Zuck Losing His Midas Touch
It’s gotten so bad at Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters that to attract high-level talent, they have to overpay by almost 5 times.
That’s how unattractive it is to work for Facebook now – almost a permanent stain on one’s resume.
It was just only a few years ago when Facebook or Meta (META) was the go-to growth story in upcoming technology, and its business model, which is still quite profitable, launched them into a trillion-dollar company.
Every Stanford MBA student was clamoring to get into the company at almost any cost. It was a blue chip tech company.
That was then and this is now.
Poor management has started to spiral out of control and that starts from the top down where co-founder and current CEO Mark Zuckerberg is notorious for being a difficult boss to work for.
He is also unfirable because he owns 51% of voting rights and rules with an iron fist like a Russian tsar.
Pouring sand on the fresh wound, Facebook has announced future job cuts for the first time in its history as a company. Might as well go out in style.
The trillion-dollar company that was once unstoppable is now shrinking its headcount to cut costs, an almost unimaginable situation just a few months ago.
This management move is essentially a mea culpa signaling that business decisions have been atrocious.
The flagship product Facebook is pretty much unusable now which is part of the multi-pronged problem.
It’s filled with so much chaos because every high-priced software engineer has attempted to put their stamp on the product by installing additional “improvements.”
The interface is now as convoluted as ever and things just get in the way.
Much like Microsoft word, it’s a software product that transcends time which is why I use Microsoft Word 2010. It also doesn’t force me to upload and save my Word document to Microsoft’s Cloud like the new iteration.
Facebook is the same, better as a slimmed-down simplified version, but that doesn’t boost short-term revenue.
Even if short-term capitalism gets in the way, it doesn’t deny the fact that competition has reared its ugly head and Zuckerberg and Facebook are flat-out losing.
The Chinese communist party-sponsored TikTok is the competitor and is hot with the young crowd with its short-form videos.
TikTok is securing market share from Facebook and Instagram while Zuckerberg pivots to virtual reality in the form of the metaverse.
Zuckerberg’s expensive shift to the metaverse also appears to be a failure which could turn out to be Zuckerberg digging his own Facebook grave.
The most successful metaverse platforms already exist in 2D, with Roblox Corp. (RBLX) and Epic Games Inc.’s Fortnight.
Success has been achieved in the form of regular users with incentives around building and sharing experiences.
Meta has instead focused on the immersive sensation of its virtual reality products, which isn’t all that appealing.
Overpaying software developers because the platform has fallen out of favor is a red flag.
Now, Meta has more red flags than a Chinese communist parade.
Meta now has a $360 billion valuation and the US economy, its biggest revenue driver, is facing a 2023 recession.
The upcoming recession is what first prompted the job cuts, but I believe this will trigger something more cynical in the form of gross underperformance of Meta’s business model and another leg down in its story.
We are inching to the point where Meta will need to perform backflips to turn around the titanic because nothing on the horizon suggests they have anything figured out.
The metaverse – not a solution.
Sell all rallies during the period of high-interest rates.
Meta clearly cannot solve the current challenges that are deteriorating by the day.
