Seems like few people remember that for a brief period, messenger bots were all the rage in the tech press and a lot of investment money was lit on fire to supp

Seems like few people remember that for a brief period, messenger bots were all the rage in the tech press and a lot of investment money was lit on fire to support them. I suspect most or all of that fervor can be traced back to this email. Concise, visionary... and wrong. It's a classic example of confusing what's good for business with what's good for consumers, and then getting wrapped up in a story that rationalizes the use case. Messaging is a convenient interface in theory, but in practice it's not. Zuck talks about opening a specific app to perform a specific action as if it's some terribly onerous process, but consider that most common use cases are the first or second button on an app's home interface. Tap to open, tap to do the action. Even if it technically takes longer because of load times, it feels shorter because you're doing less work. Two or three taps to complete a task vs. opening messenger (tap), then TYPING what you want and hoping it's parsed correctly. Sounds awful. Zooming out, this is a microcosm of how we get the labyrinthine user experience of so many popular apps and web sites: Executives suppose they know where the future of their business is, then insist the UX be built around that (instead of how or why people actually engage). Note that Zuck's analysis here isn't based on any data whatsoever - it's purely "here's what I think the future of this business is," and then the entire company pivots around it. Is it all bad? No, having some kind of vision isn't bad. But... This is one of those areas where we can point to someone like Steve Jobs and say, at least he generally focused on the end-user experience and worked towards building the right product; FB/Meta's business-first consumer-later approach is backwards. It might seem at first like it's framed as being about the consumer experience, but if you pay close attention the primary questions answered are: What can we do to increase engagement on the platform? And: What might others do to drive engagement that we can do first? Wait a minute, what might others do that we can do first? That sounds like... playing defense. Except, the others haven't done it yet, so it's speculative proactive defense, which is something just about any startup advisor would caution against. But FB/Meta is at the point where they're focused on market share above all else, so decisions are being made from this backwards second-guessing defensive position. And because so many of us are already locked into the ecosystem, we're experiencing the consequences.