[tmotwu]

> The references I shared make it very clear that Instagram is losing market share. Not sure why those dots were difficult to connect.

I said that in the context of breaking up G/FB. Why isolate that sentence for no apparent reason? It was a very short comment.

> It's interesting you said that. Obviously a lot of people are in favor of breaking up Facebook from Instagram, but my guess was that it was always for antitrust concerns. More recently, I started to sense that an additional flavor has entered this conversation recently, something like "Facebook and Instagram would be better products if they were run by independent companies."

There is no additional flavor. Ask yourself why we bother about antitrust. It is to raise the level of competition. Do you believe innovation is best nurtured in a competitive environment? Literally, the title of the bill consists the words a "stronger online economy", for "innovation".

Pooling all your resources into ads targeting because you are comfortably sitting in a dominant position is exactly the problem. YouTube and Instagram with independent leadership would have the flexibility to focus on their market -- image/video media. That is why TikTok and Snapchat were able to catch Instagram with their pants down -- Facebook had no idea alternative forms media (and did not care) was possible and were simply focused on milking their existing platform. Better ads targeting does not bring in users, and market share is driven by users, not ads. Why does it matter if it increases their cost of operation and slows down their rate of development if the majority of their development is focused on ads targeting - an ineffective user growth strategy? The blame lies on nobody but Facebook or Google if their products have been losing marketshare in 2021.

[aerosmile]

Ok, I might finally understand you now. It appears you're agreeing with me that Instagram is losing market share, but you're adding the caveat that this wouldn't be the case if it operated as a stand-alone company. We're agreeing that as a stand-alone company it would take longer to develop features and it would cost it more money to do so, but your argument is that the features would have a better PMF.

The part we're disagreeing on is the root cause of the fact that Snapchat and Tik Tok managed to out-innovate Facebook (which is very similar to the root cause of what Facebook initially out-innovated Google). You're thinking that it's because Facebook was focused for too long on milking the platform, and I agree with that, but I don't think it's the root cause. The root cause in my opinion is that Facebook became a public company, and now it needs to chase quarterly results or the stock price will fall and its top talent will leave. The same thing happened with Google back in the day. If you were to spin off Instagram, it would still be a public company and it would still have the same boundary conditions on innovation that it has today - quarterly results.

In other words, my thesis is very simple - once a company goes public, you cannot expect it to be a leader in innovation anymore [1][2]. But don't cry for public companies - when one door closes, another one opens; public companies can very well continue to grow by acquiring innovation and market share, which is what happened with Facebook and countless other examples. But... M&A becomes easier when you have a balance sheet with a lot of zeroes on it. If you were to break up Facebook, the individual companies would have a smaller M&A budget, and that would weaken their sharpest weapon they have at this time.

[1] I interviewed at Facebook pre-IPO and met about a dozen of their top PM stakeholders back at the time, including the current CPO. As you would expect, the strength of that talent was just insanely good. Of those people, only Chris Cox is still there, but even he decided to leave for a while. At the end of the day, people are too motivated by money, and it hurts in two ways: those who have it are no longer working as hard, and those who don't have it can make more of it at pre-IPO companies.

[2] Google deserves a lot of praise for trying to escape that fate with with their efforts with X - Vaymo may or may not end up generating cash, but either way, my hat's off to them. Even so, X highlights another problem with innovation at a megacorp - unless your idea has a clear potential of being a 100 billion dollar company, it's not worth pursuing it since it won't make enough of a difference for someone with AdWords on their balance sheet. In contrast, there's plenty of VC to be raised as a startup seemingly trying to become a 1 billion dollar company and then eventually discovering that it can go further than that.