logoalt Hacker News

sneaktoday at 2:53 PM1 replyview on HN

Has Zuckerberg ever deliberately invented a successful product using skill and taste?

His original moneymaker was sort of happenstance, a right-place-right-time quick hack that lucked out, got traction, and raised enough money to scale out, BIG, with essentially the same concept that he lucked upon.

Instagram and WhatsApp, both absolutely successful beyond imagination, were acquisitions. Same goes for Oculus.

Has Zuckerberg/Meta ever once themselves deliberately sat down and invented and built something great masses of people want? Facebook doesn't count; that was happenstance. He didn't hack that together in a day to get a billion users, or perhaps even to build a "product" at all.

They tried doing hardware with that Echo Show knockoff, afaik nobody really bought it. They tried the metaverse thing, and, again, nobody really wanted it. (I'm still not convinced it doesn't have legs; the way they did it was obviously not it.)

React and zstd don't count, obviously.


Replies

abroszka33today at 3:21 PM

No, but did any of the other big companies? Google literally found the transformer architecture but had no idea what to do with it.