Aug. 16, 2017 "Why Facebook was treated as a mission, not a product": Today I found this article by Harvey Schachter in the Globe and Mail:
The 10 Challenges That Defined the Company That's Disrupting the World
Facebook wasn’t originally started to be a company. It was a plaything for Harvard University students. These days, it’s our plaything – something we turn to regularly, often in boredom, to find out the latest news from our friends. But it’s also a company of consequence, which has grown not only its adherents but also its crucial ad revenues in startling fashion, riding the mobile wave.
A crucial moment came in 2006 when founder Mark Zuckerberg, then 22, was offered $1-billion by Yahoo for his two-year-old company. Some board members thought they should take the money and run. Mr. Zuckerberg brusquely told then “we’re obviously not going to sell.” He had things he wanted to build and Yahoo didn’t value those objectives, so he believed the business was actually being undervalued.
In Becoming Facebook, Silicon Valley veteran Mike Hoefflinger, who was head of global marketing at Facebook for nearly seven years, says founders need to differentiate between building a feature, product or company – or fulfilling a mission.
“It takes less than a year to build a feature (like FriendFeed or CoverFlow) and you can create tens of millions of dollars of value doing so. In a little more than a year or two, you can create a product (like Siri, Android or Instagram), and we’ve seen that valued as high as a billion dollars,” he notes.
My opinion: I don't even remember FriendFeed or CoverFlow.
My opinion: I don't even remember FriendFeed or CoverFlow.
But to build a company can take many years and create tens of billions of dollars of value. Pursuing a mission, however – and Mr. Zuckerberg intends to connect the world, not just our part of it – can take decades and return hundreds of billions of dollars in value. Mission-oriented Mr. Zuckerberg, in his Yahoo moment, sensed that distinction.
He also senses when others have the same urge. He has been remarkably successful in buying new technology and having those founders stick around, comfortable he will grant them space to fulfill their vision in his empire.
Mr. Zuckerberg spent nearly eight years cultivating a relationship with Instagram’s Kevin Systrom, sharing and understanding each other’s vision, before the two negotiated a deal in an evening, essentially amongst themselves, for Instagram’s acquisition.
Why did Mr. Systrom not ignore the offer, as Mr. Zuckerberg had done with Yahoo?
Why did Mr. Systrom not ignore the offer, as Mr. Zuckerberg had done with Yahoo?
Mr. Hoefflinger says it was because Mr. Systrom was being offered a “founder-friendly win-win vision that appealed to the kind of builder more focused on all the capabilities necessary to become a truly impactful business than whether or not they rang the bell at the NASDAQ the day of their IPO.”
Crucial to Facebook’s success has been the News Feed and advertising. Advertising was introduced gingerly and contoured to what it was thought people were interested in, because Facebook’s top team is customer-focused. In a sense, it was another form of connecting people, this time to products and services they might like.
Facebook recognizes its strength is when a user encounters friends in their News Feed, so it works hard to get new users to seven friends within 10 days of joining and to 10 friends in two weeks. Allowing for the importing of contacts from other services, particularly e-mail providers, was an important step in reaching that goal.
The Facebook News Feed is a personalized news service delivering more than 200 million stories to screens worldwide every minute, contoured to interests and based on sophisticated algorithms that calculate what other like-minded users are interested in.
Mr. Hoefflinger says Google provides a lens to what we need when we know what we want and can search, while Facebook’s lens operates when you don’t know what you want.
We access search on average two to five times a day but Facebook 10 to 15 times. “We don’t know what we want three times as often as we do know. We don’t know what we want roughly once every waking hour,” he reports.
Mr. Hoefflinger says Google provides a lens to what we need when we know what we want and can search, while Facebook’s lens operates when you don’t know what you want.
We access search on average two to five times a day but Facebook 10 to 15 times. “We don’t know what we want three times as often as we do know. We don’t know what we want roughly once every waking hour,” he reports.
I almost didn’t read the book because the cover photo suggested it was a glamourization of Mr. Zuckerberg and, when I leafed through, I couldn’t easily find the “10 challenges that defined the company” it promised, instead finding 10 lessons that were simplistically trivial.
But it’s actually an excellent book on Facebook’s growth, deeply knowledgeable, with a good take on future challenges, only marred by those silly attempts at spoon-feeding essentially meaningless lessons.
