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Zuckerberg Tells Staff to Focus on Video Products as Meta's Stock Plunges (bloomberg.com) 71

Posted by BeauHD from the rough-week dept.
Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg rallied his employees to focus on video products, after they watched the stock lose a quarter of its value. Bloomberg reports: At a company-wide virtual meeting Thursday, Zuckerberg explained that the historic stock drop was a result of Meta's weak forecast for revenue in the current quarter, according to a person who attended and was not authorized to speak about it. Zuckerberg echoed his remarks of a day earlier to investors, telling employees that the social networking giant faced an "unprecedented level of competition," with the rise of TikTok, the short-video platform Facebook doesn't own. Zuckerberg appeared red-eyed and wore glasses, the person said. He said he might tear up because he'd scratched his eye -- not because of the topics up for discussion.

Meta is already talking about ways to retain staff amid the stock rout. The social media giant is thinking of offering long weekends, Zuckerberg said, responding to a question on burnout. He also encouraged exhausted employees to use their vacation days. He added that based on his life experience, transitioning to a four-day work week would not be productive. Employee shares vest on Feb. 15, and manager conversations about bonuses and promotions happen in March -- both of which could be factors in workers' potential decisions to leave, according to another person familiar with the company's plans.
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Zuckerberg Tells Staff to Focus on Video Products as Meta's Stock Plunges More

Zuckerberg Tells Staff to Focus on Video Products as Meta's Stock Plunges

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  • FACEBOOK (Score:5, Insightful)

    by darkain ( 749283 ) on Thursday February 03, 2022 @07:48PM (#62235407) Homepage

    The entire summary lists "Facebook" once, and only as a competitor to TikTok.

    Stop with the "Meta" fuckery already. Its FACEBOOK. Facebook lost over a quarter TRILLION dollar today because of the number of users on FACEBOOK declined!

    • If the "metaverse" flops -- which I suspect it will -- then Facebook's decline is just getting started. and if regulators make it more difficult for giant corps to just buy up the competition then Facebook's decline could be terminal. They are rapidly becoming the Boomer hangout.

      • Re:FACEBOOK (Score:4, Funny)

        by ravenshrike ( 808508 ) on Thursday February 03, 2022 @09:30PM (#62235661)

        More importantly since the success or failure of Meta will take longer than 3 months at the end of the day, if they have declines for 2 quarters the stock will tank. Which, especially with their latest stunt concerning the US trucker protest page, is extremely likely.

      • What even is it? Second Life with VR helmet support? That's about the most detail I've seen it described with.

        The way they've been hammering the public with marketing and branding, it wouldn't even surprise me if that was its main purpose. Not to deliver a product, just deliver hype to investors, and deflect negative publicity associated with their original brand. Pretend like you're developing Cyberspace 2.0 for a few months until this PR "moment" is over and everything goes back to normal.

        Of course it won

        • Re:FACEBOOK (Score:5, Interesting)

          by sudonim2 ( 2073156 ) on Friday February 04, 2022 @08:01AM (#62236673)

          The "metaverse" existed long before Facebook. The point of FB's current push is to try and bring websites off the HTML5/Python/LAMP/AWS stack and onto their architecture. That would let them siphon data from all websites. And selling such data is Facebook's actual business plan. All the social media stuff is really just a way of gathering the data that's their actual product. This is obviously going to fail for a myriad of reasons but FB has no other options. Their investors demand constant growth because that's what's needed to get a reasonable return on their investment. That constant growth isn't possible in a closed finite universe experiencing entropic decay is of no concern to investors; it's what they demand, so it's what FB must try and deliver. But there's no more cake to eat after you've eaten all the cake.

          We're looking at an industry collapse that will make the 2000's Dot-com crash look like a minor market correction. When Facebook can't deliver on its promises to investors, it's valuation is going to drop towards its current earnings instead of its future possible earnings. That's about 10% of current valuation. Such a drop has inertia of its own and will actually drive the stock down well below that level before stabilizing. Investors are morons who don't actually understand the things they're investing in. As such, Facebook tanking will make the whole social sector look weaker and take that out, too. Twitter, Pinterest, & TikTok will go down with FB. Reddit might go with it.

          In order to try and boost revenue to keep stock prices up, Facebook will drop rates on its ads to try and make up the difference in volume. They'll have to do this as raising their prices will let their main competitor, Google, undercut their prices quite heavily. This will drop ad prices across the industry. Twitter, Mozilla, probably Google, and anyone else reliant on ad revenue, which is most tech companies that are currently in the black, will go revenue negative. Having several of the largest tech companies look to be flirting with bankruptcy will make the whole tech sector look weak to investors who, again, are morons who don't really know the things they're investing in. This will cause mass disinvestment in tech in general.

