2012: Facebook catches up with mobile. Not many people realize that Facebook had an existential dread as the action in the computer shifted from the desktop to our wallets. This made Zuckerberg paranoid about being behind again when the next big thing arrived. He was determined to avoid what Clay Christensen called the Innovator’s Dilemma, which states that dominant companies are doomed to collapse when the next paradigm arises because their success—and their thinking—is tied to the current paradigm. When Zuckerberg saw an Oculus demo in 2014, he concluded that the future of computers lay in virtual reality. Spurred on by memories of Facebook’s near-death experience with mobile, he bought Oculus for $2 billion and later went all in, changing the company name and spending $10 billion a year on research to remove the scientific hurdles that hinder his view of the metaverse. currently form impossible.
In the past, Meta’s problems were always mitigated by fantastic financial results. So what if people hated the company – it made a fortune and the stock crawled to that trillion dollar valuation. Now that those gains have evaporated, Meta’s shortcomings take center stage. The company has been lax in improving its key products. Worse, it’s rotten.
For years, the big changes in Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger have been driven by what’s good for Meta, not what’s good for the people who use its services. Instead of improving things like, say, the birthday experience (a thing people love about Facebook), massive resources are being used to copy Meta’s main competitor, TikTok, something no one using Facebook is begging for. Admittedly, that approach worked to some degree when Instagram shamelessly swiped Stories from Snap. But there’s little chance that Meta’s TikTok clone, Reels, will surpass the maker of that format. Not only does TikTok have a state-of-the-art discovery algorithm, it also has cachet among those under 40 that Facebook can’t match. And when it comes to retaining top talent at Meta, is being second or third best in short video (don’t forget YouTube) an inspiring mission?
So what comes next? I have a solution! Dear Zuck: Break up your business. Not in the way the regulators would like, separating Facebook from Instagram and so on. But just acknowledge that Meta is already two companies. One is a technological gamble on the metaverse, and the other is a massive social enterprise suffering from the CEO’s loss of focus. The two must be split.
Meta then becomes a project to build the software and mixed-reality hardware for virtual worlds. Zuckerberg will be much happier if he returns to the exciting task of building something from scratch – he boasted in the earnings calls that working on the metaverse will eventually be “historic” – and no longer wakes up every morning feeling like he’s his heart under the belt, as he told Joe Rogan. Funding the research-heavy Meta 2 will be a breeze. If Elon Musk can pull $44 billion from investors, banks and his own pocket to buy Twitter, a company that never came close to the billion-user goal it set itself in 2009, Zuckerberg could certainly make the money. for a runway long enough to develop the metaverse he so passionately believes in. Obviously, the biggest investor will be his current company, which spends some of its $40 billion in cash betting on its late founder. One thing the new investors might specify is that the board of directors, not the CEO, will have ultimate control over the company.