But it’s actually an excellent book on Facebook’s growth, deeply knowledgeable, with a good take on future challenges, only marred by those silly attempts at spoon-feeding essentially meaningless lessons.
My opinion: The part that stood out to me was "contoured to interests and based on sophisticated algorithms that calculate what other like-minded users are interested in."
I'm like that when I'm writing for my blog. I share articles I'm interested in, and possibly some topics my friends may be interested in. However, I am only one person writing this blog. There is no tech person working for me and creating algorithms.
Jul. 4, 2018 B-------t job book review: Today I found this book review by JP O' Malley in the Globe and Mail:
- B--------t Jobs: A Theory
- By David Graeber
- Simon & Schuster, 285 pages
In 1930, the British economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that by the end of the century, technological progress would go hand in hand with human freedom.
Unfortunately, this utopian vision of society working less – and citizens having the time to pursue artistic creativity and philosophical ideals – never came to fruition.
Unfortunately, this utopian vision of society working less – and citizens having the time to pursue artistic creativity and philosophical ideals – never came to fruition.
As American anthropologist David Graeber explains in the introduction to his book, the pendulum of the white-collar-corporate economy has drastically swung rightward, resulting in the widespread global phenomenon of “B------t Jobs.”
Huge swaths of employees in Europe and North America now spend their entire working lives performing tasks they believe to be pointless. Predominately, these jobs are in the administrative, financial and information sectors.
The working system that’s now operating around this relatively new global corporate economy has become a benign form of totalitarianism, the author believes.
A progressive anarchist who played a central role in the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement, Graeber is also the author of Debt: The First 5000 Years, The Utopia of Rules and The Democracy Project.
This current tome covers some of the ground Graeber’s other books explore. Namely, the drastic transformation in global capitalism, which increased inequality and created a managerial class which Graeber claims is modelled on the value of “classic mediaeval feudalism.”
This is a world, Graeber explains, of killing employees with kindness: plying them with material goods, cash and seminars on mindfulness and yoga.
Of course, historically, employees have always been sweetened up with money and perks to ease the pain of working.
However, Graeber points out that since the 1970s, the culture within corporate capitalism shifted dramatically. Previously it was, as Graeber explains, “independent of, and to some extent, hostile to the interests of high finance.”
But everything changed when the financial sector and the upper echelons of the corporate sector fused. This fusion has led to a vicious cycle whereby workers and employers no longer feel any loyalty to each other, and consequently have to be “increasingly monitored, managed and surveilled.”
The b-----t-job industry goes against the general rule of capitalism, which hires the smallest number of people to produce the most profit. Paradoxically, it hires more people to do less work.
The b-----t-job industry goes against the general rule of capitalism, which hires the smallest number of people to produce the most profit. Paradoxically, it hires more people to do less work.
This shift has created a world in which employers speak in a paternalistic-fictitious language, layered with bureaucratic confusion. Both worker and boss play out a series of confusing mind games to keep a system that benefits a small elite in power.
It’s hardly surprising, then, that employees across the West have increasingly come to hate their jobs. Mass outbreaks of anxiety and depression have followed closely behind. So too, Graeber argues with conviction, has a culture of envy, leaving a terrible psychic wound on the Western collective-consciousness.
Graeber’s book is intellectually rewarding but easily digestible, too, mainly because he arranges the material with great diversity. There is a nice mix of first-person anecdotal experience; everyday testimonies from workers themselves; complex anthropological and political theory; and an informed view of western capitalism, as well as the history of work more generally.
All of this allows Graeber – incrementally and with striking clarity – to unpack his central argument: that “b-------t jobs” are not profitable for the global economy, but they ensure the masses will be too distracted by these mind-numbing tasks to think about plotting a revolution any time soon.
But B-------t Jobs is about much more than politics or economics. Fundamentally, it’s a book that brilliantly explores a yearning for human freedom and dissects, with great analysis, the subtle distinction between power and domination in hierarchical corporate structures.
Sadly, this is what most of the global economy is presently built on. It’s probably the best non-fiction book you’ll read all year. Just don’t tell your boss about it.
Sadly, this is what most of the global economy is presently built on. It’s probably the best non-fiction book you’ll read all year. Just don’t tell your boss about it.
JP O’Malley is a freelance journalist and cultural critic who writes regularly on politics, history, literature, society, the environment and technology, for numerous publications around the globe.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books/reviews/article-review-david-graebers-bullshit-jobs-brilliantly-unpacks-the-modern/
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