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> However, if Mark Zuckerberg goes back on the drawing board to figure what went wrong, he’ll probably realize that data breaches and privacy awareness aren’t t

> However, if Mark Zuckerberg goes back on the drawing board to figure what went wrong, he’ll probably realize that data breaches and privacy awareness aren’t the causes of an impending downfall. > Instead, a lack of effort in developing their own operating system a decade ago might be Facebook’s biggest regret. And this has come back to bite them today. Crazy that it came to this.

sneak 5y ago
Ultimately every platform is about control. With the situation wrt bonzai buddy and a million search bars on every '95 box, treacherous/trustworthy DRM-everywhere computing was eventually inevitable. Enter the iPhone/iOS and ChromeOS. (Android and Windows still have an escape hatch, and are still plagued with malware. macOS's escape hatch is basically irrelevant at this point, to the point of nonexistence.) In those circumstances, if you aren't publishing the OS and holding the secret keys to the certs in bootloaders, you are only a sharecropper, and your access to the namespace of programs that are allowed to run on end user devices is entirely outside of your control. Your milkshake is now someone else's. Epic and Facebook are upset about this, understandably. I personally believe that people should be able to run Facebook spyware on the devices they bought, even if it is worse for them and the world. We aren't free if we aren't free to act against our own interests.
insert_coin 5y ago
Is it that crazy? It's the reason Google not only developed Android, but Chrome, ChromeOS, Fuchsia, the Google speaker thing and all that, and Samsung has Tizen, which is sort of their plan B, of plan F or whatever, and Amazon developed the Fire line, Alexa, AWS, the speaker thing, etc. They know they can't trust each other. Even Apple had to develop their own maps! It's really a surprise Facebook was so blindsided by this, they should've known better.
- bredren 5y ago
  When the initial FB OS attempt failed, I think Zuck realized the investment to make something work was beyond the capital he was willing to invest. When FB released its first “phone” it was still unwilling to take mobile seriously. They left the head of mobile position open for a very long time. Zuck himself has said he missed mobile. With the IPO around that time, making some major strategic investment in tech was not an option when the company was likely under a lot of pressure to make the stock price only go one way. You give Apple Maps as an example, but that product was a major fumble at release. To the point Apple fired the exec in charge over it. It’s taken major investment over many years to get that app sorted out and it still needs a lot of work. I think FB did know better they just had a competing problem of revenue growth that was at odds with laying claim to the future. If anything, I think FB is making an ongoing strategic mistake in lack of any obvious work to establish an Alphabet structure. FB can recover by building a social network that monetizes via payments and subscriptions. This could be hooked up to a new fortnite-seeded metaverse and run exclusively through oculus. The opportunity for a FB-parent Corp that distinguishes a new, private network away from the damaged brand of FB is still there. Leadership just has to be way more daring now in what it’s willing to do. It really has to or the ruling metaverse social network will be built by someone else for Apple hardware.
  - dannyw 5y ago
    FB more or less always had access to capital markets, and they could 100% have borrowed money and dumped billions into mobile. Subsidized, $100 phones that are comparable to flagships (but data-sucking for FB) would have beaten the market.
    - bredren 5y ago
      Yes, but they were not willing to. The environment for risky internet companies at that time was tepid still. They knew money came from ads and tracking and the web and the other thing did not move the needle.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      Same with Microsoft.
  - spideymans 5y ago
    >You give Apple Maps as an example, but that product was a major fumble at release. To the point Apple fired the exec in charge over it. They fumbled, but that really didn't matter in the long run. Apple now has a perfectly competent mapping application. They've siphoned data away from Google and redirected it to themselves. Maps is now a key component to Apple's products and service, and has clearly become a cornerstone of Apple's AR roadmap. Apple Maps is now part of Apple's moat, and nobody can take that away from them. There is no situation in which Apple would go back to Google Maps. Sounds like a strategic win to me.
    - bredren 5y ago
      I’m in full agreement. My comment was to show just how much investment was required and how injurious it was early on. I’m saying Zuck / FB could not stomach it at the time.
- tmccrary55 5y ago
  Facebook's never done anything great or prescient. They were just at "the right place, at the right time" to be MySpace 2.0.
  - pmontra 5y ago
