The importance of being Mark Zuckerberg

Silicon Valley Billionaire Mark Zuckerberg is generally made fun of and vilified in the global press. This despite the fact that he has built the largest social network in the world, in the region of a whopping 2.8+ billion. His company is touching a turnover of $100 billion and has touched a valuation of $1 trillion.

Now it’s not just Facebook and Zuckerberg is no one-trick pony. He has been successful in more ways than one.

Facebook: This is the most obvious one. It will become the first product which will soon be simultaneously used by 3 billion people. Available in more than 100 languages, it has changed the definition of what a “friend” and “like” is. Formed in 2004, “Facebook” was word of the year in 2008, unfriend became a word in 2009 and it was a key part of the 2011 Arab Spring. After that it has been into one controversy after another but nothing has been able to stop its growth.

News feed: One reason why Facebook became so powerful was that it’s not just a collection of friends who send messages to each other. It has a dynamic news feed which has been tweaked continuously through algorithms to stay relevant. It was comparatively static and individual-oriented initially. Then it became more Twitter-like and more political. But now it’s moving away from politics a bit. Throughout all of this, the friends have just been adding non-stop. For all you know the News Feed is the most influential media entity on earth.

The Like button: Like “friend”, the term “like” has also been associated with Facebook. One wonders how posts would have become viral and so important if this button wasn’t there. Zuckerberg earlier on made a decision not to come out with the dislike button. He seems to have made a wise choice with YouTube recently deciding to hide the dislike button.

Instagram: Formed in 2010, it was acquired in 2012 by Facebook for just $1 billion. How’s that for ROI? It has grown to be the world’s number one picture (they added video later) service and the number one choice for celebrities. When Facebook took it over, it didn’t even have 50 million users and today it has close to 1.3 billion. Instagram Stories and Reels were some other innovations.

WhatsApp: WhatsApp was a relatively small company with just hundreds of employees when it was acquired by Zuckerberg for a then a whopping $19 billion. After that it just grew and brought in innovations like WhatsApp Web, WhatsApp Business, group video calls and WhatsApp Payments. Moreover it has touched 2 billion users with about 400 million in India alone. Now it is worth every cent and in fact multiples of that of what it was acquired in 2014.

Messenger: It was a masterstroke to promote this as a separate product in the form of Facebook Messenger. Meta’s properties now stand at…
Facebook: 2.8 billion.
WhatsApp: 2 billion.
Messenger: 1.3 billion.
Instagram: 1.3 billion (approx).
Only Alphabet comes close, with Google Search, YouTube and Gmail.

The Middle or Centre: Now add all of the above and you get a number close to 7.5 billion. Of course there's an overlap with many individuals using all four services, but still that’s the kind of user base that many companies would kill for. This at a time when Twitter is way behind even the half-billion mark with one report claiming that it has tens of millions of bots.

The main reason for that is that while Silicon Valley leans Left (maybe far Left), Zuckerberg has tried to stay near the Centre as much as he can. That’s why he has succeeded in getting all kinds of people on his platform all over the world. But that’s also why he gets attacked more than the other Silicon Valley billionaires, many of whom may be manipulating the public on a greater scale than Zuckerberg.

Meta: Which brings us to Meta. While a lot of people became sceptical about the move, the industry has already caught on to it. Morgan Stanley called the metaverse the next big investment theme, declaring: It can fundamentally change the medium through which we socialize with others. NVidia is talking about something it described as the “HTML of 3D” or Universal Scene Description or USD to power the metaverse. Disney, which championed the multiverse in its MCU franchise, is also planning to come out with its own metaverse. UniversalTencent CEO Tony Ma weighed in: Anything that makes the virtual world more real and the real world more rich with virtual experiences can become part of the metaverse.

Meta has started unveiling the tools of the metaverse. It all began when they took over Oculus and at that time everyone was thinking of a VR headset. But in 2022 they will come out with a high res high processing headset named Project Cambria. They have already demonstrated a haptic glove which will make you feel that you are in the virtual world and generate physical sensations. This will be coupled with an artificial skin called ReSkin. There will also be other AR wearable glasses and wrist devices. So this is totally at another level.

The metaverse could be yet another Zuckerberg winner.

Videos: YouTube ruled the video world before TikTok became a threat. It was racing toward the one billion users mark when both India and America cracked down on it. It had captured the teen market so it was the video app of the future. But since then YouTube has recovered to touch 2 billion users. However Zuckerberg smelt blood and is aggressively pushing Facebook Videos and Instagram Reels. Whether their combined might can topple YouTube remains to be seen.

Online money: Zuckerberg has got into the online money domain. For that he has launched WhatsApp Payments. It remains to be seen how successful that becomes. But more than that, he seems to be betting on cryptocurrency. Project Libra has now become Diem.

Facebook Marketplace: This is another project of tomorrow. This is a place where you can buy and sell. It is for individuals and businesses. This is one to watch for the future.

Meta has acquired more than 90 companies and along with Alphabet and Amazon, it is looking at total global domination. It remains to be seen which one wins in the end, but you can’t count Zuckerberg out.