          Many big names in tech are completely reliant on investor cash infusions. Uber, Lyft, Grubhub, and Doordash are all operating at a loss of billions a year. They're probably all going to disappear. Uber might be able to scrape together enough cash to weather the storm and fulfill the monopoly bet its investors have been making. But Lyft will likely try to stay on long enough to force Uber to either buy them out or form a duopoly. This will likely just result in both of them failing. Basically every delivery service of every type as well as all non-B2B startups, and even most of those, will utterly collapse. Companies that have a lot of money and actually make/do things at a profit like Apple & Microsoft will take a hit but they have billions in liquidity anticipating this, sort of an ark of money. IBM might not make it. In the end, the tech sector as a whole will be left with a valuation in the single-digit percentages of what it is now. And that's being optimistic.

          • Great summary. If you're right that a revaluation of FB stock price based on existing earnings would put it down 90% then we're in for a hell of a ride.

            • The current valuations factor in future earnings. Constant past growth means that line goes up significantly. All this ignores the reality of the size of the market as most everyone who has access to the internet is already on Facebook. Meaning that when growth slows, not even stops or shrinks, it can lower valuation by significant amounts. This recent drop was because all the trading algorithms, the things actually doing most of the buying and selling, dropped the future earnings based on slower growth pro

            • Great summary. If you're right that a revaluation of FB stock price based on existing earnings would put it down 90% then we're in for a hell of a ride.

              "Metaverse" is only a tiny part of Facebook at the moment.

              • I'm pretty sure I did a good job of explaining that the metaverse crap is just a desperate attempt to grow their marketshare despite the fact that their marketshare is essentially "the market". Thanks for not reading.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by flink ( 18449 )

        I look forward to Facebook becoming the new Friendster.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by msauve ( 701917 )
      > Its FACEBOOK.

      Or Myspace, or Geocities. What's the difference?

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Z80a ( 971949 )

        They didn't forced you to use your real name, and focused more on what you create rather than who you are.
        Geocities pages were cringe, but they were actual creations, people trying to entertain who gets in the geocities page, not just a fake display of your life that only robbers and marketeers care about.

        • It's actually fascinating to me that of Facebook, Myspace or Geocities, the one that won is the ugliest of them all.

    • But more importantly they weren't allowed to just haul off and buy up a couple of competitors and then funnel the users into their main line product like they've done the last several times they face declining users.

      No kid wants to be on the same platform as their parents. This means every time a new generation comes up a whole new platform is going to start to develop. And the only way to stop that is with the kind of classic anti-competitive bullshit Microsoft made famous. Facebook is used that to sta
    • Who would have thought that banning users, and filtering posts would cause a decline in membership... I am shocked!

  • FTFY (Score:3)

    by splutty ( 43475 ) on Thursday February 03, 2022 @07:49PM (#62235413)

    with the rise of TikTok, the short-video platform Facebook does not yet own.

    • It's the META (Score:5, Insightful)

      by luis_a_espinal ( 1810296 ) on Friday February 04, 2022 @08:39AM (#62236765)

      with the rise of TikTok, the short-video platform Facebook does not yet own.

      And very likely will not own ever. I'm a sucker for media consumption, and I tell you, I rarely use FB. I prefer instagram and youtube, and my kids are gaga with TikTok, making their own content and consuming in return (and me having to keep a watchful eye but that's another story.)

      Anyway, FB used to be about connecting, and although many here will laugh at the concept, I did enjoy it. But shit went tribal, and FB was at the helm of polarizing and alienizing chunks of its customer base. It became a rage-porn-peddling machine and profited from it.

      Now that people are abandoning it, they can't go back to the growth and financial reports they used to have.

      The final nail was this whole Meta bullshit. Metaverses as envisioned by these execs will never take off. There's not "Ready Player One" shit that can happen, not unless we really go dystopic.

      The real metaverses that exist are the ones with online gaming, in particular world-building experiences like Mindcraft, Roblox, where people, mostly youngsters go to build their own world. Think of them as collaborative virtual LEGO-based tea party games.

      That's where this meta shit is at. Kids don't go to these platforms to alter or experience new realities. They go to build stuff on a scale that would never be possible in the real world. These platforms can even be learning platforms to well.

      If ZuckBorg had thought it carefully, he would have moved into that direction. Instead, he went with his creepy-as-fuck, uncanny-valley-triggering vision, and not one consumer with a functioning neuron (including the dumb ones) ain't buying it.

      If FB is to survive and not go the way of Yahoo, it needs to circle wagons and go back to core social-network business, improve IG so that it can compete with TikTok, and see how it can enter the same markets where Mindcraft and Roblox are.

  • The story reminded me to go look at Facebook. From the dates on some of the notifications, it had been at least a week since my last visit. I'm allowed (by myself) to visit Facebook for 5 minutes per day, but I lost interest after 3. I did send a few reactions to old friends' posts of some interest. The other things Facebook dangled before my attention included videos (per this Slashdot story), but I failed to become engaged. Happy at the divergence.

