the service, from a user perspective. I think you're vastly underestimating how much scale they already had, before all these people. When FB IPOed (just 6 years ago) FB were operatating with 1/10 the current resources. ATT, they were already generating revenue and private investors were falling overthemselves to invest.. so it's not like times were leane then. Since, revenue, expenses & headcount has grown 10X. FB is still basically FB. If their ad business had capped off at $8bn instead of $80bn, my guess is that almost nothing a user notices would be different. It's not proveable. You can always counter that FB does 10X more than they did 6 years ago. We can't count the number of cars leaving a factory.

dalbasal 8y ago

If you cloned every single detail, I suppose you'd have an exact clone, including all the people. But cloning the main features is cloning the service, from a user perspective. I think you're vastly underestimating how much scale they already had, before all these people. When FB IPOed (just 6 years ago) FB were operatating with 1/10 the current resources. ATT, they were already generating revenue and private investors were falling overthemselves to invest.. so it's not like times were leane then. Since, revenue, expenses & headcount has grown 10X. FB is still basically FB. If their ad business had capped off at $8bn instead of $80bn, my guess is that almost nothing a user notices would be different. It's not proveable. You can always counter that FB does 10X more than they did 6 years ago. We can't count the number of cars leaving a factory.