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Everyone commenting that this isn’t wrong/illegal/bad. But it sure is a sign that an organization no longer believes they can sufficiently innovate. Is this inevitable?
When I was at Netscape, marketing had every page of Yahoo up on a wall (printed out!), and there were teams assigned to recreating each and every one of them, verbatim. So, this isn't new. But, like Steve Jobs said [1], good artists copy, great artists steal. It's one thing to take the essence, it's another to completely reproduce it with your own twist. [1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/03/06/artists-steal/
It's the user's graph. The rest of this I have no problems with.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery Don't most companies have these types of conversations? I haven't been at one yet that hasn't. Good startups look at their competitors and decide to clone some, and change other, features. Were we not excited here yesterday on HN, that Cloudflare is cloning and undercutting AWS S3?
Cloudflare provides services directly to its users, who pay for and use said services.
Facebook and Google avoid their users at all costs. They are in the business of selling their users to advertisers. Any services they provide are just carrots on sticks to generate more meat for the grinder.
They are nefarious in intent because they are Facebook and Google, not for any abstract or technical reason.
He's really nothing but a boring and defensive cloner/acquirer at heart. The world would be no worse off, and probably better off, had he never created Facebook. Unlike Apple, Amazon, Google, Intel, and many of the other SV companies that truly moved the world forward.
Oculus is the only thing he's bought that is actually doing something important in technology, and he seems to have done a pretty mediocre job running it so far.
Copying has been in an other nation's playbook for a long time. TikTok (Douyin really) is really just a copy of Vines for instance. Facebook would be foolish not to look outward at the competition.
Also I feel like the problem with Facebook is not that it's copying, but rather their copies often seem subpar. Remember the function to send/receive money in Messenger? Back in the day it seemed like one of the worse instantiations of this feature out of the various messenger systems...
What gives you the right to read those emails?
Is there anything else to take away from these emails?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
US rules against monopolies generally hold that the monopolist cannot clone competitors offerings. Facebook is not yet a convicted monopolist
There’s no such rule. Even running a monopoly itself is not illegal, it’s only illegal if you leverage your monopolistic position to prevent competition such as temporarily cutting prices below cost to starve competition.
For example, in the US Microsoft bundling internet explorer with windows wasn't seen as a anti-competitive. In the EU, it was.
In another example, apple and android both bundle browser with their operating systems. However, the EU has not rule either to be anti-competitive. That's primarily because they aren't considered to hold a monopoly on their markets.
This is also a failing in the law (IMO). ISPs in the US clearly coordinate prices regionally, yet monopoly laws don't really touch them both because there are often at least 2 ISPs in most locations with relatively similarly sized customer bases and internet packages. Further, there really aren't a whole lot of national ISPs (unless you consider cell phone companies).