    But is Slashdot a sufficient substitute? Obviously asking

  • Well, of course ... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Thursday February 03, 2022 @07:57PM (#62235435)

    [Mark Zuckerberg] added that based on his life experience, transitioning to a four-day work week would not be productive.

    Because *his* life experience is so typical. /sarcasm

    Also, "productive" for who(m) -- Facebook or the employees?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by hawguy ( 1600213 )

      Exactly, I'm not sure that a billionaire CEO's "life experience" who works only because he wants to is even tangentially related to the life experience of ordinary workers that have no choice but to work.

    • The life experience of a guy that waits in front of a car door for his driver to get out, walk around the car and open the door for him ?

  • Put another way (Score:5, Interesting)

    by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Thursday February 03, 2022 @07:58PM (#62235437)

    Meta lost $232 billion in value [marketwatch.com] in one day. There are a few countries out there whose yearly budgets [wikipedia.org] aren't that large.

    Not bad for one day. So far the largest single-day decline in market value on record for any U.S. company.

    • Re:Put another way (Score:4, Funny)

      by youngone ( 975102 ) on Thursday February 03, 2022 @08:31PM (#62235509)
      It has turned out to be quite a good day then.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Huitzil ( 7782388 )
      You have to remember that market value is marginal - so the latest stock transaction is really the most recent valuation of a company - it does not equal cash in hand or yearly expenses, that actually remains stable. So the biggest losers in all of these are 401ks, hedge funds, and rank and file employees. Not Mark, not the Facebook machinery. I feel really sad for employees actually, because lots of them rely on the market to pay bills.

      Facebook can only afford to spend as much as Cuba does every year

    • It is not comparable to any country's budget, because market value isn't actual cash resources. Market value is a measure of how much people desire or envy a company. If you can get two billionaires to want your toenail real bad, it can be worth $1 billion until they decide they don't want it. It literally means nothing. It doesn't mean you have $1 billion in cash to spend on hookers. You might be able to get a bank loan on it though .. if the bank believes you.

      • "Market value is a measure of how much people desire or envy a company"

        Actually, market value is much more objective than that. It's the number of oustanding shares multiplied by the current price of a share.

        That's pretty much it. In fact, if we were to drill down further, the price per share isn't even set merely by the last price of a sold share, but it's actually driven by price targets set by huge huge huge volume traders.

    • valuation != expenses

      Facebooks operations are not 230 billion a year.
      Its expenses are a LOT LESS.
      A paper valuation is meeeeh, it goes down, it goes up.
      If it goes down, its a BUY oppertunity.
      If amazon doubles the price of RAM, do you go buy it?
      The valuation worth of a said country that spends $232 billion a year, could be $20 trillion+

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by hawguy ( 1600213 )

      The company itself didn't lose anything. Zuckerberg lost some paper money, but not enough to even come close to changing his lifestyle.

      The real losers are employers that are counting on stock options or RSU's as part of their income -- employee retention is going to be much harder, especially if the stock continues to slide.

    • The real question is, who are the big players dumping the stock for a payday?

      The loss in valuation sounds alarming, but it is just a paper figure. The gain in profit from selling the stock is the actual money.

      • The real question is, who are the big players dumping the stock for a payday?

        The loss in valuation sounds alarming, but it is just a paper figure. The gain in profit from selling the stock is the actual money.

        As other's have said more elegantly the loss in valuation is based on a transition in valuing the stock based on the current revenue instead of assuming future growth. As much as it is just a paper figure it is based upon the reality that Facebook failed to make it's growth targets and was actually in decline.

  • ... pep talk [youtube.com].

  • a way to cut down on liabilities (Score:5, Insightful)

    by magarity ( 164372 ) on Thursday February 03, 2022 @08:11PM (#62235469)

    "He also encouraged exhausted employees to use their vacation days"

    Yes, because accrued vacation days are a liability on the balance sheet. Employees using them up looks better than when they pile up.

    • Yup. For the past two years, my company has been trying to get people to use their PTO at the end of the year to clear it off the books and then backtracked when people started scheduling November and December, allowing additional carryover. Executive level and HR don't seem to realize that people have been told not to take time off all year because we're so busy. We're not some Silicon Valley startup, we're a boring old East Coast company. The fact that this is so prevalent across the US is indicative of a

      • then backtracked when people started scheduling November and December

        Weird. In my company it is pretty well known and expected that lots of people will be taking off large parts of December and some of November every year. Generally not everybody, every year, but enough that it has been literally and officially referred to as the "quiet period" for at least the past 10 or 20 years. There are official quiet period rules on what sort of work can be scheduled during the quiet period.

