10 ms·

Never fun for those impacted, but given Meta’s poor performance this is expected. The history book is being written now on if Meta was a brilliant business for

by JCM9 4y ago

Never fun for those impacted, but given Meta’s poor performance this is expected. The history book is being written now on if Meta was a brilliant business for the ages or always destined to decline into a has-been tech play. Ironically now Zuckerberg is the old guard with stale ideas that he railed against so hard when Facebook was founded. My grandparents and their friends are currently the most active users on my Facebook feed. Most under 40 in my circle have left and most under 25 I know don’t even have an account. If Facebook can turn things around then that would be truly impressive. Right now it’s on a slow march to the sidelines of has-been tech. I don’t think anyone is buying the whole metaverse thing, which just smells like someone missed the memo on Second Life. Facebook bet the farm there and the crops and livestock are looking rather ill.

MagicMoonlight 4y ago
Zuckerberg never had fresh ideas. He stole someone else's idea and that has been the only product he has ever made.
- zeroonetwothree 4y ago
  Most successful businesses aren’t based on new ideas. All the big tech companies copied existing businesses, they just did it better.
  - smt88 4y ago
    > All the big tech companies copied existing businesses, they just did it better. I agree with this regarding their first product. Google wasn't the first ad network, Slack wasn't the first team chat, etc. Very few of them seem to have ever had a follow-up hit product (whether original or copied). Apple and Microsoft are the only ones I can think of that did it. Meta and Alphabet have only ever created profitable businesses by acquiring other companies. I'm not even sure anything is profitable at Alphabet other than their ad business (which I would now include with YouTube) and G-Suite.
- morph123 4y ago
  Ideas are meaningless, execution is everything.
- zip1234 4y ago
  There are very very few fresh ideas and even those require the vast majority of the project built on someone else's work. Taking something existing and doing it better is what business is all about.
- s1k3 4y ago
  This is true of every tech billionaire. They improved something that already existed. Rarely if ever do they true novel inventors dominate the market because when the market doesn’t exist they have to create it, and also they’re inventors not necessarily business men.
  - peanuty1 4y ago
    Wasn't PageRank for instance a pretty novel creation?
    - pb7 4y ago
      But search wasn’t.
- xeromal 4y ago
  Having fresh ideas isn't necessary of having a successful business. His acquisition of instagram and whatsapp were good moves.
  - smt88 4y ago
    > His acquisition of instagram and whatsapp were good moves. Acquiring your competitors to kill competition isn't a "good move," it's an obvious strategy that has existed for hundreds of years and is (rightly) illegal. We unfortunately forgot the lessons of the Gilded Age in this country, and incredibly anti-competitive acquisitions like that have been tolerated on too many occasions. It's easy to make "good moves" if regulators are ignoring you and you're comfortable with being immoral, as Zuckerberg always has been.
    - xeromal 4y ago
      I should clarify that I meant a good move for Facebook/Meta. I'm not commenting on the meaning of those moves outside of that context.
- jobs_throwaway 4y ago
  this is cope
- MikusR 4y ago
  Same can be said about Apple.
jeltz 4y ago
Poor performance? Meta is doing great and just had one year of not insane growth. My take on why they have to fire people is that they hired way too many in 2020 and 2021. https://www.statista.com/statistics/277229/facebooks-annual-revenue-and-net-income/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/277229/facebooks-annual-...
- ramraj07 4y ago
  And from what I remember, many of the retention models also got screwed up (people weren’t quitting as often as before).
  - troupe 4y ago
    Was this because when people were allowed to work remote, fewer people quit to move to a different part of the country?
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  Poor performance is relative to what their peers (Alphabet/Apple/Amazon/Microsoft) were accomplishing for many years in the 2010s. The market has separated these 5 pretty clearly now, with Meta trailing by quite a bit, Alphabet and Amazon in the middle, and Microsoft and Apple with a decent lead.
  - Closi 4y ago
    Meta is in the advertising business - why would we say they are they trailing Apple, Amazon and Microsoft? I don't really understand why we are comparing a company who develops social media applications and generates advertising revenue against Apple who generates most of it's revenue from selling Hardware, or Microsoft who generates most of it's revenue from licencing software. If we are saying that Meta are trailing Apple, we might as well say that Microsoft are trailing Saudi Aramco.
    - lotsofpulp 4y ago
      The market is not comparing their potentials now, but the market used to feel their potentials were similar in 2010s. Sorry for the terrible graph, it’s the quickest market cap with all of them except Microsoft on it that I found. http://www.innovationkm.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/image004.png http://www.innovationkm.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/image... http://www.innovationkm.com/the-market-cap-of-faang-changes-in-the-past-days/ http://www.innovationkm.com/the-market-cap-of-faang-changes-... Another way to think of it is in the 2010s, a potential employee may have ranked a job at any of those companies as having similar security, but there is probably a different feeling about that now.
rvz 4y ago
And the stock is up 120% since three months, of the low of $88. Obviously no-one bought it back then when they were expecting the stock to go to zero. Once again, Meta's death has been greatly exaggerated on this site.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  No one was expecting a business earning $20B profits per year to go to zero. What changed were the expectations of what their profit will be in 5, 10, 20 years.
  - oblio 4y ago
    > What changed were the expectations of what their profit will be in 5, 10, 20 years. The funny thing is, that's a bad bet. Large tech company profits can last for years and decades. The archetypal example is IBM. They've had some years or record losses, but overall, look at their yearly profits: https://companiesmarketcap.com/ibm/earnings/ https://companiesmarketcap.com/ibm/earnings/ We're talking about probably more than $250bn of profits over 20 years.
    - lotsofpulp 4y ago
