This discounts a lot of failures and products without real success:
- Facebook Apps
- Facebook Home
- Facebook Workplace
- Facebook Portal
- Facebook Essentials
What he's done well: found promising competition and subsumed them.
I think AR is going to be a huge part of the future. I don't think Facebook is going to lead that effort, not because I don't want them to (though I don't), but because they don't have a track record of building anything worthwhile outside of their core offering (ie, the Facebook product).
>Don’t like Facebook one bit, but Zuck is almost always spot on with his bets. So yes, incredibly scary as it has a high likelihood of succeeding.
Instagram was growing like crazy, even faster than Facebook in its early days so acquisition was no-brainer. