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Thinking For Yourself Does Not Mean Knowing What You Are Doing

Michael Hedges November 14, 2022 Follow on Twitter

Admiration for digital everything spread far and wide over this century. Digital innovation has been widely - even wildly - rewarded. The popularity is chalked up to boundlessness, or the appearance thereof, often related to youth. Admit it: the subject makes great copy.

oops!Social networks and media came to the world, rather auspiciously, as a quite logical extension of the World Wide Web, the major innovation of the last half of the 20th Century. People were interested in connection through advanced digital devices. SixDegrees, Friendster and MySpace popped up, gained followings then faded away. With new advances in technologies raging - along with related public interest - new social media platforms arrived. Roughly half the population of the world, according to Statista (January 2022), are attached to one or more of these platforms.

The biggest social media platform is Facebook, one of three owned by Meta, the company once known as Facebook. The renaming by chairperson/chief executive Mark Zuckerberg came with a general overhaul toward virtual innovation. The company has faced various complications, beginning with but not limited to content moderation and related grumblings from media buyers and advertisers, the center of its revenue stream. The virtual reality products - referred to as the metaverse - have never quite taken off.

As with virtually (sic) every enterprise facing stress, something had to give. This week that became around 11 thousand employees worldwide, who gave their jobs. Significant shareholders had called for the “streamlining,” reported Reuters (November 10). “Meta has three huge problems to overcome,” wrote shareholder Altimeter Capital chief executive Brad Gerstner. “It is no longer an innovative groundbreaker; its grip on market domination is dwindling; and the promise of the metaverse, the centerpiece of Zuckerberg’s vision for the future of his company, has been diminished by a combination of consumer apathy, business skepticism, and the realities of a sinking worldwide economy.”

"Revenue trends are just a lot lower than what I predicted,” said Mr. Zuckerberg at a company townhall witnessed by Reuters. “Again, I got this wrong. It was a big mistake in planning for the company. I take responsibility for it.” Several product lines are being sidelined - including smartwatches but not virtual reality games.

This coincided - not really coincidental - with newly self-installed Twitter principal owner and chief executive Elon Musk dumping half the company workforce. But, Mr. Musk then tried to lure a few back, only to fire a significant number of contractors. Twitter does not have the scale of Facebook but it has been a favorite message board for professionals, including news reporters. Keeping with his personal style, Mr. Musk (Chief Twit) bounced around a wide variety of ideas, some dropped or changed within hours. E-commerce giant Amazon posted signs near the Twitter headquarters in San Francisco: “We’re Hiring.”

After months of squirming, Mr. Musk bought Twitter - just two weeks ago - by leveraging financial instruments, some his own, some held by “interesting” others. He understands this: it’s how he made his billions. For Twitter’s reality, as we say in Switzerland, he’s “out over his skis.” In his defense, Mr. Musk does think for himself.

The first and truly only job of the chief executive is minding the shareholders. Their interests are singular: where’s the money? Innovation, product design and such is best assigned to specialists, engineers, scientists and a skilled communications team. Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb but did not run General Electric. It was up to JP Morgan.

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