Mark Zuckerberg Just Put Facebook Into Maintenance Mode
So, that Mark Zuckerberg Facebook privacy memo. What stood out to me when it was published was that it was one of the first non-faceplants (not to mention non-facepalms) Facebook had done from a PR-perspective in months. It’s actually pretty well-written, seemingly straight-forward, and unquestionably interesting.
Upon reflection, a week later, I believe there’s quite a bit more nuance in terms of what it means. Essentially, it means almost nothing in the short term, and almost everything in the long term.
What Zuckerberg signaled with the memo is simply an intent. He intends to steer the Facebook ship towards the private waters that they’ve largely shunned in the past. Instead, Facebook has operated almost solely in the public seas and enticed billions of users to join them there. But a rogue wave has rolled that party this year. And as those troubled waters have begun to recede, everyone is now seeing the very real downsides of living our lives and leaving our data exposed out in the open.
This is an existential threat to Facebook. But the network’s demise has been overstated in these times of trouble because of its sheer size and scope. Facebook is too big to fail — at least to fully flatline. Instead, it will decay over time. And this decay will largely happen as its foundation (new users from new generations) crumbles. This will take a lot of time.
And time is exactly what Facebook needs to pull off the pivot Zuckerberg is suggesting. Again, it’s not that he’s going to shut down Facebook, forsake ads, and make everything private, it’s that he intends to build products going forward that cater to this new world that has been left in old Facebook’s wake.
Said another way: he effectively just put Facebook as we know it into maintenance mode. It will continue to operate, and will undoubtedly ship new features here and there — at the very least to keep some level of freshness so that they can continue to milk the profits of the News Feed to feed the new initiatives. But make no mistake: there’s a new focus going forward.¹
Many people seem to think that such a read of the situation is giving Zuckerberg too much credit. That he’s either doing a head fake to distract the outside from the shitshow of the past year, or to rally his own troops after the beating Facebook has taken from said shitshow — or both.² I believe this isn’t giving him enough credit. I think he knows that all the best businesses in the world — truly lasting businesses — have to have a second act.
The question now is what style of second act this will be. Will it be Windows to Microsoft’s DOS?³ Perhaps this works as DOS was still the underlying pipes to the new facade of Windows, which could very well be what Facebook does here, utilizing the social network and profiles as a base for the new private modes.⁴ Or will it be the iPod to Apple’s Mac?⁵ That is, a seemingly smaller tangent that ended up taking the business to the next level. Facebook will undoubtedly hope it’s the iPhone to said Mac (or said iPod!⁶), but let’s not get carried away here. That’s one of the best businesses of all time, let alone one of the best second (or third, or fourth) acts. Perhaps Facebook views this second act more akin to Netflix moving from DVDs to streaming. That is, the basic idea remained the same, but the method of delivery and interaction changed. And it was the legacy business that allowed Netflix to make such a change, to become the behemoth it now is. Amazon, of course, has had many, many acts at this point. I guess Facebook just probably wants to avoid the fate of AOL — an amazing legacy business that was milked for profits for years after its relevance had ended, but the company was never able to nail that next big thing, despite many attempts.
Facebook’s need for such an encore is probably coming sooner than many people expected, but it was always inevitable. The world in which Facebook operates is fickle. The attention economy is ever-fleeting. Facebook will probably need three acts in order to stay relevant in the same timeframe that the companies of yesteryear needed but two.
You could argue that the move to mobile was Facebook’s second act. But it really was just porting the product to a new form factor — one that ended up being even better from a business model perspective. This really just extended the first act. Instagram, WhatsApp, and even Oculus have also been labeled as Facebook’s second act at times. But true second acts aren’t bought, they’re built. This is the challenge Zuckerberg is taking on.
¹ And I can’t help but wonder if Facebook, the company, doesn’t shift to a structure more similar to that of Alphabet — where Google is but one arm of the tree. Or perhaps it’s a less exaggerated move in the Snap/Snapchat vein.⁷ The way the company is constructed right now with Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, and the like, would seem to make this even more straightforward than the examples above.
² At the same time, it’s undeniable that both of these elements are a part of this message. Otherwise, why write the memo in public? He’s sending a message to the world. And this in turn shows his own team that he’s serious.
³ And you could argue that DOS itself was a second act to BASIC. It also, of course, took Windows quite a while to take off.
⁴ Or perhaps Office to Windows is the better comp, since that was the first act beyond operating systems?
⁵ And you could certainly argue that the Mac was Apple’s second act — it really was, after the Apple II. And again, it took a long time to take off. But, of course, it’s still going strong today. Dipping in and out of growth, but the user base continues to increase all these decades later.
⁶ Comparing the iPod to Facebook, the social network (not the company), is interesting in that it was an absolute powerhouse, that has now dwindled to almost nothing in the era of the iPhone.
⁷ Wouldn’t that be clever, copying not just Snap’s products, but their structure as well… (Yes, a footnote in the footnote!)
Mark Zuckerberg Just Put Facebook Into Maintenance Mode
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