Every disruptive company in the history of companies has, at one point or another, found themselves, surprisingly, inexplicably, sill-illy, the incumbent. The mainstream. The establishment. The anti-cool.
We used to joke about it all the time with Friendster* and then MySpace. And of course, inevitably, Facebook would be next. It didn't matter how cool you were in 2004. The laws of the internet said that, if you happened to last a decade, on the other side you were lame, period.
But then a weird thing happened. A company undermined that logic in a simple way: it operated under the premise that this law of social was true; that social norms shape technology shapes a new set of social norms shapes a new set of technology and so on in an endless waltz that leaves the dominant platform clinging to zombie ad revenue in a hope of figuring out before everyone writes them off for good.
Facebook operated differently in two ways. First, it recognized that the heart of Facebook wasn't a particular user experience but an unrelenting desire to understand evolving human social norms. Second, it bought (or tried to buy) literally every company that had some insight or capacity it didn't.
An example: Instagram hit Millennials like a Mission Burrito after all the cool-kid bars had closed. It understood mobile; it understood photos; it understood how people wanted to tell the story of themselves. And in under a year and a half it had rocketed to 30 million users. At the time of acquisition, Facebook had 850 million or so, but whatever, that wasn't the point. The point was that Systrom-et al figured out something faster (or at least, were doing that something better) than Zuckerberg-et-al.
And Zuckerberg, unlike the GatesJobs's of the past, gave no shits about anything other than having that brilliance on his team. Basically unbeknownst to his board he negotiated a deal worth at the time $1B (later around $780, given changes in stock price) to nab the service, its 13 employees, and its 30 million users. He gave his board about 6 hours notice to get on...err..board.
People thought he was fucking insane.
Then he bought Oculus, a pre-product Kickstarter VR company for 2 billion. Even though VR had nothing to do with the FB product (at the time)
Then he bought WhatsApp for $19 billion (oops, $22B by the time it all resolved). Even though Facebook was investing hundreds of millions in a competing product.
The he tried to buy Snapchat. People at the time thought the reported offer of $3B was ludicrous. People thought that Evan Spiegel was a literal actual honest-to-god crazy person for turning it down. They all forgot that, for the squabbling over a few hundred million dollars, Facebook would have been a Yahoo company.
Facebook has become the model for a technology giant. It outperforms Wall Street estimates. Its executive team is engaged and responsive to the queries of outsiders. Zuckerberg and his brilliant wife Priscilla Chan have become model Millennials. Marketers have started to shift their budgets on massive to the company's video & native units. Your mom and my grandfather are now Facebook members.
In other words, the company is the establishment.
At least, that's what it would like you to think.
Quietly, Facebook is implementing a fundamentally new approach to the internet. Its efforts to bring broadband access to the entire world via satellite and drone are not just humanitarian (although they are), but represent a clear break from the telecommunications infrastructure of the past.
In Zuckerberg's world, the value happens when humans connect and those connections give business a chance to add value. There is more money to be made by having everyone online then by having a cover charge to join the party.
It's not totally clear whether Verizon, ATT, Comcast, et al understand just how radical a shift this is, although the fact that each of them are investing aggressively in content and over-the-top services suggest they might.
I was a history major in college. In 2009, my decision was go to Oxford for an MPhil or move to Silicon Valley.
Historians like moments, and people, and organizations that can conveniently separate the world into "before they existed" and "after they came to be." Facebook is one of those companies.
*as an aside, anyone who wants to cast shade on Friendster, feel free to check out Nuzzel, the new(ish) service from the founder of that service who, a decade+ later seems to be the first person/company to have maybe cracked serious, value-add social content sharing
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