Meta Reports Second Quarter 2022 Results
Disclaimer: Ex-Facebooker.<p>The first thing to know about Facebook is that they view the social media landscape in two dimensions: format and audience size. Format here means text -&gt; audio -&gt; video. So if you look at the match up between audience of 1:1,000,000 and text you&#x27;ll find Twitter, for example.<p>This has served FB quite well but what happens after video, if anything? Well, the company believes the next two steps are VR then AR. In this context, the Oculus acquisition makes more sense.<p>Meta is ultimately (IMHO) suffering from a problem similar to what Microsoft had in 2000: it didn&#x27;t know where to go and lacked leadership and direction. With MS and Netscape, MS really believed they were doing normal MS things until the governmen tintervened and they didn&#x27;t really know what to do.<p>There have been three big initiatives from the top at FB that IMHO didn&#x27;t and still don&#x27;t make sense:<p>1. In respons eto the misinformation aroundd and subsequent to the 2016 election, FB decided to try and police truth with &quot;fact checking&quot;. This is a huge mistake. Nobody is going to be happy. There will always be a line where people disagree. Even in clear cases of false information, as we&#x27;ve seen you&#x27;re going to still upset a lot of people. This was always a losing strategy;<p>2. They decided to merge WhatsApp, FB Messenger and IG Direct to try and &quot;win&quot; the US messaging market against iMessage. Years before this there was no concerted effort to merge FB, IG and WA accounts. When asked, Mark said they were differnt ecosystems with different permissions. It didn&#x27;t make sense to try and unify them. Well that fell by the wayside and angered users in the process; and<p>3. The Metaverse. Much like VR in general, I don&#x27;t htink is ever going to be mainstream. It doesn&#x27;t solve any problem. AR might if we can ever get AR glasses to work but that&#x27;s a pretty big if. For now, people love their phones. They don&#x27;t love VR headsets and (again, IMHO) they never will.<p>So now Meta stock has lost half its value. The best performers will be looking at the door. An effort to weed out low performers is going to make things incredibly toxic. It won&#x27;t weed out bottom performers. It&#x27;ll weed out those who are the worst at politics because that&#x27;s what employee calibration is.<p>None of this is address the real problem: leadership. There is no top-level direction (that makes sense). Who you should be looking to lose is 50% of the people from directors right up to Mark&#x27;s level. ICs and &quot;leaf&quot; managers don&#x27;t decide company strategy. Direct this at those who do.