
The man who helped Facebook beat Snapchat - danso
http://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/15/instagram-kevin-weil-helped-facebook-beat-snapchat.html
======
abalone
The interesting flipside to the copycat issue is that Snapchat _intentionally_
did not copy Instagram. And that was probably a mistake.

Spiegel was explicitly against the concept of "accumulative" profiles.[1] The
accumulative feature they rolled out last year was Memories, a _private_
gallery that only the user could see and show to people in person. And he was
explicitly against making it easy to add tons of friends on Snapchat. He
wanted it to be about your "seven most important people."[2]

Well, turns out people do in fact like their Instagram accumulative profiles
to store and share highlights with their followers. And it turns out people
like getting engagement and adulation from a broader network of followers.

So, as much as I dislike the crass copying that Instagram/Weil did and his
attempt to pass it off as just a "format" \-- that's bullshit, they copied
vast aspects of Snapchat stories and messaging.. calling it a "format" is
naked intellectual dishonesty. I noticed Weil back in the Twitter days and
this intellectual dishonesty makes me respect him less.

But Snapchat also did not make the right strategic product decisions here.
Spiegel, to his credit, went with a bold vision and strategic analysis about
what people want. Turns out it was just wrong with respect to how people want
to engage with and present their experiences to a broader set of friends.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykGXIQAHLnA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykGXIQAHLnA)

[2] [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/17/technology/snapchat-
ipo-v...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/17/technology/snapchat-ipo-
video.html)

~~~
ouid
I sometimes use snapchat, I never use instagram. There's nothing wrong with
occupying a niche.

~~~
lnanek2
I use both here and have some friends using both. Different purposes, though.
We post an occasional staged "trophy" pic on Instagram and get polite,
complementary comments and likes and follows from places like restaurants we
visited. It's not intimate or close at all, it's more like bragging.

Snapchat is very different, however. Every day has dozens of conversations
with people or groups full of silliness and poking fun. It's like being with
your friends in person. I would never post a Snap of myself dancing with a
hotdog, or a love portrait with one on my House of Curry shots on Instagram,
or have a competition with someone posting our grocery receipts trying for a
certain number, or send a cute good night sticker, but it's all normal in
Snapchat.

If it gets a laugh and some happy communication out of your friends it feels
worth it in a way Instagram doesn't.

Disclaimer: I work for Snap, but the views and opinions offered here do not
necessarily represent those of any past, current, or future institution and/or
employer :)

~~~
parthdesai
Yup, i'm 24 and my experience is exactly the same. All the jokes or whatever
embarrassing pictures or politically incorrect jokes my group of friends have
are on snapchat or group chat in messenger. Instagram is mainly for decent
pictures.

------
nancyp
I'd rewrite the title: "Man who helped Facebook shamelessly copy Snapchat's
best features without giving any credit"

~~~
dsacco
There is nothing inherently righteous or honorable about allowing another
company to lay exclusive claim to features. That "shameless copying" is an
example of competition, and it's what turns the wheels of capitalism.

What would you have Facebook do? "Well, darn. I guess we can't implement those
features, Snapchat beat us to it! Time to just lay over and let them churn our
users." This is not how any rational company works, and every major tech
company has copied others many times.

~~~
ouid
>an example of competition

Not when you are leveraging monopoly power to gain market share somewhere
else. This kind of capitalism tends to degenerate.

~~~
majani
They gave a massive buyout offer before copying. There was only one thing left
to do after that.

~~~
ouid
If you're arguing that Facebook behaved rationally, then we aren't in
disagreement. If you're arguing that Facebook acted in the public interest,
then you're going to need a different argument.

~~~
kinkrtyavimoodh
So you seem to be implying that ONE company having a feature is somehow better
for public interest than TWO companies having that feature?

