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Focus

boz.com

21–30 of 60 posts

Re: Focus

#21
post #16

Takes some extraordinary lack of self awareness to write something like this while burning tens of billions of dollars a year spearheading the "Metaverse", which is as big a digression from the company's core competency as you could possibly get. And soon after publishing this he would go on to lay off a large chunk of the team and more than 20,000 employees total.

I wouldn’t be surprised if he had the Metaverse in mind but found it less offensive to his colleagues to use charity as the example.

Re: Focus

#23

I don't think it was thought of that Facebook would be worth $1.5T some day, but I'm positive what was on the 10th employees mind while getting paged at the middle of night was "I'm in the process of getting filthy rich". That certainly would help me focus.

They didn’t know if they would get rich.

They certainly hoped that would be the outcome. But they would have been idiots to not know most startups fail.

Re: Focus

#25

Boz, really? This is the guy who messed up Meta's "Metaverse" biz first, then introduced privacy invading tracking to all employees and now messing up their AI biz big time. Where is the Focus?

I didn’t know that. Box was responsible for all those things?

I never heard of him before reading this article just now.

Re: Focus

#26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The early iterations of Facebook, just like the early iterations of most internet community and social platforms legitimately brought and kept people together and helped them forge and maintain more solid group connections… I still communicate with a wider range of people from my past, high school, university, etc because of it and enjoy easy access to excellent information about certain vehicles and natural areas (h…

The focus wasn’t making the world a better place, or even to provide any value at all to its /users/, who are not its customers. The focus it was and is making money and to take this essay at face value, nothing else. Nothing wrong with making money - honestly.

I’m sure a lot of early employees convinced themselves Facebook had positive social value in addition to making them rich.

That was the default mindset in the early days of the web.

Re: Focus

#27

What good has Meta even done? They harm teen mental health with their products and farm user data. What an achievement of youth to waste it on that noble mission.

The early iterations of Facebook, just like the early iterations of most internet community and social platforms legitimately brought and kept people together and helped them forge and maintain more solid group connections… I still communicate with a wider range of people from my past, high school, university, etc because of it and enjoy easy access to excellent information about certain vehicles and natural areas (h…

Thanks to Facebook I am finding out that those people I grew up with and had connections have become assholes and would behave like one in public forums, even at the matured age of 40+. No thank you.

Re: Focus

#28
post #16

Takes some extraordinary lack of self awareness to write something like this while burning tens of billions of dollars a year spearheading the "Metaverse", which is as big a digression from the company's core competency as you could possibly get. And soon after publishing this he would go on to lay off a large chunk of the team and more than 20,000 employees total.

Did you read the whole thing? he is clearly talking about having lost focus which is directly in agreement with your take on the Metaverse.

If that was the case then he wouldn't have continued doubling and tripling down on these same product decisions for many more years.

Ask anyone at Meta and they will readily agree that Boz is among the most incompetent and unserious leaders in tech. His only qualification is being Zuck's friend, and that shields him from all criticism. At a more "focused" company he would have been fired a decade ago. As it stands he lost the shareholders $150B+ (and counting), dipped from the metaverse org, and got rewarded with a new role overseeing the shiny new thing - AI.

Re: Focus

#30

> Each individual digression from our core competency like this can probably be measured positively on ROI when considered locally. But I believe they collectively add up negatively. I’d love to see the official internal leadership stance on what Meta’s core competencies are today.

Whatever Zuck is feeling on any given day. At the moment it seems to be prediction markets.
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