Facebook CTO jumps ship for new horizons Bret Taylor, the CTO of Facebook, is leaving the company to start a new business venture in Silicon Valley. "I've learned more than I ever imagined in my time at Facebook. I'm also extremely grateful for my relationship with all of the amazing people I've worked with here," he said on his Facebook page. "I want to give a …
I agree, a challenge to Facebook would be a similar platform but one that cuts out the ads and the crap that users are forced to put up with.
The problem is something like this has to make money to stay alive,
Advertising is not the way to go, the return on Facebook ads are so small to be almost worthless. Once the advertisers see this less investment will go into Facebook, then we will see how financially solid the thing really is. I doubt that it's future worth is anything near what has been forecast.
We've seen this happen befor when the .com bubble burst.
Advertising is their whole business model. How else can they make money other than by selling apps or merch?
The business model for a Internet site seems to be to build up the site gradually then once it gets to a certain level of market share switch on all the money making options.
But the problem is once the site is sold and the adverts start the user experience seems to dive. It happened with MySpace, it just became really clunky, slow and annoying.
True, unless they begin to charge a fee for access then the only way to make money is by advertising. But it doesn't take a genius to see that advertisers will eventually get wise to the fact that the return is so small on Facebook advertising. The audience get so used to them they don't see them anymore.
Then they will have to up the game with pop ups that you have to click to get rid of, so the audience then gets a pop up blocker. It becomes a war of attrition until the advertisers leave in droves.
Finally as a last resort they use celebs to product place, like on twitter, which incidentally takes the piss,
'ooh had a lovely trip out in may BMW X5', 'ooooh what a wonderful face cream, I use....'
Finally we the audience are 'added out' that nothing works on use, Facebook loses value, gets sold, sold again and disappears. 10 years at the most before it dies.
If he had a billion dollar idea, that needed 100 million in seed capital, and his stock options were suddenly cashable for that, I'd say he had a great reason...
But there is another.
Post IPO company = cash cow. You deliver a reliable return to investors, rather than taking big risks to big produce growth. The emthasis is on stability. The people you need to do that are different.
As a company changes, or when could see it was going to change, maybe he felt like he wouldn't fit in anymore.
It won't change much. Taylor strikes me as guy who is well on his way to becoming a serial entrepreneur. Don't forget he left the GOOG shortly after their IPO, surely with a reasonable pile of cash, and started that FriendFeed thing which sold to FB and he came along for the ride. Naturally with the FB IPO he wants to spin off with a second pile of cash and start something else like FoneFeed or some such which will have its own IPO or will be sold and he gets another cash pile to repeat the cycle.
This is the kind of guy I can respect. Planting the seeds of a company, employ a bunch of people, nurture it as far as he can and when he reaches his limit of ability sets it in more capable hands. The beauty is that each time he does it he pushes his limit a bit further so the companies he starts have a better chance of survival each time and maybe one day the most capable hands will be his.
Is it just me or are the iPhone and Android apps some of the worst performing apps on mobile platforms. To verify it's the app, I used the web client on the same mobile devices and they perform much better. This is not just a one-off, the apps are consistently worse in terms of performance.
So - either this multi billion dollar company is incompetent (so, the CTO leaving isn't much of a concern) or they've deliberately built poor performing apps to get you to use the web client and be exposed to advertising.
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