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Agreed. It's really hard to read the rest of the article without questioning every statement after reading that ridiculous paragraph early on. You're telling

by victoro 13y ago

Agreed. It's really hard to read the rest of the article without questioning every statement after reading that ridiculous paragraph early on. You're telling me Facebook, who's killer app was photo tagging for the first 3 years of its existence and who has, over the last few years, been struggling with transitioning its platform to a mobile audience, somehow ranks ahead, technology-wise, of the biggest e-commerce site on the internet? The technology that goes into Amazon's logistics and distribution platform alone rivals facebook's impressive scale, and Amazon is doing that while, at the same time powering a gigantic and feature rich cloud service and methodically eating the publishing industry's lunch.

nostrademons 13y ago
It's because he's not measuring greatness by technical achievement, he's measuring greatness by how much you have changed the average consumer's behavior. Amazon's big as far as e-commerce goes...but people bought things before, they can buy things from other websites, and they'll continue to buy things even if Amazon didn't exist. Facebook somehow managed to get people to spend 2-3 hours/day throwing sheep at each other and give up all their personal information for targeted ads. Zuckerburg's genius isn't that he's a master technologist (I hear he's pretty good, but that was never FaceBook's core competency), it was that he realized social networking would be a billion dollar business long before anyone else did. Google had competitors out within a year, but it never took those competitors seriously, and so 9 years on they are still struggling to play catch-up. Probably nearly everyone on Hacker News could've built FaceBook in a weekend or so, in its original incarnation. Zuck was the only one who realized he should and then pressed forward with it, and that's why he got rich.
- ryanmerket 13y ago
  Building Facebook is one thing, scaling Facebook is an entirely different beast.
  - victoro 13y ago
    Agreed, but I find scaling Amazon's physical and digital infrastructures in tandem is equally impressive.
- victoro 13y ago
  I agree with you that Zuck deserves praise for taking the idea of Social networking and running with it far longer and more successfully than anyone else. But, I can just as easily make the argument that people were using the Internet to interact socially before, they can interact socially on other websites, and they will continue to interact socially online even if Facebook didn't exist (we could be spending 2-3 hours a day on myspace or instagram right now). All of these companies (except for maybe Apple, who introduced a completely new paradigm with the consumer PC back in the 80's) took something consumers were already doing and did it better. Therefore, I think the argument has to be made from a technological perspective, where Amazon is the clear innovator.

by victoro 13y ago

nostrademons 13y ago

It's because he's not measuring greatness by technical achievement, he's measuring greatness by how much you have changed the average consumer's behavior. Amazon's big as far as e-commerce goes...but people bought things before, they can buy things from other websites, and they'll continue to buy things even if Amazon didn't exist. Facebook somehow managed to get people to spend 2-3 hours/day throwing sheep at each other and give up all their personal information for targeted ads. Zuckerburg's genius isn't that he's a master technologist (I hear he's pretty good, but that was never FaceBook's core competency), it was that he realized social networking would be a billion dollar business long before anyone else did. Google had competitors out within a year, but it never took those competitors seriously, and so 9 years on they are still struggling to play catch-up. Probably nearly everyone on Hacker News could've built FaceBook in a weekend or so, in its original incarnation. Zuck was the only one who realized he should and then pressed forward with it, and that's why he got rich.

ryanmerket 13y ago
Building Facebook is one thing, scaling Facebook is an entirely different beast.
- victoro 13y ago
  Agreed, but I find scaling Amazon's physical and digital infrastructures in tandem is equally impressive.
victoro 13y ago
I agree with you that Zuck deserves praise for taking the idea of Social networking and running with it far longer and more successfully than anyone else. But, I can just as easily make the argument that people were using the Internet to interact socially before, they can interact socially on other websites, and they will continue to interact socially online even if Facebook didn't exist (we could be spending 2-3 hours a day on myspace or instagram right now). All of these companies (except for maybe Apple, who introduced a completely new paradigm with the consumer PC back in the 80's) took something consumers were already doing and did it better. Therefore, I think the argument has to be made from a technological perspective, where Amazon is the clear innovator.