Actually, Facebook's core functionality, at least at small scale, is trivial. It's a database of people, with CRUD on top. All the really hard technical problems Facebook has solved -- and there were many, don't get me wrong -- have to do with scaling that system, and those problems were solved long after Zuck was no longer hands-on with the code every day.
That's not to say I don't think Zuck is really smart. What I think he's really smart at, though, is interface design and user experience. The film touches on this, noting that Facebook's exclusivity was key to its early popularity. However, the reason Facebook really trounced Friendster and MySpace was that it was a much, much better experience. Everything worked perfectly and each screen was carefully thought-out in terms of information density and placement.
Of course, Sorkin's narrative for the film is that Zuck is an aspie geek who built a website because he doesn't understand people, so the counter-evidence -- that Facebook's design is clearly built by somebody who understands people very well indeed -- has to be downplayed.
It's not as though being the Harvard kid writing the first version of thefacebook.com is the same as running a large company; as if Zuckerberg can just hire people to do hard coding for him and that's the end of it. I thought I'd point out that building Facebook as a company is something that would have been, and is, hard. The inability to grow has killed promising web businesses.
I don't understand why I'm being downvoted and you're being upvoted.
Addendum: the downvotes continue. Someone explain what I'm missing, please.
seldo covers this in his original post. The assertion (correct or otherwise) is that the difficult parts of scaling Facebook occurred after Zuck stopped working on the code himself.
Good god it is outrightly ridiculous. Yes, I am a Zuck fanboy. At least I can admit it and cite a few reasons why. All I keep hearing from the other side is "omg all he's got is a freakin php site". Yeah, that's why he is a billionaire and you are not.
People keep saying "all Zuck did was scale". DOH! Scaling is what separates McDonalds from your local burger joint and facebook from millions of other php sites. If scaling is all Zuckerberg has done, good for him! That is all he should be doing.
> That he did not solve the biggest scaling problems and instead let
> his employees do that(ever wonder how they attracted those
> employees in first place)?
Personally, I think the idea that he is some sort of 'hacker genius' stems from the fact that the vast majority of the people that use Facebook, are probably the same type of people that thought I was a 'hacker genius' for showing them how to change their wallpaper or use Alt-Tab to switch between windows.
It comes down to some equation like:
do something related to X + gain success/fame/money = genius at X
Other people posts here seem to just be related to fighting the assertion that Zuckerberg gave Facebook success due to some genius piece of code. This assertion detracts from all of the rest of the stuff that made Facebook a success (business decisions, etc), any one of which had the potential to sink Facebook.
tl;dr Zuckerberg did a lot of things and made Facebook through a lot of hard work, but the moniker 'genius hacker' is not fitting. That is not a criticism of Zuckerberg so much as it is a criticism of the MSM (or just people in general) trying to boil the success of Facebook down to a single thing (the code) and claim that Zuckerberg's success must make him a genius at the one thing.
http://www.forbes.com/profile/mark-zuckerberg
That said, I can't see anybody in this thread being jealous or criticizing Zuckerberg. People are merely stating that his accomplishments do not automatically make him a "genius hacker" just because his very successful business happens to have to do with "computers".
seldo was referring to scaling the software system, not the business. cynicalkane is making a valid point here: that Zuckerberg was not only faced with the technical problems of scaling a popular website, but also with those of managing a fast growing company.
Scaling the business side is definitely another strength of Mark's, but I don't think it was a contributor to their early success -- certainly not the first six months covered in the movie, where it appears Parker was the one who knew how to get deals done. Of course, the movie is fiction, so who knows really?
I hardly ever log into, but FB seems extremely pushy to me. They constantly push people at me who might be my friends. Either I could invite them, or I could make them use FB more by befriending them.
Facebook is just a more subtle version of Farmville in that respect...
Facebook has only been around for 6 years. The first investment of a half million dollars was made 6 months after the site had launched. I'm not diminishing Zuckerberg's insight or hard work but anything that takes off that fast involves a lot of luck.
If an engineer who has worked for several years on the field, but finally gets a big project that's completed in a year, you don't throw away his previous experience and say that he's just a lucky guy who landed a big job. It's the sum of all the work before that adds up to the current experience now.
"take off fast" does not require luck. Yes, being lucky can result in take off fast, but there are things that took off fast that didn't involve luck. (Unless you think that "right place, right time, right thing" is an instance of luck, that is, happenstance.)
That being said, I think there is absolutely no reason to dismiss what Zuckerberg did or claim that it was all luck. Just don't fall into sensationalism and call him a genius.
The others get to be called "autistic savants".
/sarcasm
Some say that Edison was not a genius, and that Ford was not a genius, etc...
Myself - I'm chock full sick of "geniuses" who would of made it if they would of made it. Thus I'd be way more inclined to root for the Zuck than for the mass of people that claim that he fracked them over.
Rooting for the underdog might be "noble". But lets face it - most of the underdogs don't deserve to win.
Known genii (?) include Einstein, Shakespeare, Bach, Mozart, Jimi Hendrix...
Okay, that's a quote from a Bond movie, but still.
Otherwise I would just say that Zuckerberg is very smart and a shrewd businessperson.
behind every great fortune lies a great crime"Behind a great success for which there is no obvious source is a crime that has never been discovered, because it was properly executed."
Bear in mind this is a translation from 19th century french to modern english, so there's a lot of wiggle room for getting different meanings.
The common, shorter version that is bandied about on the internet drops the important qualifier "success which there is no obvious source for" - in other words, there's only a crime behind a success that has no apparent reason.
Also keep in context that this was written ~7 years before the French revolution, about French society. People should keep that in mind when applying that to modern situations.
In Facebook's example, I'm sure most will agree the reason for the success is pretty apparent, and thus no 'great crime' was committed.
I could fill a whole website with mis-attributed, mistranslated and misrepresented popular quotes. Poor old Einstein has got a lot floating around that he never said.
I'm not saying intelligence didn't help Zuckerberg, I just disagree that wealth=intelligence. There are plenty of poor geniuses out there, like Grigori Perelman who solved the topological conundrum.
"Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity."
[1] I say "problems" because it's irrelevant. I'm sure he's crying his way to the bank because of all the hate he gets.
Look at Tesla, he died poor, in debt, and not very well respected. Only now is Tesla regarded as the genius that he was. Neither, Einstein or Edison died wealthy.There are many more examples (Socrates, Oscar Wilde, John Milton) I can go on if needed. Not to mention all the unintelligent wealthy people: Paris Hilton, Tom Cruise, Britney Spears, etc.
just by the way ...
To say that Zuckerberg got to where he is purely because of luck is as equally false as saying that luck has nothing to do with it. I think the real issue that people are arguing about is, colloquially, whether the success is "deserved". You have people who look at the circumstances and assert that "given the opportunity I could have done the same thing", to them - it is an instance of luck, and undeserved success.
To others, they perhaps are recognizing that more went on beneath the surface that we know about - perhaps even though technically what went on is nothing special, there may be other factors in play that only a select few would be able to surmount.
The truth probably lies somewhere in between, but the digestion of the circumstances will vary from person to person. There exist many people who could have made "Facebook" and been equally successful; there exist MANY more people who would not have been able to.
I think that the polarization of responses has a lot to do the framing in absolute terms. Whatever attributions that are ascribed to him, cannot be said to viewed with equal validity for all observers.
Contemporary Art = I could've done that + Yeah, but you didn't.
It's amazing how easy it is to dismiss other people's accomplishments. Notice how "Knew a little bit of PHP and got lucky" is used to represent years of hard work, business and development wise.
You must have never run a business if you think that Zuckerberg's success came easy and was due to sheer luck.