The point of the article is not that she's incompetent or bad at her job. The point of the article is that once Facebook hired her to help them come up with a business model, ads were a foregone conclusion. She led the charge on the monetization problem. There was never any serious consideration of real, creative alternatives.
I don't think she's done a bad job at Facebook. She's actually done a great job at selling ads - that's something she's been doing very well for 11 years now.
But a company like Facebook doesn't come along often, and when you're the COO of Facebook you owe it to your employees, your investors, your industry, and the world to attempt to create entirely new ways of doing things. There was no real creativity in the Facebook monetization solution - which sucks because up to that point Facebook was one of the most creative technology companies.
But blaming Sandberg for selling advertising is like blaming Elton John for selling music. It's what she does. Sandberg didn't make any real mistakes - she did the job she was hired to do. Facebook made the mistakes by letting her decide how to monetize.
I don't think she's done a bad job at Facebook. She's actually done a great job at selling ads - that's something she's been doing very well for 11 years now.
But a company like Facebook doesn't come along often, and when you're the COO of Facebook you owe it to your employees, your investors, your industry, and the world to attempt to create entirely new ways of doing things. There was no real creativity in the Facebook monetization solution - which sucks because up to that point Facebook was one of the most creative technology companies.
But blaming Sandberg for selling advertising is like blaming Elton John for selling music. It's what she does. Sandberg didn't make any real mistakes - she did the job she was hired to do. Facebook made the mistakes by letting her decide how to monetize.