    I don't like FB as anybody else but FB was not alone there at that time. There were many other social networks and FB was the one that succeeded. Other social networks were born later on and FB is still here. Beating the competition and surviving almost 20 years is quite great enough IMHO.
    - beagle3 5y ago
      They weren’t prescient, but they were functionally equivalent: they were spying on users (e.g. through Onavo) and knew stats about Instagram, snap and WhatsApp very early on, that let them respond well early (and price an offer, or build a competitor). I think Zuck, having taken the market from Orkut, Friendster and MySpace, decided he will not let anyone take it from him, no matter what. E.g. Skype was still on every phone in 2014; it’s not about install base - it’s about potential to become a social network, which WhatsApp had, and Skype didn’t.
      - pmontra 5y ago
        I didn't know or didn't remember about Onavo. Thanks. WhatsApp is a social network because of groups. I think I never had a group with Skype. I don't even know if they are a thing there. I'm currently using WhatsApp and Telegram groups to chat and exchange pictures and links with groups of friends and colleagues. I'm trying to move from WA to Telegram starting with the most technical friends (as always has been with new things.) I'm basically not using Facebook anymore. I appreciate that those apps let me partition people in groups with well defined boundaries. I believe FB has something like that but the UI was more about posting something and let all contacts see it. Anyway, everything I post there is meant to be lost. I'm backing up images, messages not so much. Definitely not on WA which is pretty much hostile to backups as it doesn't give us the key to decrypt the local databases. Maybe it is not to break E2E encryption and not let other apps decrypt messages, but I should be able to download the key from somewhere if I ask for it. Uploading to Google Drive an unencrypted database is not good. On the other side Telegram has a kind of distributed database on all my devices. Probably bad for E2E encryption unless every devices has its own key and messages are encrypted for all of them, or another equivalent system. I didn't investigate how it works.
croes 5y ago
Isn't FB developing an OS for the Oculus Quest?
dougmwne 5y ago
Zuck is personally all in on capturing the VR and AR market and making it the next ubiquitous computing platform. They already have their own OS. One fifth of the company is working on VR and AR, 10,000 employees. They are pouring billions into it. Zuck likely understands that he missed the platform boat last time around and doesn't intend to miss the next one. https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/12/22326875/facebook-reality-labs-ar-vr-headcount-report https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/12/22326875/facebook-reality...
- nottorp 5y ago
  I don't think VR will ever take over the world. Too many people get motion sickness from it and I don't think it's only a matter of more pixels/fps. AR... maybe. My personal opinion is the needed electronics (and especially the battery tech) aren't small enough yet, if we're talking AR glasses. If we're talking AR on phones, where's the killer app? Pokemon go?
  - dannyw 5y ago
    You're saying it ain't small enough yet. Another way to say it is, it'll get there, but in the future. That's what FB is investing in
    - simonh 5y ago
      General Magic was investing in the future, but jumping the gun by 10 years didn’t work out so well for them. I suspect VR and AR are probably still that far out. I still remember the buzz about VR back in the late 80s and early 90s. Thirty years later we’re still really not there yet and LeapMotion fell completely flat already.
      - MetaWhirledPeas 5y ago
        The difference is, 30 years ago we did not have viable VR consumer devices for sale. They might not be "iPhone" popular, but they exist now. I liken this to the MP3 player years before the iPod launch.
onion2k 5y ago
What's even more crazy is that they kind of did have their own OS, albeit one that was really just a launcher on top of Android with some deep integration of Facebook content - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Home https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Home
swiley 5y ago
They had the open web, which they worked well to kill. Facebook can go die in the grave they dug for themselves.
- distribot 5y ago
  I don’t see how that is related since nowadays most people use Facebook products from mobile apps. They’d still be hosed right now.
  - browningstreet 5y ago
    People visit sites outside of apps and those sites feed back data to Facebook for targeting purposes. On desktop, people use FB in browsers, too.
  - swiley 5y ago
    You used to be able to use Facebook on mobile OSes without the apps. Many people did this (because the apps don't really add anything anyway and take up a ton of space) but Facebook put themselves at the complete mercy of these mobile OS vendors by killing that off.
    - asciimov 5y ago
      I still use Facebook on iOS only through the browser. Have a little shortcut in my Home Screen and it takes me straight there.