      Just having a profit is not enough to say something was or was not a bad bet. I doubt anyone is happy with their bet on IBM in the past couple decades. A riskless bet on SP500 would have delivered far greater returns.
      - oblio 4y ago
        It also depends on dividends. If IBM consistently gave dividends to its shareholders, that could add up to a lot of money.
        lotsofpulp 4y ago
        But it did not add up to a lot of money, compared to alternative, much less risky investments. In fact, it added up to a loss. https://dqydj.com/stock-return-calculator/ https://dqydj.com/stock-return-calculator/ IBM has objectively been a terrible investment for many, many years.
mancerayder 4y ago
Don't they have an enormous cash pile? How does that translate to poor performance?
- capableweb 4y ago
  I'm no financial expert, but wouldn't hoarding an "enormous cash pile" be a indicator of not using capital efficiently?
  - solarmist 4y ago
    It depends, but investing wisely is very difficult and slow once you get into the billions of dollars.
  - reaperducer 4y ago
    I'm no financial expert, but wouldn't hoarding an "enormous cash pile" be a indicator of not using capital efficiently? Having an enormous cash pile is what allowed Apple to keep paying its employees when COVID shut everything down. Every good company has a cash reserve. The one I work for has a policy of maintaining enough cash reserves to operate for 18 months with zero income. It saved our bacon when the virus came around.
    - Delphiza 4y ago
      COVID did not shut down Apple's revenue generation. Revenue growth was staggering during COVID. Remember everybody buying electronics because of lockdowns? They may have felt less inclined to pay people while they weren't standing around in genius bars, but they didn't need cash reserves to keep them going.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- zug_zug 4y ago
  Well they have some money in the bank, but culturally nobody thinks meta is the future (within USA at least). There is massive mistrust of their brand and any product they could ever make (be it lack of privacy or giving a terrible experience by over-monitizing).
newaccount2023 4y ago
> now Zuckerberg is the old guard with stale ideas that he railed against so hard when Facebook was founded how is that any different than most of Silicon Valley? Silicon Valley is what people thought the future looked like in 1994 It has taken Silicon Valley a long time to realize there is a limit to what you can do with websites and computers
- sebzim4500 4y ago
  >It has taken Silicon Valley a long time to realize there is a limit to what you can do with websites and computers Through robots in there and I'm not convinced there really is a limit, it just becomes difficult
  - RugnirViking 4y ago
    These companies arent really robotics companies though. They have tried, but no successes yet
gonzo41 4y ago
Soon you'll all be fighting for your jobs. Many of you will be dying for your jobs. A few of you will be forced through a fine mesh screen for your jobs. They will be the luckiest of all. -- Zuck probably. I feel like 10K people are taking a hit because Zuck ruined VR for another decade with his very boomer like imagination and monetization strategy. Anyway, it's rough out there.
- andsoitis 4y ago
  > Zuck ruined VR for another decade with his very boomer like imagination and monetization strategy What do you mean?
  - gonzo41 4y ago
    Go watch the launch of the metaverse and consider who would actually want to spend time and money there. Meta is trying to own vr like apple owns it's app store. But apple make a great set of products, that I don't like personally, but they are objectively good. Facebook is hanging on because it's got early market share from a long time ago, and it bought all it's competitors rather than out flank them. So it's lazy in mind and spirit and this is showing up in it's offerings in vr. Firing 10k people on the back of other layoffs just obscures that for a while.
  - ben7799 4y ago
    Boomers were responsible for the late 90s VR hype train. This latest round is a re-run. VR was talked up like crazy then and fizzled. Zuckerberg is old enough to have been an impressionable kid when that was going on. I remember being very excited about it all.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      I honestly don't remember a lot of VR hype but I've never been much of gamer so maybe I wasn't paying much attention. Various organizations, including the MIT Media Lab, have been playing around with VR for a long time but I don't recall VR being particularly notable in the dot-com runup.
AlwaysRock 4y ago
> stale ideas > whole metaverse thing pick one
- yurishimo 4y ago
  Meta's take on it is literally stale. It's VR Chat with more funding. The service itself is nothing more than a poor tech demo.
- seattle_spring 4y ago
  The “metaverse” so far has just been a shitty video game. What, in your opinion, isn’t stale about the metaverse?
vishnugupta 4y ago
Meta owns Instagram and WA both of which have terrific and growing user base. How well are they able to monetise is a different question though.
- peanuty1 4y ago
  It's a little frustrating that they don't seem to break down earnings for Instagram and WhatsApp. My impression is that their monetization of Instagram is probably ok but not great compared to Facebook and their monetization of WhatsApp is probably awful.
- daveidol 4y ago
  Growing user base because they copy and steal all their good ideas
  - CameronNemo 4y ago
    They don't ask how, they ask how many.
orcajerk 4y ago
Facebook is an intel front: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_LifeLog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_LifeLog
- buzzert 4y ago
  > The LifeLog program was canceled on February 3, 2004 > On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg launched "TheFacebook", originally located at thefacebook.com. If true, that’s a pretty crazy coincidence.
  - kridsdale1 4y ago
    I worked there 7 years. This is tinfoil nonsense.
dvngnt_ 4y ago
that's why they have IG and the headsets which are younger
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
abledon 4y ago
Discord is the the Facebook killer
opportune 4y ago
I know people like to shit on the blue app, but Instagram has done a very good job at attracting younger users and feels like fb’s main focus anyway. Ironically apple entering AR/VR may be the best thing to happen to Meta if it helps bolster the ecosystem. Meta may not be #1 in the space for a long time, if ever, but they may be able to ride the wave to a strong #2
nanidin 4y ago
Maybe they should take a page from Blizzard and roll out Facebook Classic?
roguas 4y ago
We didn't have good notion of global social network at the time - facebook was first, kinda, so they took it all. Facebook still gonna prevail, but over time it festered a lot of specialized competition from twitter, reddit, linkedin, discord.