Or that it is better for public interest that people prop up companies with
multi billion dollar valuations on the basis of trivially copy-able features?

~~~
ouid
If that were a complete accounting of the variables then yes, that is what I
would be saying. That is not a complete accounting of the variables though.

It is harmful to the public interest to allow a company to use its monopoly
status as leverage to monopolize other markets. Facebook is competing for
image messaging in the same sense that Lance Armstrong was competing in the
tour de france.

Monopoly is the degenerate case of capitalism, and this kind of behavior by
monopolies is how the degeneracy reproduces.

------
edpichler
I really dislike the feature of Instagram that imitates Snapchat. When a
software tries to make more than one thing, it loses it's identity. I am
surprised that people are still using it, but about the long run, nobody
knows.

I saw a funny tweet that someone just wrote "A fear" than an image of Twitter
print, of the mobile version, with small spheres on the top (like the ones
suddenly appeared on Instagram), so I realized that it's not just me that
think Instagram got worse with this feature. And the design solution they
found, really annoys me. Now we have this on all Facebook products (WhatsApp
and Facebook itself).

Talking about the software identity, I don't remember successful products that
tries to do more than one thing. I think it's wrong, but it's apparently
working, so I am observing and learning.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
I'm on the flipside of this, I think my Instagram use is better as a result.

I shared the same friend (mostly) list between Snap and Instagram and with the
introduction of stories my Snap use dropped to basically zero. Instagram is a
one stop shop for the accumulative feed, stories, and video DMs. No need to
switch apps.

That said, I didn't get a ton of direct messages on Snapchat, probably because
I'm older and the kind of 1-1 communication I saw teens doing on Snap isn't as
common for my age group, however that feature is there in IG.

I might be an outlier, though I don't think I am judging by the numbers.

On a more crass note, from the business perspective, Instagram is in a much
better ad position than Snap because it's really easy to buy ad space. Not
only that it's going to be easier to develop content for AR filters on
Instagram because they have an actual developer pathway for that.

As far as I can tell, Snap highly curates all broadcast content and
advertising, and there is no third party developer support.

Not sure why anyone wouldn't see how bad that is - if anything Snap should
have learned from Twitter that third part devs are core to longevity.

~~~
Zak
I'm a pretty casual user of Instagram and I _hate_ the disappearing stories.
I've never posted one, and I don't like the time pressure to view them rather
than catching up at my leisure. I've never used Snapchat.

Can you explain the appeal?

~~~
AndrewKemendo
The idea is that it's a more natural, free flowing expression because it's a
low bar of entry that has no memory. So in that sense it can be anything you
want without you having to worry if it's going to be indelible.

------
raz32dust
I am curious how many people actually feel this is cool that Facebook can
simply copy everything Snapchat comes up with? I understand that this is the
way of the world. Big fish eats smaller fish yada yada. But is it good in the
long run? I don't know how to do this, and I understand any solution will
probably be riddled to the core with loopholes. But I do feel like there
should be some way to prevent this kind of monopolization. What do you all
think from a long-term, idealistic perspective?

~~~
Eridrus
From an ethical perspective, I think the amount of truly unique ideas is
actually very, very low, I think most ideas (including all the snapchat UI
concepts) have been had by multiple people, so I do not think it makes sense
to give people a monopoly on ideas since by doing so you are restricting
others who may have even come up with the same idea. The amount of obvious
patents vastly outnumbers the amount of non-obvious ones.

There is an argument that says that large companies are better at execution,
and so will just reap the rewards of other people's ideas, but I think that
big companies are actually bad at execution and they are currently benefiting
far more from the current legal regime.

So, all in all, we should abolish all patent law.

------
briandear
Instagrams revenues are increasing because Facebook advertisers unwittingly
are having their ads run in Instragram. You have to opt-out. Found that out
after blowing through and ad budget that got consumed more quickly because of
Instragram.

Instagram users as a cohort are the worst audience for advertising. Low
conversions, lots of impressions and just all around less profitable than the
exact same ad on Facebook itself.

Even music acts that would seem to be a tailor made product for Instragram –
still, in my anecdotal experience, a complete waste of money. Instagram the
“thing” might be a fun product, but Instagram as a provider of cost-effective
advertising, no way.

~~~
quickthrower
Ultimately this should hurt Facebook if advertisers are tracking ROI they may
just stop campaigns and go into other channels entirely.

