(2017-04-19) Thompson Facebook And The Cost Of Monopoly

Ben Thompson on Facebook and the Cost of Monopoly

That is why Facebook’s theft of not just Snapchat features but its entire vision bums me out, even if it makes good business sense

The problem is that Peter Thiel’s examples refute his own case: decades-long monopolies like those of AT&T, IBM, and Microsoft sure seem like a bad thing to me! Sure, they were eventually toppled, but not after extracting rents and, more distressingly, stifling innovation for years. Think about Microsoft: the company spent billions of dollars on R&D and gave endless demos of futuristic tech; the most successful product that actually shipped (Kinect) ended up harming the product it was supposed to help.

This, ultimately, is why yesterday’s keynote was so disappointing. Last year, before Facebook realized it could just leverage its network to squash Snap, Mark Zuckerberg spent most of his presentation laying out a long-term vision for all the areas in which Facebook wanted to innovate. This year couldn’t have been more different: there was no vision, just the wholesale adoption of Snap’s, plus a whole bunch of tech demos that never bothered to tell a story of why they actually mattered for Facebook’s users