sneak 5y ago

Ultimately every platform is about control. With the situation wrt bonzai buddy and a million search bars on every '95 box, treacherous/trustworthy DRM-everywhere computing was eventually inevitable. Enter the iPhone/iOS and ChromeOS. (Android and Windows still have an escape hatch, and are still plagued with malware. macOS's escape hatch is basically irrelevant at this point, to the point of nonexistence.) In those circumstances, if you aren't publishing the OS and holding the secret keys to the certs in bootloaders, you are only a sharecropper, and your access to the namespace of programs that are allowed to run on end user devices is entirely outside of your control. Your milkshake is now someone else's. Epic and Facebook are upset about this, understandably. I personally believe that people should be able to run Facebook spyware on the devices they bought, even if it is worse for them and the world. We aren't free if we aren't free to act against our own interests.

insert_coin 5y ago

Is it that crazy? It's the reason Google not only developed Android, but Chrome, ChromeOS, Fuchsia, the Google speaker thing and all that, and Samsung has Tizen, which is sort of their plan B, of plan F or whatever, and Amazon developed the Fire line, Alexa, AWS, the speaker thing, etc. They know they can't trust each other. Even Apple had to develop their own maps! It's really a surprise Facebook was so blindsided by this, they should've known better.

bredren 5y ago
When the initial FB OS attempt failed, I think Zuck realized the investment to make something work was beyond the capital he was willing to invest. When FB released its first “phone” it was still unwilling to take mobile seriously. They left the head of mobile position open for a very long time. Zuck himself has said he missed mobile. With the IPO around that time, making some major strategic investment in tech was not an option when the company was likely under a lot of pressure to make the stock price only go one way. You give Apple Maps as an example, but that product was a major fumble at release. To the point Apple fired the exec in charge over it. It’s taken major investment over many years to get that app sorted out and it still needs a lot of work. I think FB did know better they just had a competing problem of revenue growth that was at odds with laying claim to the future. If anything, I think FB is making an ongoing strategic mistake in lack of any obvious work to establish an Alphabet structure. FB can recover by building a social network that monetizes via payments and subscriptions. This could be hooked up to a new fortnite-seeded metaverse and run exclusively through oculus. The opportunity for a FB-parent Corp that distinguishes a new, private network away from the damaged brand of FB is still there. Leadership just has to be way more daring now in what it’s willing to do. It really has to or the ruling metaverse social network will be built by someone else for Apple hardware.
- dannyw 5y ago
  FB more or less always had access to capital markets, and they could 100% have borrowed money and dumped billions into mobile. Subsidized, $100 phones that are comparable to flagships (but data-sucking for FB) would have beaten the market.
  - bredren 5y ago
    Yes, but they were not willing to. The environment for risky internet companies at that time was tepid still. They knew money came from ads and tracking and the web and the other thing did not move the needle.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    Same with Microsoft.
- spideymans 5y ago
  >You give Apple Maps as an example, but that product was a major fumble at release. To the point Apple fired the exec in charge over it. They fumbled, but that really didn't matter in the long run. Apple now has a perfectly competent mapping application. They've siphoned data away from Google and redirected it to themselves. Maps is now a key component to Apple's products and service, and has clearly become a cornerstone of Apple's AR roadmap. Apple Maps is now part of Apple's moat, and nobody can take that away from them. There is no situation in which Apple would go back to Google Maps. Sounds like a strategic win to me.
  - bredren 5y ago
    I’m in full agreement. My comment was to show just how much investment was required and how injurious it was early on. I’m saying Zuck / FB could not stomach it at the time.
tmccrary55 5y ago
Facebook's never done anything great or prescient. They were just at "the right place, at the right time" to be MySpace 2.0.
- pmontra 5y ago
  I don't like FB as anybody else but FB was not alone there at that time. There were many other social networks and FB was the one that succeeded. Other social networks were born later on and FB is still here. Beating the competition and surviving almost 20 years is quite great enough IMHO.
  - beagle3 5y ago
    They weren’t prescient, but they were functionally equivalent: they were spying on users (e.g. through Onavo) and knew stats about Instagram, snap and WhatsApp very early on, that let them respond well early (and price an offer, or build a competitor). I think Zuck, having taken the market from Orkut, Friendster and MySpace, decided he will not let anyone take it from him, no matter what. E.g. Skype was still on every phone in 2014; it’s not about install base - it’s about potential to become a social network, which WhatsApp had, and Skype didn’t.
    - pmontra 5y ago
      I didn't know or didn't remember about Onavo. Thanks. WhatsApp is a social network because of groups. I think I never had a group with Skype. I don't even know if they are a thing there. I'm currently using WhatsApp and Telegram groups to chat and exchange pictures and links with groups of friends and colleagues. I'm trying to move from WA to Telegram starting with the most technical friends (as always has been with new things.) I'm basically not using Facebook anymore. I appreciate that those apps let me partition people in groups with well defined boundaries. I believe FB has something like that but the UI was more about posting something and let all contacts see it. Anyway, everything I post there is meant to be lost. I'm backing up images, messages not so much. Definitely not on WA which is pretty much hostile to backups as it doesn't give us the key to decrypt the local databases. Maybe it is not to break E2E encryption and not let other apps decrypt messages, but I should be able to download the key from somewhere if I ask for it. Uploading to Google Drive an unencrypted database is not good. On the other side Telegram has a kind of distributed database on all my devices. Probably bad for E2E encryption unless every devices has its own key and messages are encrypted for all of them, or another equivalent system. I didn't investigate how it works.

