71–80 of 231 posts
I'd venture that they're extremely wealthy, still friends, and decided it's time to go have fun rather than prescribe this to Facebook's ethical challenges like the article would have you believe.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
According to the article, this info was leaked to the reporters from several people who knew about it, and the co-founders have already notified Instagram's leadership team. It's not just anyone, but two co-founders of one of the world's most prominent tech companies. If they are indeed leaving "just for fun", presumably they care enough about their company and their colleagues to have given an explanation for their…
I don't understand, what could the founders have done differently? At some point they must make the initial step to notify leadership that they are leaving. This the step that was leaked. Were they supposed to write their own press releases before they even told anybody that they were resigning?
If Facebook truly was unprepared, it’s reasonable to assume they weren’t expecting the announcement.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They have over 2 billion monthly active users. This is a global penetration rate that is the best in the world. They have done something that no other company in the world has done. They are relevant to basically the vast majority of all Internet users in the world. To say they are the least stable or that their power over most humans is waning is, quite frankly, ludicrous. To put it in perspective, they would need t…
Windows has seen an officially reported install base as high as 1.5B. This was a few years ago; their numbers have taken a hit recently. Considering the average annual revenue per U.S. Facebook user is ~$20, startlingly less in other countries, arguably Microsoft, not Facebook, is the more interesting company. Nearly as many active users as Facebook, but substantially more revenue per user (~$50-$150 for an OEM key?…
React is one of the most used front-end frameworks in the world, so it’s not like they aren’t capable of doing what Microsoft does, if that becomes their focus.
I’m not sure either company is really that interesting though. Azure is limited AWS but with better support, Windows is more horrible than it’s ever been and the .Net environment is a shit show for anyone working in it because it’s running around like a confused cat. Which is awesome for some people, but terrible when you have to keep your employees up to speed.
I mean, going from asp to mvc to core 1 to core 2 has been ridiculously expensive. So has replacing half our services with modern power shell and orchestra. It’s not bad tech wise, but it’s so ridiculous expensive from an organizational perspective.
The worst bit is that in a few years, you can add to things Microsoft has changed for the apparent fun of it.
We didn’t have to adopt core from a tech perspective, of course, but my developers wanted to, to stay relevant in the .net job scene, so we kind of had to from a management perspective.
It’s too much though, and they are doing the same across platforms. Like we have skype for business and we’ve trained 7000 employees to use it, and now it’s becoming obsolete... That’ll litteraly cost us millions because 5000 of our employee can’t tell you if they are on an android or iPhone device when they contact support, so many of them won’t havd learned Skype before it dies. :p
I think the thing that describes the problems with modern Microsoft the best is how they enabled new 365 features by default. So suddenly we had non-tech savvy people creating teams (and new emails that were added to our address books).
Anyway, this was a long rant, but it’s just to show that Microsoft isn’t really doing well in non-tech focused enterprise. And we’re their main market share.
Here's an offtopic observation. This article (from the New York Times ) denoted the names of the Instagram founders as "Mr. Systrom and Mr. Krieger..." The Wall Street Journal has a corresponding article about this story. In that article, the Instagram founders' names are written, "Messrs. Systrom and Krieger..." Despite frequently reading both papers, I can't recall ever seeing "Messrs" before. I thought it was a ty…
But you have to give credit to how the company started and how it's been running all these years. Instagram is still flourishing (and grew in the face of competition from Snapchat, even by copying its features and making it better) and seems like a nicer group of communities with a lot less of the nastiness that's seen on Facebook (I don't have much first hand experience, but do see some feeds on the web). That's not easy to cultivate, and for reasons I haven't read about or examined, the Instagram users have self-selected such a group to be in.*
Here's hoping the founders start something new and fresh, far from privacy invasive platforms.
*: I'd be interested in any writings about how these communities developed to be what they are.
Here's an offtopic observation. This article (from the New York Times ) denoted the names of the Instagram founders as "Mr. Systrom and Mr. Krieger..." The Wall Street Journal has a corresponding article about this story. In that article, the Instagram founders' names are written, "Messrs. Systrom and Krieger..." Despite frequently reading both papers, I can't recall ever seeing "Messrs" before. I thought it was a ty…
E.g., English https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=messrs&case_in...
French https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=messrs&case_in...
Posting anon. In 2009, the startup where I was working was hitting the skids, and our investors (correctly) were not willing to back us. We all kept grinding for a month or two in honorable futility, but after a while, my bank account depleted and I had to go. To make various ends meet and to keep my mental health during the wind down however, I took up some contract work that I found through various friends in the S…
Here's an offtopic observation. This article (from the New York Times ) denoted the names of the Instagram founders as "Mr. Systrom and Mr. Krieger..." The Wall Street Journal has a corresponding article about this story. In that article, the Instagram founders' names are written, "Messrs. Systrom and Krieger..." Despite frequently reading both papers, I can't recall ever seeing "Messrs" before. I thought it was a ty…
"Messrs" is pretty old fashioned language. It's uncommon to see it in modern use.
Though it may be part of the WSJ's house style, so you might see it in its pages quote a bit (the paywall means I don't read it enough to know). For a similar example, see the New Yorker's continued archaic use of the diaeresis:
I wonder what's Facebook's move after Instagram becomes stale and no longer "cool". It seems to me that the popularity of social networks are cyclical, and there's very little that a company can do to satiate a user's appetite for something new. That's before we discuss future regulatory troubles Facebook might face. What future revenue streams does Facebook have? Are they even capable of creating something new that…
Cool probably doesn't matter nearly as much as it used to given Facebook's user base size. As long as they have eyeballs, they'll have a revenue stream. Their willingness to pay what appeared to be outrageous sums for competitors users reflects that. But now that they've got the lions share of the social network using world, it's doubtful that they'd need to do that again in a big way unless they see something gettin…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
1. They probably had some sort of golden handcuffs with FB, a vesting period? 2. How often do you get to experience the thrill of leading one of the fastest growing and most popular apps of all time? That's a lot of power and prestige, you're basically a real world rockstar. Why leave while the missile is still going upwards to space at full speed, even just for the experience? It's an exhilarating ride, I'm sure, an…
I think you have to step back and wonder what "growth at all cost" can turn into. Multiple research studies have confirmed Instagram, relative to other social media apps, has basically been engineered to maximize FOMO and is making people more depressed, isolated, feeling "not good enough", and in a constant cycle of comparison with others. When you create an app that is as consequential as Instagram is on society/cu…
There's little correlation IMO between being a smart person and being a caring person. The average FB shareholder or employee could give less than a fig if the product is making people depressed, as long as their eyeballs stay attached to it.