It was an ambush that was designed to give FB an advantage in negotiating with him. It was hardball tactics, carried out in bad faith. Why should Dalton feel neutral about being on the receiving end of that?

I don't understand how they gained an advantage through that meeting. It seems that, meeting or not, they already had the advantage by controlling the platform.

Dalton sums up his issue with FB's tactics pretty succinctly right here:

Your team doesn’t seem to understand that being “good negotiators” vs implying that you will destroy someone’s business built on your “open platform” are not the same thing.

He then goes on to call out the root-cause of the problem as FB's understandable but unfortunate focus on ad-revenue. This puts them at odds with the developers who use the platform and that's clearly not a good dynamic. Both MS and Apple have long understood that getting developers and keeping them happy was essential to keep a platform fertile.

EDIT:fixing typo/poor construction in last sentence.

Actually, over the years both MS and Apple have heavily messed with developers in various ways.

Microsoft refined the practice to the point they coined a new term for it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish

As a recent example from Apple, they are now requiring sandboxing in the App store, which is heavily messing with a number of developers. But they are not sandboxing their own applications.

EDIT: this comment appears to be unpopular? what's the disagreement?

EDIT: Also, I should point out that apple didn't used to mess with developers, probably because they were primarily a hardware company, with low market share, so developers were key, and there was no competition. However, they have expanded and are now also a services company, so they have an incentive to mess with the environment in order to defend their services against competition. Microsoft, conversely, made quite a bit of money off of it's office products, so always had a reason to manipulate the environment.

Generally, negotiations favour the prepared. By ambushing him, FB was hoping to trick him into negotiating unprepared. Dalton, by experience or judgement or both, recognized the ambush and dealt with it well. Someone else might start talking terms because they accept what the FB execs are saying (and thus be intimidated or fearful, or grateful for what seems like a nice guy move by FB).

"What was the cost to him in going to this meeting??

Time, both in the meeting and in preparing, and in information transfer. He didn't specifically say what he went through, but he may have divulged pieces of the puzzle that they were unaware of.

I mean, sure, but in business there are always meetings you attend for partnerships or offers that don't pan out. It's just the way the world works.

Yes but there's a difference between a well-intentioned meeting that didn't pan out and a mal-intentioned meeting, and it would seem that it was the latter according to the OP

I recently had a meeting where our side came out of it literally saying "WTF was that?". We'd expected it to be about how a partnership would progress and it was more the other side questioning us about why there should be a partnership at all.

In retrospect, our contact with the other side that had set up the meeting hadn't properly communicated to us what the meeting would be about, and presumably had not communicated much with his side about what they were looking for at this stage.

Their side was basically dysfunctional, with each person on their team having a different agenda.

I wouldn't say that meeting was mal-intentioned, just that their company was really screwed up.

Facebook may be in a similar stage at certain levels.

There doesn't have to be a specific badness to be mal-intentioned. Disparate, fuzzy, or nonexistent intentions are just as much a waste of time for the other side than specifically harmful goals. It's all garbage on the receiving end.

His time is presumably valuable to him. The cost was his time. Time he could have spent building his product.

Time, sure, but also I think that instead of the exec-level support he wanted he instead got the impending doom that either:

a) Facebook will knock on his door again at a later date asking to "acqu-hire".

b) Facebook will eventually release something in-house that will compete with his app (and most likely win due to Facebook's large momentum).

With the impending doom stuff aside, I still don't think that he should've expected getting exec-level support for his product walking in to the meeting. Facebook doesn't _need_ to give him anything. So yeah, he wasted his time, but that's _his_ problem, not Facebook's.

I replied to veyron [your sibling]'s similar comment.