The moment they couldn't do either they got their clock cleaned (tiktok)
Search is bad at finding what you want but good at keeping you searching.
Here in Canada, kijiji(ebay classifieds) was popular and has accounts and ratings. People still have moved to marketplace.
By practically any measure all of the things you've listed have been wildly successful.
Apple is wildly successful at both, arguably more so the leadership than the actual product. Amazon, despite its faults, has a ton of businesses many of which do well, and it continues to innovate. I'm biased but I think Google is also in that category, with many new products that are widely well regarded (yes some were acquisitions, but typically smaller ones).
Meta on the other hand... Facebook was huge, no doubt. Instagram too, but that was already semi locked in on acquisition, they already had product/market fit at least. WhatsApp has languished under Zuckerberg, having had their explosive growth independently.
Oculus? Nope. Metaverse? Nope. Crypto? Nope. AI? Nope, or at least not yet.
By business metrics, very successful. By innovation in ads, very successful. But building new consumer businesses? Not really.
I can.
He's not necessarily dimwitted but it would take an absolutely amazing person to understand the 8 layers below him without having lived any of them. Of course he can't transcend Meta into something beyond what it's become.
I'd believe that a complete automation of this aspect of our industry would only be enough to provide a 10-20% boost in productivity. Still impressive, but within the range of "Our team improved our CI, build times, development process etc."
Most times were spent juggling paperwork, bouncing back and forth on code reviews, negotiating ambiguous requirements, and attending pointless meetings.
Granted... the agentic tools can also help with that. I've had them automate JIRA tedium for me before, much to middle management's chagrin.
This is an interesting quote from Zuckerberg:
> trajectory of the agentic development over at least the last four months hasn’t really accelerated in the way that we expected
Combine that with the other theories about Meta management in the article, I think we have the answer to is Zuckerberg a "dimwitted or just evil". It's probably the former. He can't plan four month in advance apparently, nor does he want to wait and work of actual data. Meta can affort to implement some AI, wait to see if it pans out and then layoff people. On the other hand, he had way to much patience with the Metaverse, even as all signed pointed to it being a failure. His personal hobbies shows that he is capable of patience, training, hunting isn't going to yield results in four months. I think he lacks the skills to manage, and to recognize and hire competent managers. Had Meta stock not been structured the way it is, I would like to think that the board had replaced Zuckerberg as CEO.
I wouldn't however agree that Meta was necessarily to late to AI. They showed a lot of potential early on, but then sort of dropped off. They weren't to late, it is just another mismanaged project.
He likely developed some irrational belief that clever and young beats anything else, and saw an echo of his own bravado in Alexandr Wang.
Turns out his heuristics were not calibrated properly.
...Yes
Zuck ruined enough lives, let him go become an mma podcaster like he wants.
I know plenty of people that reacted with the desired fear, putting in long hours to avoid layoffs, willingness to accept lower pay because the job market sucks, etc. - but I think there are also plenty of the the mythical 10x engineers that just checked out, stopped being 10x engineers, and are just collecting their paychecks and waiting for the layoff now. And I'm not sure you can "get them back", ever.
At least some companies reacted to this with more top-down management, stricter metrics etc. which kills motivation further and leads to metric optimization. Tell a good, smart, motivated engineer that you want more AI usage, and he's going to maybe start using some AI where it makes sense, but mostly ignore the metric while trying to do useful work. Demotivate the same engineer and make clear that his paycheck depends on metrics, and he'll give you what you're asking for, except https://github.com/dtnewman/burn-baby-burn is probably not what you _wanted_...
Meta's strategy is the kind of thing many/most people here could have come up with:
* "We have lots of users, let's show them more ads"
* "They are doing AI, let's do AI".
* "I've watched Ready Player One, let's build VR".
Duh.
ChrisArchitect•54m ago