~~~
briandear
One would think, but I think big brands don’t care. They are after “awareness”
and not actual conversions. It’s like TV, how does one measure the ROI on a
national Coca Cola ad? (I actually don’t know.)

~~~
nocoder
What you seem to be saying is that Instagram is a good brand building platform
over the longer-term vs platform to generate leads and transactions over the
short term. Unless, there is a study to prove that I am not too sure. I
usually find media agencies and platforms make this argument when they cannot
justify the RoI of their platform in a direct and measurable sense. It is much
like how Google tries to prove effectiveness of its display ads using a fuzzy
metric called view-through impressions.

On the coke bit, coke actually does measure the RoI on its TV using a mix of
brand track studies and marketing mix modelling. I know this because I have
worked with agencies that Coca-Cola engages to do both and is really
scientific and serious about it.

------
siliconc0w
I'm surprised it took Instagram this long to copy Snapshot. This guy seems
super impressive but adding a competitor's features to your product to
increase market share seems like a pretty obvious move.

~~~
zitterbewegung
It might be that it's all a part of execution of the product. Google tries and
fails with their social networking efforts and they are also doing the obvious
move and they can't .

~~~
saimiam
This is such a good point. Personally, I'd rather not copy to win but in
business, it's easily possible to copy poorly and fail hard.

There's a saying in Hindi - you need brains to copy well.

------
debt
Most of this will come down to brand equity anyway. I have to assume there are
people using Lyft over Uber because those people have negative associations
with the Uber brand. Uber and Lyft both provide the same products, but people
prefer one brand over another.

People prefer Gucci over Versace, North Face over Patagonia etc.

Inevitably, the same will be true for Facebook vs Snapchat. Snapchat will
likely prevail in a way because the "brand" ecosystem, talent pool(pr, actors,
producers etc.) are concentrated largely in Los Angeles due to the existing
Hollywood system.

Proximity to the talent might not have much to do with it, but I imagine
Snapchat has been developing those relationships for a while.

------
curiousDog
Looking at Linkedin, he's had a remarkable career. Wow. He's made it from
Engineering lead at 28 to SVP and Head of product at 34.

------
adventured
At the time the DOJ began seriously looking into Microsoft about anti-trust
abuses derived from their monopoly, there were still a vast number of medium
to large software & tech companies that competed head on with Microsoft. That
of course meant there were a large number of parties that could sign on to the
aggrieved list against Microsoft.

As Facebook formally kills off Snapchat in the next few years, it's a curious
problem of which companies will supply the ammunition to go after Facebook for
anti-trust abuse. Said companies will be the biggest motivating factor for the
US Government to act, their prompting will drive the case.

Given the scale we're talking about now (Facebook is already more profitable
non-inflation adjusted than what Microsoft was at the height of its power; and
they might double their profit in a few years up to $20 billion before any
government action would come through). I would expect companies to begin
lining up with their hands out. Twitter as one example, stands to easily land
maybe $5 billion or more as compensation for being one of the few survivors of
Facebook's social monopoly. Something that has changed a lot in the last 20
years, corporate fines & costs of negative legal outcomes have skyrocketed in
practically every industry. Google's worsening EU disaster is just the latest
example of that. Facebook will need tens of billions of dollars set aside for
settling with governmental entities and competitors (even semi-dead
competitors like MySpace - its owners will show up with their hands out for a
settlement, and they'll definitely get some crumbs as Facebook will settle
just to move on as the lawsuits stack high after the blood hits the water).

As the world witnesses Facebook intentionally kill off Snapchat by leveraging
its monopoly in nearly every way it can, there are going to be few people
remaining in the Facebook defender camp as the number of major social players
in the US & EU markets drifts toward just a few small competitors left
standing. Snapchat better have been worth it, as I can assure you that
crushing Netscape wasn't worth what it cost Microsoft.

~~~
boulos
> Facebook is already more profitable non-inflation adjusted than what
> Microsoft was at the height of its power

As a nit, what's the point of using a non-inflation adjusted comparison? You
wouldn't say have compared Facebook to Standard Oil :).

It turns out that 1998 to today is only a 50% change according to CPI [1] and
MSFT had $4.5B in net income for FY 1998 [2]. So your point still stands given
Facebook's massive ~$10B FY2016 net income [3].

