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You have to have a talent for that though. How many companies have made terrible purchases?

Like him or hate him, Zuckerberg’s strategies have been great for his company. I don’t know about his VR business, but he’s like a Midas king when it comes to social media. Everything social media related he’s touched has turned into gold. Instagram and WhatsApp were already kind of big, but they’re were not the ubiquitous behemoths they are today.

Threads could be his first big fail though.



Beware survivor bias. How many acquisitions has Facebook/Meta made? (answer: a lot). How many are social behemoths? (answer: 2). We don't know how many he tried to make successful and failed at, because we don't hear of them, or don't remember them.

The whole Oculus mess does seem to indicate he doesn't have a Midas touch. And let's not forget the metaverse, which isn't going at all well.


They have 5 successful social platforms:

Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Workplace, Threads.

The latter has reached 130m+ users after all.


Never heard of Workplace before (unless that's the metaverse thing, in which case it's clearly not successful). And "threads is successful" is dubious: the key point of the article is that it isn't.


Workplace is private Facebook for large orgs. So just Facebook. Doesn't seem like a total flop, though.

I'd rather think that Facebook had been consistently successful in catering its cohort. That targeted cohort might just have too little overlap with users in market for Twitter/Mastodon/Threads, but as far as Facebook/Instagram(post-acquisition) are concerned the users seem satisfied with Meta-run social media to me.


Large orgs aren't using FB enterprise offering, they're on Teams or Slack.


Workplace is the market leading enterprise social network.

And if building a hundred million user social network in such a rapid timeframe isn't a success not sure what is.


yeah, exactly. We're not sure this is success.




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