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I doubt Zuck is underestimating TikTok. He has spent a 13 years living and breathing social media, has surrounded himself by smart people, has access to masses
by underwater 7y ago
I doubt Zuck is underestimating TikTok. He has spent a 13 years living and breathing social media, has surrounded himself by smart people, has access to masses of data others don't, and has shown a willingness to admit making mistakes.
Taking his Q&A responses at face value is a mistake. There is a huge element of PR in his response. He is undoubtedly very aware that anything he says has a decent chance of being leaked to the press.
- nickthegreek 7y agoHis concerns should be that he cant buy TikTok and the facebook brand name is toxic to the youth. TikTok is mostly youth.
- cptskippy 7y agoFacebook is toxic to adults to, it's like AT&T or Comcast. Everyone who uses it hates it and can't find a suitable replacement.
- onethought 7y agoA phone with a contact list, and messaging is a suitable replacement to Facebook... and 99.99% of people using Facebook have that.
- drcross 7y agoAnd yet here we are. Facebook has billions of active daily users.
- bluGill 7y agoNo it is not. Facebook is a way to quickly call all my classmates when Ed died - I never was friends with Ed but I knew him and it was important to find out. Facebook ensures that the grandparents see pictures of the grand kids sure I could mail them, but hitting "upload to facebook" on my camera (read phone) is vastly more convenient and cheaper so it gets done. Did you not the convenient word there? That is the key, nothing else is as convenient as facebook, so much as I don't like facebook I remain.
- ramblerman 7y agoPerhaps we are realizing that both those use cases are not really solving anything real though. The people that knew Ed well enough to care will find out. And the grandparents would probably prefer an extra visit a month than a never ending photo reel. It appears convenient but adds nothing of substance to our lives.
- bluGill 7y agoI don't live close to my parents. I would love to visit more often, but it isn't practical. Pictures are the next best thing so it is what they get.
- cptskippy 7y agoI really detest the "if you find value in x you're living your life wrong" argument.
- solinent 7y agoThere may be value, but there may be more value in not having your privacy violated.
- infinitezest 7y agoI think you may be misapprehending the argument. The value propositions that people cite when talking about why they use Facebook are certainly understandable. However, there is a cost incurred here (ex. questionable usage of private data, externalities imposed on elections, loss of understanding and control over what shows up in your feed, etc.) So yes, there is certainly value there. And it's made even more attractive by the fact that the actual cost is effectively hidden to users since they aren't actually the customers. The argument here is more about whether the cost incurred is actually worth the minor convenience. Tangentially, I've often thought that the added convenience necessarily cheapens the interactions. Things like the automatic birthday reminders have basically outmoded the old "it's the thought that counts" adage.
- 7y ago
- noobiemcfoob 7y agoFacebook's biggest strength for me was in navigating the first couple months of a new acquaintance becoming a friend. Sharing numbers and managing all that is cumbersome. Adding someone on Facebook was easy and if the relationship didn't pan out, it was painless to keep the contact or purge them later. To me and a lot of people I know, texting is an intimate thing whereas Facebook was not. Note, I left Facebook some year ago, and my mental health is better for it.
- _pmf_ 7y agoWhy can't he buy it and why can't he buy it and leave it under the existing brand?
- nickthegreek 7y agoIt is owned by China's ByteDance.
- karmakaze 7y agoIt's not so much the toxic aspect but if given a choice why would yonger generations be on the same platforms/networks as their parents/grandparents? Instagram is set to be facebook2 and so on generationally.
- espadrine 7y agoMark Zuckerberg’s answer to TikTok is similar to that for Snapchat. After he failed to convince Evan Spiegel to sell, his company released Poke[0] in 2012, an app that failed to reach its competitor’s success and got shut down in 2014[1]. [0]: https://www.vox.com/2018/2/17/17022586/facebook-snapchat-poke-clone-mark-zuckerberg-evan-spiegel-billy-gallagher https://www.vox.com/2018/2/17/17022586/facebook-snapchat-pok... [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2014/5/9/5700732/facebook-poke-is-dead-and-so-is-facebook-camera https://www.theverge.com/2014/5/9/5700732/facebook-poke-is-d...
- WillPostForFood 7y agoFacebook also responded to Snapchat by copying their most compelling features and integrating them into Instagram. It has been highly effective at taking the wind out of Snapchat’s sails. Facebook can easily afford to attack threats in a multitude of ways.
- meerita 7y agoIt's true that he spent his life doing this, but that doesn't mean he's god knows everything person. Truth is, during history, most leaders lost track of certain aspects, we can cite Microsoft, Apple and other bigger companies. Just because he built FB doesn't mean he understands TikTok.
- sharemywin 7y agoThe same could be said for Xerox, Kodak, Apple, Blackberry, IBM, Microsoft, Google, etc. Yet each one got their lunch ate in the next trend.
- brennebeck 7y agoI don’t really think Apple, Google, or Microsoft fit in that set...
- patagurbon 7y agoApple and MSFT do not belong in that list at all. Google remains to be seen, but they’re doing just fine. Apple has demonstrated time and again the ability to innovate in the hardware space, even if you find their products overpriced like I do. And MSFT has so many different extremely successful products they’re totally unkillable.
- mikeleung 7y agoWhile they are all long lived, they have had incumbents come in and eat (*some) of their lunch. MSFT missed the boat on mobile and have given up from a HW standpoint. Apple missed the boat on the cloud (tbd if they can catch up). Google missed the boat on social.
- GuB-42 7y agoI would rather say "screwed up" rather than "missed the boat". Microsoft never was a hardware company but their software powered many pre-iPhone smartphones. If you are into Android hacking, you probably know about xda-developers. It got its name from the O2 XDA brand, a brand of Windows Mobile early smartphones. They were on the boat, they just couldn't keep up. When tablets became a thing, they had a second chance, they tried to take it, but failed. Google had Orkut before Facebook even existed, and every few years, they try a new social thing, and they invariably fail. As for Apple, they didn't really miss out on the cloud. Apple has cloud services... for Apple device users. It is an exclusive service they offer to people who buy their overpriced devices, and it seems to work well for them. The failures, I think, are just a matter of corporate culture. What helps them one way handicaps them in another. Microsoft focus on business hinders their ability to consider consumer-focused mobile devices. Google machine-centric doesn't help with the human element of social interactions. And Apple focus on hardware limits the availability of their software.
- OrgNet 7y ago> [...] and has shown a willingness to admit making mistakes lol, we must live in a different world.
- underwater 7y agoHe dumped 20 billion dollars into WhatsApp, a company with a dozen employees, when Facebook already had a successful messaging app. That's an astounding lack of sentimentality.