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It's fair to say that Mark is the Bill Gates of our generation. A technical prodigy with limited social skills that saw a boundless opportunity and just took the leap. Now he is rich, powerful, and hated.

He is not a murderer or a saint. Just a dude who wanted to win more than anyone else.

No idea is 100% original and are usually the sum of many great ideas that already existed.

People who didn't take the leap fully just blamed him/sued him instead of trying to build something better. I bet you most of them couldn't if they tried.




> It's fair to say that Mark is the Bill Gates of our generation.

Hyperbole much? Zuck is no Gates by any stretch of the imagination. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates revolutionized the world and brought computers to the masses. Zuck built a popular website, and not even an original one, these things aren't anywhere near the same league.


"popular website" - the largest social network in the world that took the platform to 500 million people?

Bill gates didn't invent operating systems, word processors, or spread sheets - but he certainly executed better than anyone before him.

I'd put Mark in the same class as Bill.


I don't care if it's the most popular website on the planet, it's still just a website in an era of websites. Social networks weren't even close to new when Facebook came out; computers in every home was absurd when Gates and Jobs decided to make it a reality. It's not at all comparable to the change they brought to the world.

Mark's a billionaire, no doubt, but he's just not in that league, not even close. The world before Facebook is hardly different than the world after it; the world before computers were in every home is vastly different than the world after it. This Facebook worship is absurd, if it disappeared tomorrow the world would move on and hardly miss a beat. If every Windows PC disappeared tomorrow the world would basically collapse, business across the globe would grind to a halt.

Linux is a platform, Windows is a platform, Facebook is a toy.


What must a website achieve in order to be considered as influential as the creations made by (continuing the analogy) Bill Gates and Steve Jobs?


When the world economy depends on a website the way it does on PC's, then someone can claim to be in that category. Frankly I don't think that'll happen. The next big earth shattering thing on the scale of the PC revolution probably won't be a website. Actually, the Internet itself was the next big revolution after PC's, and probably then the introduction of the web. What's next? Who knows!


> When the world economy depends on a website the way it does on PC's

What do you call the internet?


Who is more fitting?

What other Harvard dropout started a billion dollar technology company with monopolistic ambitions and pulled it off?

I don't even use facebook anymore, I don't personally trust Mark, but I will acknowledge his contribution. What idea is 100% original anyways...


> Who is more fitting?

There is no Gates of this generation yet. Being a billionaire isn't enough to qualify you for that.


What does?


Changing the world in some massive way like Gates/Jobs did, can you imagine the world today without personal computers? Seriously, Facebook could disappear tomorrow and the world would hardly notice; if PC's disappeared it'd collapse. I don't know what the next earth shattering thing will be, but it ain't Facebook.




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