His discussion of the handling of personal data was atrocious. 'We'll give the data to others if they give us a boatload of money and let us use theirs. If not, well, the user agreement prohibits it' and also 'we won't compete with app developers unless we do'. He really makes google look principled...
It is a little strange, when somebody who holds so much personal information about people says something like that. It is one thing to do what he is doing with MSN; but to come out and say it. I would have preferred if he had just lied.
Thanks. It's sad that it's taken this long for people to believe that I'm speaking plainly and honestly, as opposed to bitterly, when I've pointed out (for much of the past four years) that there was something inconsistent about "the greatest internet company ever" being run by someone like Mark, but now that people have woken up to reality, I can't complain.
I don't object to the hundreds of millions of dollars he's going to make, even though Microsoft clearly overpaid for its stake out of a desperate attempt to seem "cool". (It didn't work, any more than paying $3 million for a used Kleenex-- smile, Manhattan art world-- can put a person on the Social Register.) Nor do I object to the fact that there are evidently legions of people willing to work for the guy.
But to the magazines, newspapers, and blogs out there: please stop elevating this guy as something other than a one-flash success. He's the most numerically successful member of my generation-- I'll give him that much-- but he's not very talented, and he doesn't have much to say. Let him run do what ever he wants with his company and his money, but keep his face and his name off my fucking screen. I will thank you, and Mark himself will thank you 15 years later.
If you bring unbridled resentment towards a person, you lose the ability to learn from their strong points.
Everyone human I've ever met is flawed. People seem to expect that once people become powerful, they should transcend and become unhumanly good, precise, unerring, and so on. It's hard. People are people, you just don't curse people when they make small mistakes that don't affect you.
I'm as guilty as anyone else of this - lots of successful people that I think are yucky personalities. But I try to segregate out what I dislike about them from what I can learn from them. Anyone whose accomplished a lot certainly has some great qualities. If you can harness those while cutting the arrogance, egoism, cavalier attitude towards the people in their care - then you can become stronger yourself and make the world a better place.
But I'm often guilty of the unbridled emotion thing, so take me with a grain of salt too.
I don't expect highly successful people to be gods, or even heroes. I'm nowhere close to being either. I merely expect them to be as talented as I am, or at least on the same order of magnitude. Zuckerberg fails.
Frankly, the blowout nature of his success results mainly from luck and positioning, as has been well-chronicled. If Zuckerberg had started Facebook at a state university, it would be just another obscure social networking site that was eventually clobbered by a superior competitor, instead of running over its then-superior competitors, as Facebook did in its early days.
Facebook is now a reasonably strong product, but that has everything to do with the momentum it has developed (Harvard is high ground for prestige marketing, and it's easy to gain speed when each cardinal direction is downhill) and the quality of engineers it can get now, and absolutely nothing to do with Zuckerberg and his "vision".
