CyberGrifters: I won’t even say that Mark Zuckerberg is talking his book here. I will say that this seems to be someone whose adrenaline-rage emotional cycles have taken over his brain, and that there is no longer a system in place inside Facebook that can use the communications staff and the ability to think long-term about how a boss and figurehead of a large production-network should behave. Jon Gruber is scornful, I think appropriately:

Jon Gruber: Zuckerberg Disses Apple With Joe Rogan: ‘They Haven’t Invented Anything Great in a While’: ‘

Chance Miller <9to5mac.com/2025/01/10/… listened so we don’t have to: “Zuckerberg also took issue with AirPods and the fact that Apple wouldn’t give Meta the same access to the iPhone for its Meta Ray-Ban glasses: ‘They build stuff like AirPods, which are cool, but they’ve just thoroughly hamstrung the ability for anyone else to build something that can connect to the iPhone in the same way. There were a lot of other companies in the world that would be able to build like a very good earbud, but Apple has a specific protocol…. They don’t let anyone else use the protocol. If they did, there would probably be much better competitors to AirPods out there…’”

If only there existed other phone platforms than the iPhone, we could see how cool these other earbuds would be. And Meta Ray-Bans could integrate with those phones in super cool ways that would make iPhone users realize what dopes they’ve been. What’s really rich about… Zuckerberg’s incessant complaining… is that Meta doesn’t allow third parties any sort of acces…. It is very hard to get any information out of them let alone integrate….

Miller concludes: “Let us also not forget that Meta has never ‘invented anything great.’ Oculus was an acquisition, WhatsApp was an acquisition, Instagram was an acquisition, and intermixed with those acquisitions are features copied and pasted from other platforms.” Yeah but other than that they invented a lot… <daringfireball.net/link…>

I frequently say that Silicon Valley firms and networks are important for society first as technology-forcers, second as stakeholder-production-networks, and third as savings vehicles. And I frequently say that one of Silicon Valley’s big problems is that it is and firm management in it is increasingly focused on firms and networks as different things: bouncing balls in casino roulette wheels and pledges of allegiance to culturo-technoid-bro movements and leaders. Facebook, however, is somewhat different: I have seen it as a zero as a technology-forcer, and as a negative—well, that is not fair, as a likely negative in a VAR sense—as a stakeholder-production-network. As best as I can see, its business model is to make as much money as it can be degrading user experience to the point where the network effects that drive its dominance almost but do not quite collapse. We’ve seen this for Facebook and Instagram, I don’t know WhatsApp, and it seems that we are about to see it with Threads.