by JCM9 4y ago

MagicMoonlight 4y ago

Zuckerberg never had fresh ideas. He stole someone else's idea and that has been the only product he has ever made.

zeroonetwothree 4y ago
Most successful businesses aren’t based on new ideas. All the big tech companies copied existing businesses, they just did it better.
- smt88 4y ago
  > All the big tech companies copied existing businesses, they just did it better. I agree with this regarding their first product. Google wasn't the first ad network, Slack wasn't the first team chat, etc. Very few of them seem to have ever had a follow-up hit product (whether original or copied). Apple and Microsoft are the only ones I can think of that did it. Meta and Alphabet have only ever created profitable businesses by acquiring other companies. I'm not even sure anything is profitable at Alphabet other than their ad business (which I would now include with YouTube) and G-Suite.
morph123 4y ago
Ideas are meaningless, execution is everything.
zip1234 4y ago
There are very very few fresh ideas and even those require the vast majority of the project built on someone else's work. Taking something existing and doing it better is what business is all about.
s1k3 4y ago
This is true of every tech billionaire. They improved something that already existed. Rarely if ever do they true novel inventors dominate the market because when the market doesn’t exist they have to create it, and also they’re inventors not necessarily business men.
- peanuty1 4y ago
  Wasn't PageRank for instance a pretty novel creation?
  - pb7 4y ago
    But search wasn’t.
xeromal 4y ago
Having fresh ideas isn't necessary of having a successful business. His acquisition of instagram and whatsapp were good moves.
- smt88 4y ago
  > His acquisition of instagram and whatsapp were good moves. Acquiring your competitors to kill competition isn't a "good move," it's an obvious strategy that has existed for hundreds of years and is (rightly) illegal. We unfortunately forgot the lessons of the Gilded Age in this country, and incredibly anti-competitive acquisitions like that have been tolerated on too many occasions. It's easy to make "good moves" if regulators are ignoring you and you're comfortable with being immoral, as Zuckerberg always has been.
  - xeromal 4y ago
    I should clarify that I meant a good move for Facebook/Meta. I'm not commenting on the meaning of those moves outside of that context.
jobs_throwaway 4y ago
this is cope
MikusR 4y ago
Same can be said about Apple.

