
Zuckerberg’s Jealousy Held Back Instagram and Drove Off Founders - yasyfm
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-04-07/zuckerberg-s-jealousy-held-back-instagram-and-drove-off-founders
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tick_tock_tick
The article reads like a bad hit job it tries to paint facebooks position as
bleak while ignore all its products have continued to experience amazing
growth.

It paints a picture of what the author want the world to be like rather than
reality. One of the biggest examples is how they view regulation as a risk to
Facebook while Facebooks views it as a guarantee of market dominance.

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Barrin92
I can't speak to every point raised in the article, but at least the jealousy
aspect doesn't seem so off-base if one looks at the recent re-branding of
Whatsapp.

Whatsapp now has a giant "whatsapp by facebook" advert right on the loading
page of the application. There was a quite funny article a while back how it
led to school children deleting whatsapp because they thought facebook was
"uncool" but didn't even know it was a product of the company.

I'd also caution about "arguments from growth", given that it's totally
possible that given better decisions it might have grown even faster. Sort of
like the medieval physician who argued that blood-letting worked because the
patient recovered. It'd be better to address the substance of the article.

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eclipsetheworld
More likely a decision made to strengthen Facebook's case to antitrust
regulators. The "by facebook" branding suggests a deeper integration between
different apps and therefore makes it seemingly harder to break up Facebook's
app family.

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askafriend
Reads like fan fiction rather than objective reporting.

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pbreit
Founders rarely stay long after acquisition and Instagram seems to be doing
quite OK.

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mentos
What’s the best book to learn about Zuckerberg and Facebooks?

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dchi
"Facebook: The Inside Story" by Steven Levy. The access he got to FB
executives is beyond anything else.

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Traster
One thing I'm surprised not to hear mentioned in this article is regulation.
I'm sure there's a level of trying to assert Facebook's dominance over the
more successful acquired product. But one thing that wasn't mentioned is that
there is a strong political movemeent saying we should break up big tech.
Elizabeth Warren was called out specifically by Zuckerberg as the most
effective and transformative politician of our time.

I think one thing we need to consider about facebook is the classic middle
manager wrangling. If you think that a priority you like is under the chopping
block, you tie it inextridcably to something else and then go "Oh, well! Can't
can this project because you'll be destroying our most important project". It
is essential for Facebook to get to the point where it is so difficult to
distinguish between Facebook/Instagram/Whatsapp that you can make a coherent
argument that you can't split that company into 3 separate parts. That's a
great reason for a lot of what was going on at facebook, but the article
doesn't seem to consider it.

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hwestiii
Wasn’t this common knowledge?

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jonplackett
As John Gruber writes after every single link to Bloomberg:

* Bloomberg, of course, is the publication that published “The Big Hack” in October 2018 — a sensational story alleging that data centers of Apple, Amazon, and dozens of other companies were compromised by China’s intelligence services. The story presented no confirmable evidence at all, was vehemently denied by all companies involved, has not been confirmed by a single other publication (despite much effort to do so), and has been largely discredited by one of Bloomberg’s own sources. By all appearances “The Big Hack” was complete bullshit. Yet Bloomberg has issued no correction or retraction, and seemingly hopes we’ll all just forget about it. I say we do not just forget about it. Bloomberg’s institutional credibility is severely damaged, and everything they publish should be treated with skepticism until they retract the story or provide evidence that it was true.

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yumraj
Gruber can write what he wants, but is there any evidence that Bloomberg's
_institutional credibility_ was impacted in anyway.

I see tons of articles from Bloomberg being posted on HN, where people care
about that issue. Outside of this, no one cared and there are people on both
camps as far as that story is concerned.

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jonplackett
Having 'people in both camps' doesn't mean much. There are people in both
camps for literally anything because opinion is cheap.

What matters is not people's opinions but evidence (or lack of it).

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xiaolingxiao
paywall

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thaumasiotes
Bloomberg doesn't have a paywall if you disable Javascript.

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gaogao
I usually just clear my cookies for this and NYT

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jrockway
Last I checked they use a service worker or local storage, so you have to
clear all data, not just cookies. I didn't investigate in detail though.

