ANAHEIM, CALIFORNIA – FEBRUARY 17: Mark Zuckerberg is seen in attendance during the UFC 298 event at … More
“I missed out on Snapchat and TikTok, I won’t miss on this.” Those were the words of Mark Zuckerberg during one particularly fraught day among presumably many at Facebook, and presumably now Meta. They were reported in the Wall Street Journal.
They reveal what everyone in Silicon Valley knows intimately, that the present is an awful predictor of the future. See Yahoo and AOL if you’re confused, or for that matter Friendster and MySpace. Today’s giants are invariably tomorrow’s afterthoughts absent an ability to not just pivot, but pivot the right way. The problem is that the right pivot requires seeing around the proverbial corner, which as the list of once prominent Silicon Valley businesses reveals, is very hard to do.
It raises thoughts about Mark Zuckerberg the businessman, Zuckerberg the employer of tens of thousands, and Zuckerberg the competitor without which we’ve never heard of Zuckerberg the businessman or the employer. With the FTC’s antitrust suit against him well in mind, what is he supposed to do?
He’s got a business to run, and he’s running it while well aware of business history. Assuming he’s not aware of business history, readers can rest assured that some on his board of directors and some among the truthtellers in and outside his employ are aware of business history. Which means there’s substantial awareness inside Meta that stasis is death. Put another way, success in the present is near meaningless as a predictor of the future. If anything, it’s the biggest threat, and it threatens precisely because success begets investment in individuals possessing Zuckerberg’s brains and energy, but who are more than eager to knock him off his perch.
It’s useful to think about all this with the quote that opens this opinion piece in mind. It’s rejects the the popular view inside the FTC that Zuckerberg’s long been in hot pursuit of “monopoly.” What a simplistic notion. If anything, the quote reveals Zuckerberg as the opposite of a monopolist, but instead as someone who recognizes he and Meta are anything but a monopoly. The quote explains Zuckerberg as someone fully aware of how little the present predicts the future, but wanting to be relevant in the future, Zuckerberg has long been looking ahead in search of what will matter in the months and years ahead.
If Zuckerberg were a monopolist, or much more pertinent to the FTC’s weak case, if Zuckerberg had monopoly powers, he would have stopped at Facebook. Really, why purchase minnows like Instagram and WhatsApp when you have the most prominent social media site in the world?
The answer to the above question can yet again be found in the quote that begins this opinion piece, that it’s not enough to be good or great once. What sustains good and great is more of good and great, but that requires not merely meeting the needs of users, but much more often than not attempting to lead them with blinders on. In other words, Zuckerberg purchased Instagram and WhatsApp not because he was certain about the future or either’s role in the future, but because he wasn’t. As the opening quote in this write up once again reminds us, the future is the stuff of sleepless nights so opaque is it.
Implied in it was that while Zuckerberg proved prescient, and more visionary than the competition with the Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions, he had a few misses too. Those included SnapChat and TikTok. Which is just a reminder that every action of Mark Zuckerberg and Meta, including the name Meta, reveals the doings of a business that was never a monopoly, and that never saw itself as one.