jeltz 4y ago

Poor performance? Meta is doing great and just had one year of not insane growth. My take on why they have to fire people is that they hired way too many in 2020 and 2021. https://www.statista.com/statistics/277229/facebooks-annual-revenue-and-net-income/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/277229/facebooks-annual-...

ramraj07 4y ago
And from what I remember, many of the retention models also got screwed up (people weren’t quitting as often as before).
- troupe 4y ago
  Was this because when people were allowed to work remote, fewer people quit to move to a different part of the country?
lotsofpulp 4y ago
Poor performance is relative to what their peers (Alphabet/Apple/Amazon/Microsoft) were accomplishing for many years in the 2010s. The market has separated these 5 pretty clearly now, with Meta trailing by quite a bit, Alphabet and Amazon in the middle, and Microsoft and Apple with a decent lead.
- Closi 4y ago
  Meta is in the advertising business - why would we say they are they trailing Apple, Amazon and Microsoft? I don't really understand why we are comparing a company who develops social media applications and generates advertising revenue against Apple who generates most of it's revenue from selling Hardware, or Microsoft who generates most of it's revenue from licencing software. If we are saying that Meta are trailing Apple, we might as well say that Microsoft are trailing Saudi Aramco.
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    The market is not comparing their potentials now, but the market used to feel their potentials were similar in 2010s. Sorry for the terrible graph, it’s the quickest market cap with all of them except Microsoft on it that I found. http://www.innovationkm.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/image004.png http://www.innovationkm.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/image... http://www.innovationkm.com/the-market-cap-of-faang-changes-in-the-past-days/ http://www.innovationkm.com/the-market-cap-of-faang-changes-... Another way to think of it is in the 2010s, a potential employee may have ranked a job at any of those companies as having similar security, but there is probably a different feeling about that now.

rvz 4y ago

And the stock is up 120% since three months, of the low of $88. Obviously no-one bought it back then when they were expecting the stock to go to zero. Once again, Meta's death has been greatly exaggerated on this site.

lotsofpulp 4y ago
No one was expecting a business earning $20B profits per year to go to zero. What changed were the expectations of what their profit will be in 5, 10, 20 years.
- oblio 4y ago
  > What changed were the expectations of what their profit will be in 5, 10, 20 years. The funny thing is, that's a bad bet. Large tech company profits can last for years and decades. The archetypal example is IBM. They've had some years or record losses, but overall, look at their yearly profits: https://companiesmarketcap.com/ibm/earnings/ https://companiesmarketcap.com/ibm/earnings/ We're talking about probably more than $250bn of profits over 20 years.
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    Just having a profit is not enough to say something was or was not a bad bet. I doubt anyone is happy with their bet on IBM in the past couple decades. A riskless bet on SP500 would have delivered far greater returns.
    - oblio 4y ago
      It also depends on dividends. If IBM consistently gave dividends to its shareholders, that could add up to a lot of money.
      - lotsofpulp 4y ago
        But it did not add up to a lot of money, compared to alternative, much less risky investments. In fact, it added up to a loss. https://dqydj.com/stock-return-calculator/ https://dqydj.com/stock-return-calculator/ IBM has objectively been a terrible investment for many, many years.

mancerayder 4y ago

Don't they have an enormous cash pile? How does that translate to poor performance?

capableweb 4y ago
I'm no financial expert, but wouldn't hoarding an "enormous cash pile" be a indicator of not using capital efficiently?
- solarmist 4y ago
  It depends, but investing wisely is very difficult and slow once you get into the billions of dollars.
- reaperducer 4y ago
  I'm no financial expert, but wouldn't hoarding an "enormous cash pile" be a indicator of not using capital efficiently? Having an enormous cash pile is what allowed Apple to keep paying its employees when COVID shut everything down. Every good company has a cash reserve. The one I work for has a policy of maintaining enough cash reserves to operate for 18 months with zero income. It saved our bacon when the virus came around.
  - Delphiza 4y ago
    COVID did not shut down Apple's revenue generation. Revenue growth was staggering during COVID. Remember everybody buying electronics because of lockdowns? They may have felt less inclined to pay people while they weren't standing around in genius bars, but they didn't need cash reserves to keep them going.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
zug_zug 4y ago
Well they have some money in the bank, but culturally nobody thinks meta is the future (within USA at least). There is massive mistrust of their brand and any product they could ever make (be it lack of privacy or giving a terrible experience by over-monitizing).