[1]
[https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm](https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm)
[2]
[https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar98/fins.htm](https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar98/fins.htm)
[3] [https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-
details/...](https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-
details/2017/facebook-Reports-Fourth-Quarter-and-Full-
Year-2016-Results/default.aspx)

~~~
adventured
Ok, serious answer. I used the non-inflation adjustment specifically because
while I recognized enough time had passed to cause a not-entirely-trivial
adjustment, I didn't regard it as enough time to matter enough to warrant a
distraction to the more core points. Inflation adjustment precision is a
notoriously disagreed upon thing, the more near term you get the less valuable
the matter becomes. I knew that someone might lodge that point, so I wanted to
potentially preempt it (hoping that it would make the responding comment not
worth bothering with, that the person writing it would be too lazy to bother
writing a comment just to argue inflation adjustment numbers for ~1997-2017).
Why bother making the point at all then? Because it highlights Facebook's
growing financial power. If their net income isn't beyond Microsoft's on an
inflation adjusted basis today, it will be very soon (perhaps by the end of
fiscal 2017 or mid 2018 on a run rate). Further, I suspected most people
realize that while there has been some inflation since the late 1990s, it's
not N hundred percent.

~~~
boulos
No problem! I'm notoriously incapable of guessing how much inflation has
happened in the last {20, 30, 50} years. I was _surprised_ it was only 1.5x (I
had predicted ~2). I agree that CPI is a particularly clumsy measure (not
mentioned is the fudge factor in how accounting for stock/option-based
compensation has changed).

Your comment had the desired (ultimate) effect though: I really haven't been
watching how much cash Facebook has been generating, and it's amazing to
compare it to Microsoft at peak monopoly.

------
ridruejo
Good prescient analysis of the same topic from a year ago
[https://stratechery.com/2016/the-audacity-of-copying-
well/](https://stratechery.com/2016/the-audacity-of-copying-well/)

------
mola
This seems like PR fluff...

------
amingilani
This may be an unpopular opinion but I feel strongly against titles like this.
They could have very well gone with "...Facebook take Instagram Market share"
but they wanted to make it personal and human.

I'm disgusted by the choice of words here. One company gained an advantage
over there other in a market, big deal! They're competing businesses and
eventually one will up the other but there's no point in saying "down to its
knees"

~~~
adventured
You're spot on that it's a bit ridiculous. It's intentional however and it's
going to get a lot worse yet. Over the next few years the press will start
using increasingly violent-sounding, negative, stark headlines against
Facebook. Associated headline words will shift toward aggressive tones.

It's a portrait. They do the same thing to most dominant companies once they
grow out of the up-and-coming phase. Amazon for example is starting to get
deluged by such press coverage; Google has been the subject of it for years;
and of course Microsoft went through a solid decade or more of it. Once upon a
time, Walmart was portrayed as a cute & fuzzy hayseed retailer just looking to
save the good 'ol consumer a buck or two.

~~~
seibelj
It's not surprising that Trump rails against the mainstream media when it's
becoming increasingly obvious that the news is written to rile people up and
get clicks. The news is like professional wrestling - there are heroes,
villains, story arcs, winners, losers, and the more you understand a topic the
more you realize the press gets it completely wrong. But maybe it's always
been this way, and I wasn't as aware before.

~~~
pedalpete
Interesting perspective, but I don't think it makes sense to take sides
politically in this argument.

All media is sadly going this way, the argument could also be made that link
bait titles are partly responsible for Trump's popularity. ALL media is sadly
going this way. If you think Fox or Drudge or whatever are above these sad
tactics, look closer.

I'd like to ask the bigger question of, how do we fight/protect agains this?

~~~
im3w1l
The problem is that journalism is unprofitable. They have to fight dirty just
to survive.

~~~
gaius
This is why I take a nuanced view of so-called Net Neutrality. In such a
world, how does anyone monetize? Well we have seen: through sleazy tracking
and sly tricks to capture personal data. Personally I liked it the old way:
you paid cash money upfront and then you got the product in your hand and the
transaction was closed.

~~~
someguydave
Agreed. I would rather have silence than constant trickery and scammy sales
everywhere I turn.

