Social-Media
Emails reveal that Mark Zuckerberg believed software companies were growing faster than Facebook in 2012.
Newly published emails from April 2012 reveal Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other executives were irritated by slow internal prototyping and considered the advantages of fast copying and replication on smaller apps like Pinterest instead.
A chain of messages starts with Zuckerberg recounting a meeting with the owners of the Chinese social networking app Renren. In China, there is a strong culture of rapidly copying stuff and creating a lot of different goods, he wrote. "Seeing all that and the speed at which new smartphone applications appear to be arriving from other businesses makes me realize we 're going very slowly. ... I wonder what we can do to go a lot faster.
The communications were released on Wednesday as part of the House Judiciary Committee.
Other staff, including some of their initials, accepted that copying is easier than innovating, even though they were afraid that it would give Facebook a negative reputation in the industry. "We waste a lot of time on goods and prototypes that are not used, said one guy. If you give the top-down command to get ahead, copy e.g. Pinterest or Foursquare gaming trends ... I 'm sure [a] very small team of developers, a [product manager], and a designer will have it done really quickly.
I 'd love to be a lot more competitive and nimble in copying rivals to the interface / last mile stage, said another. Let's 'clone' (aka superset) Pinterest! The final chain email compared this strategy positively with the slow production of two internal products, known as "Snap" and "Roger." There is not much knowledge on both, but Roger was obviously a messaging program similar to WhatsApp, which Facebook purchased in 2014, and Snap was a possible rival to Instagram.
We spend a lot of time making sure that our prototypes match standards or configurations are future-proof. ... I've found that this is something that has slowed us down on Roger and other projects.
Startups get the best of all worlds: they 're siphoning our graph to create a new program ... And it lets them have a different experience with the drug.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) claimed at the hearing yesterday that Facebook used the possibility of copying goods to compel smaller rivals to sell, including Instagram, which was bought days after these emails were sent. Has Facebook ever tried to copy another company's products while simultaneously attempting to buy the company? She has written. Congresswoman, I don't know, Zuckerberg replied.
Since then, Facebook has established a reputation for copying devices. A variety of device updates have been introduced to clone Snapchat services, including Instagram Stories in 2016. Recently shuttered, it launched a TikTok-inspired app called Lasso and a Pinterest-like app named Hobbi. This discussion points out some of the potential reasons behind these choices and outlines an alternate strategy that Facebook has clearly not figured out.