newaccount2023 4y ago

> now Zuckerberg is the old guard with stale ideas that he railed against so hard when Facebook was founded how is that any different than most of Silicon Valley? Silicon Valley is what people thought the future looked like in 1994 It has taken Silicon Valley a long time to realize there is a limit to what you can do with websites and computers

sebzim4500 4y ago
>It has taken Silicon Valley a long time to realize there is a limit to what you can do with websites and computers Through robots in there and I'm not convinced there really is a limit, it just becomes difficult
- RugnirViking 4y ago
  These companies arent really robotics companies though. They have tried, but no successes yet

gonzo41 4y ago

Soon you'll all be fighting for your jobs. Many of you will be dying for your jobs. A few of you will be forced through a fine mesh screen for your jobs. They will be the luckiest of all. -- Zuck probably. I feel like 10K people are taking a hit because Zuck ruined VR for another decade with his very boomer like imagination and monetization strategy. Anyway, it's rough out there.

andsoitis 4y ago
> Zuck ruined VR for another decade with his very boomer like imagination and monetization strategy What do you mean?
- gonzo41 4y ago
  Go watch the launch of the metaverse and consider who would actually want to spend time and money there. Meta is trying to own vr like apple owns it's app store. But apple make a great set of products, that I don't like personally, but they are objectively good. Facebook is hanging on because it's got early market share from a long time ago, and it bought all it's competitors rather than out flank them. So it's lazy in mind and spirit and this is showing up in it's offerings in vr. Firing 10k people on the back of other layoffs just obscures that for a while.
- ben7799 4y ago
  Boomers were responsible for the late 90s VR hype train. This latest round is a re-run. VR was talked up like crazy then and fizzled. Zuckerberg is old enough to have been an impressionable kid when that was going on. I remember being very excited about it all.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    I honestly don't remember a lot of VR hype but I've never been much of gamer so maybe I wasn't paying much attention. Various organizations, including the MIT Media Lab, have been playing around with VR for a long time but I don't recall VR being particularly notable in the dot-com runup.

AlwaysRock 4y ago

> stale ideas > whole metaverse thing pick one

yurishimo 4y ago
Meta's take on it is literally stale. It's VR Chat with more funding. The service itself is nothing more than a poor tech demo.
seattle_spring 4y ago
The “metaverse” so far has just been a shitty video game. What, in your opinion, isn’t stale about the metaverse?

vishnugupta 4y ago

Meta owns Instagram and WA both of which have terrific and growing user base. How well are they able to monetise is a different question though.

peanuty1 4y ago
It's a little frustrating that they don't seem to break down earnings for Instagram and WhatsApp. My impression is that their monetization of Instagram is probably ok but not great compared to Facebook and their monetization of WhatsApp is probably awful.
daveidol 4y ago
Growing user base because they copy and steal all their good ideas
- CameronNemo 4y ago
  They don't ask how, they ask how many.

orcajerk 4y ago

Facebook is an intel front: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_LifeLog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_LifeLog

buzzert 4y ago
> The LifeLog program was canceled on February 3, 2004 > On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg launched "TheFacebook", originally located at thefacebook.com. If true, that’s a pretty crazy coincidence.
- kridsdale1 4y ago
  I worked there 7 years. This is tinfoil nonsense.

dvngnt_ 4y ago

that's why they have IG and the headsets which are younger

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

abledon 4y ago

Discord is the the Facebook killer

opportune 4y ago

I know people like to shit on the blue app, but Instagram has done a very good job at attracting younger users and feels like fb’s main focus anyway. Ironically apple entering AR/VR may be the best thing to happen to Meta if it helps bolster the ecosystem. Meta may not be #1 in the space for a long time, if ever, but they may be able to ride the wave to a strong #2

nanidin 4y ago

Maybe they should take a page from Blizzard and roll out Facebook Classic?

roguas 4y ago

We didn't have good notion of global social network at the time - facebook was first, kinda, so they took it all. Facebook still gonna prevail, but over time it festered a lot of specialized competition from twitter, reddit, linkedin, discord.