> After suffering significant failures during this critical transition period, Facebook found that it lacked the business talent and engineering acumen to quickly and successfully integrate its outdated desktop-based technology to the new era of mobile-first communication. Unable to maintain its monopoly or its advertising profits by fairly competing, Facebook’s executives addressed this existential threat by buying up the new mobile innovators, including its rival Instagram in 2012 and mobile messaging app WhatsApp in 2014.
Man, I hate FB as much as the next guy, but this argument is weak as hell.
FB was still the #1 mobile app in the world when they bought up both of these companies. Hell, neither were even direct competitors any more than Oculus was.
FB's play is clearly a horizontal integration - they want as many different types of products to fall under their single advertising pane of glass as possible. The FTC is going after them for doing the exact opposite thing.
Agreed - the idea that facebook was "outdated desktop based technology" is laughable.
It was one of the first apps most people installed - and they actually made it run on an INSANE number of platforms. Wasn't there versions of facebook for things like symbians and nokias and low bandwidth devices in developing countries?
Instagram had a pretty small team when facebook bought them, and facebook was active on mobile before that.
This complaint is such trash - I can't believe they can't find better arguments to make.
Edited: It looks like in 2010 or so facebook had something like 150 million mobile users (using this "outdated desktop technology"). I don't doubt it wasn't perhaps best of breed, but there were lots of mediocre approaches back then. Did the FTC even have an app? Did the fortune 500 all have amazing apps?
Interesting! I didn't actually know that. I just remember being in a developing country and like Nokia's had facebook or messenger or something? Skype and Facebook were showing up a lot of places way back. I remember the office I was in ran everything on skype - period. Months with no phone calls really, but you could somehow get on facebook. Symbian / Nokia I'm trying to remember how this worked back then. I'm sure they dropped them, and I may be confusing who was on these crap devices but I vaguely remember thinking damn, facebook and snake are like the advanced apps on phones.
I assume this is completely unintentional, but the narrative that Facebook was just expanding into new markets is pure revisionism. It was very clear around the time of purchase that Facebook considered Instagram to be a competitor, and that fact has since been verified through leaked Facebook emails and documents.
Facebook's concern was that social paradigms would shift and that Facebook would not be the predominant way that people communicated in the future. To get around that problem they aggressively targeted almost every small company in the space. Their goal was to make it so that the market couldn't shift quickly in any direction at all until Facebook had already become the dominant player within that shifted market.
The purchases were designed to make sure that there was never any opportunity for a competitor to build a large, secure userbase before Facebook had an opportunity to replicate their features.
Here's the direct quote from Zuckerberg himself[0]:
> One way of looking at this is that what we’re really buying is time. Even if some new competitors springs up, buying Instagram, Path, Foursquare, etc now will give us a year or more to integrate their dynamics before anyone can get close to their scale again. Within that time, if we incorporate the social mechanics they were using, those new products won’t get much traction since we’ll already have their mechanics deployed at scale.
Facebook's concern about horizontal integration was not about expanding their business, it was about protecting the company from potential changes in the social landscape. This tactic was being discussed as recently as 2020, and we literally have scores of internal documents describing Facebook's mindset. How are people's memories so short about this?
> Facebook found that it lacked the business talent and engineering acumen to quickly and successfully integrate its outdated desktop-based technology to the new era of mobile-first communication
LOL. This literally goes against every Facebook announcement and press release broadcast in the last 10 years.
Of course were Instagram and WhatsApp competitors.
Not on the service side but at the user base. FB users switched to Instagram and WhatsApp, that's why they bought them.
Man, I hate FB as much as the next guy, but this argument is weak as hell.
FB was still the #1 mobile app in the world when they bought up both of these companies. Hell, neither were even direct competitors any more than Oculus was.
FB's play is clearly a horizontal integration - they want as many different types of products to fall under their single advertising pane of glass as possible. The FTC is going after them for doing the exact opposite thing.