croes 5y ago

Isn't FB developing an OS for the Oculus Quest?

dougmwne 5y ago

Zuck is personally all in on capturing the VR and AR market and making it the next ubiquitous computing platform. They already have their own OS. One fifth of the company is working on VR and AR, 10,000 employees. They are pouring billions into it. Zuck likely understands that he missed the platform boat last time around and doesn't intend to miss the next one. https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/12/22326875/facebook-reality-labs-ar-vr-headcount-report https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/12/22326875/facebook-reality...

nottorp 5y ago
I don't think VR will ever take over the world. Too many people get motion sickness from it and I don't think it's only a matter of more pixels/fps. AR... maybe. My personal opinion is the needed electronics (and especially the battery tech) aren't small enough yet, if we're talking AR glasses. If we're talking AR on phones, where's the killer app? Pokemon go?
- dannyw 5y ago
  You're saying it ain't small enough yet. Another way to say it is, it'll get there, but in the future. That's what FB is investing in
  - simonh 5y ago
    General Magic was investing in the future, but jumping the gun by 10 years didn’t work out so well for them. I suspect VR and AR are probably still that far out. I still remember the buzz about VR back in the late 80s and early 90s. Thirty years later we’re still really not there yet and LeapMotion fell completely flat already.
    - MetaWhirledPeas 5y ago
      The difference is, 30 years ago we did not have viable VR consumer devices for sale. They might not be "iPhone" popular, but they exist now. I liken this to the MP3 player years before the iPod launch.

onion2k 5y ago

What's even more crazy is that they kind of did have their own OS, albeit one that was really just a launcher on top of Android with some deep integration of Facebook content - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Home https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Home

swiley 5y ago

They had the open web, which they worked well to kill. Facebook can go die in the grave they dug for themselves.

distribot 5y ago
I don’t see how that is related since nowadays most people use Facebook products from mobile apps. They’d still be hosed right now.
- browningstreet 5y ago
  People visit sites outside of apps and those sites feed back data to Facebook for targeting purposes. On desktop, people use FB in browsers, too.
- swiley 5y ago
  You used to be able to use Facebook on mobile OSes without the apps. Many people did this (because the apps don't really add anything anyway and take up a ton of space) but Facebook put themselves at the complete mercy of these mobile OS vendors by killing that off.
  - asciimov 5y ago
    I still use Facebook on iOS only through the browser. Have a little shortcut in my Home Screen and it takes me straight there.