Communications of the ACM
How Mark Zuckerberg Led Facebook’s War to Crush Google Plus
In Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg built not just a business, but a company culture with the fervor of a messianic sect. So, in June 2011, when Google launched Google Plus, Zuckerberg put his company into lockdown. In an adaption from his new book on Silicon Va
Credit: Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images
Mark Zuckerberg is a genius.
Not in the Asperger’s, autistic way depicted in the very fictional movie The Social Network, the cognitive genius of exceptional ability. That’s a modern definition that reduces the original meaning.
Nor would I say he was the Steve Jobsian product genius, either. Anyone claiming as much will have to explain the crowded graveyard of forgotten Facebook product failures. Remember "Home," the Facebook-enabled home screen for Android phones, launched with much fanfare at a Facebook press event in 2013, Zuck appearing alongside the C.E.O. of the soon-to-be-disappointed smartphone-maker HTC? Or Facebook’s misguided bet on HTML5 in 2012, which slowed the mobile app to a frustrating crawl? How about Facebook’s first version of Search, available in English only, mostly useful for checking out your friends’ single female friends, and since discontinued? The stand-alone mobile app Paper, which was a shameless rip-off of Flipboard? Some unlaunched products I can’t name consumed massive resources, dying internally after Zuck changed his mind and shut them down.
If he’s a product genius, then there’s lots of serendipity counterbalancing his divine madness.
No. I submit he is an old-school genius, the fiery force of nature possessed by a tutelary spirit of seemingly supernatural provenance that fuels and guides him, intoxicates his circle, and compels his retinue to be great as well. The Jefferson, the Napoléon, the Alexander... the Jim Jones, the L. Ron Hubbard, the Joseph Smith. Keeper of a messianic vision that, though mercurial and stinting on specifics, presents an overwhelming and all-consuming picture of a new and different world. Have a mad vision and you’re a kook. Get a crowd to believe in it as well and you’re a leader. By imprinting this vision on his disciples, Zuckerberg founded the church of a new religion. All the early Facebook employees have their story of the moment when they saw the light and realized that Facebook wasn’t some measly social network like MySpace but a dream of a different human experience. With all the fervor of recent converts, newly recruited followers attracted other committed, smart, and daring engineers and designers, themselves seduced by the echoes of the Zuckian vision in others.
From Vanity Fair
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