Facebook aside you really see this across the board on almost any platform, that once the product reaches it's 1.0 stage, (where it is good, does what the users want it to do, and has realised its vision) it begins a process of gradual decay, as the focus of the product managers (now panicking to find some statistics to improve to show their bosses) shifts from "building functionality" to "increasing engagement/reten…
> We, as in the IT industry, need to come up with a culture or methodology of 'declaring a product complete' Blaming Product Managers chasing "impact" is a fashionable thing to think/say here, but I don't think thats entirely true for consumer apps, and especially not for social networks. If it were, you'd expect that the each successive generation of apps to be a return to form. However as we've seen with the migrat…
Exactly. Look at the fashion industry: pants are pants, shirts are shirts, and there hasn't been a major step forward since decades. Still, brands birth and die continuously, without the underlying product being any better or worse, or cheaper, than the one that comes to replace it. Products are overrated, success as a business is far more complex than ticking a feature list and delivering it to the right people.