        I have on rare occasions been asked to defer vacation or have chosen to based on when we schedul

  • "Devaluations are an important, and necessary, evil, associated with trading in publick".

  • Social Media Valuations across the board?
  • ... of today. Once a chunk of talent leaves and another 100 million users along with them next quarter, we can laugh as the stock sinks further. A-hahahahahahaha

  • If the Open App Markets Act [macrumors.com] get's passed in the Senate then I would fully expect Facebook to withdraw its App from Apple's App Store and make it available exclusively on some other App Store with little or no rules about data harvesting and tracking. Probably its own App store.
    There's a wise investment saying that goes "never try to catch a falling knife" but maybe this time it doesn't apply? A good time to buy in at this low point?

  • with a new coat of paint. What did they expect?

  • Zuckerberg's life experiences (Score:5, Insightful)

    by subreality ( 157447 ) on Thursday February 03, 2022 @09:48PM (#62235701)

    He added that based on his life experience, transitioning to a four-day work week would not be productive.

    Zuck, when's the last time you've done laundry, washed dishes, fixed your parents' computer, cooked dinner, written code, stood in line for anything, taken your car in for service, argued with insurance to get your meds approved, vacuumed, fixed a leaking toilet, cleaned the cat litter, lost sleep worrying if you can afford college for your kids...

    Normal people have to do those things, and it leaves us rather burned out by the end of the week.

    • You've got to realize, Mark Z is only 37 years old. His "life experience" is about as long as a retired NFL player!

    • lost sleep worrying if you can afford college for your kids...

      At least you don't have to worry about this one. You can't afford it. Problem solved, sleep sweetly now.

    • This guy stands waiting for the door of his car until his driver sees him, gets out, walks around the car and opens the door for him. That is how out of touch he is. "his life experience" ? give me a break

  • Like 3D TVs (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Tony Isaac ( 1301187 ) on Thursday February 03, 2022 @10:51PM (#62235889) Homepage

    Every few years, TV manufacturers come back with a push for 3D TVs. Everybody wants those, right? This "metaverse" idea is kind of similar. There are a few who really like the concept. But most of us are scratching our heads asking why anyone would want to spend a lot of time in a "metaverse"!

    • Even worse, meta commercials [youtube.com] have nothing to do with the reality of what VR will be like.

      • Right!

        And worse yet, we KNOW there will be commercials in the metaverse! After all, this is driven by a company that makes nearly all its money on placing ads.

        • And worse yet, we KNOW there will be commercials in the metaverse!

          Well there's a depressing thought. Hopefully we have ad-block.

          • I can see it now. You install an ad blocker. Soon the entire metaverse is crashing in around you, kind of like in the Truman Show.

    • I think the movie was called Inception where they had a scene with a bunch of people addicted to a virtual world. The same way that people get addicted to alcohol, drugs and video games at the expense of living a properly fulfilling life there is an opportunity for a metaverse. Its strategy requires keeping people broken and in despair so that they connect to their metaverse.

      • You're right that people get addicted. But I don't think the facebook / meta engineers and executives are thinking of it in this way. They aren't thinking of the impact on people at all, except to the extent that they have to to stay out of trouble with the law. Their one and only focus is money. All the rest of that stuff is just a list of bottom-line risks to mitigate.

      • Also reminiscent of Ready Player One [imdb.com]

  • Them, and their rabid followers? Please???

  • Phone party lines were banned, Fakebook filled the gap with internet. Now imagine you wearing a 3D headset and a picture of you being unfaithful hits the airwaves. Ooops. Sometimes the phone camera picks a mirror or an unlikely bed companion. I can hear the divorce lawyers: bring it on - more money for out pockets. TG I have black electrical tape over my phones camera, to prevent snooping.

  • They started embedding tik tok like videos a few months ago. Literally the one change that pissed me off recently.

    And they want to make it more visibile?

  • If they've been there this long, they have really bad sense of morality that I don't want to deal with at other more successful or influential companies. Please: either stay where you are face book employees or go join someone like Dell , HP, or IBM where you will never be that dangerous.

  • Well, I guess they can always go back to providing a great hosting platform for Nazis, Russian bots, and anti-vaxxers.
  • Here's a translation from Zuck-speak into English: fads don't last forever and Facebook's time in the sun is ending but, I still need the stock price to stay up there so I can cash out so don't stop pretending like the future is bright.

    MFGA!
    (make Facebook great again)

  • Anyone have any stories about being in facebook jail? I don't have experience with that. However, I've met people that simply replied to a post that wasn't nasty or anything like that and was put in jail. One of them was for pointing to a scientific paper on covid because the idiot so called "fact checker" perceived it as criticizing the vaccine. She pointed out their obvious leftist stupidity and was taken out of the so called jail. This has upset a lot of people. So it's no surprise to me that I understan

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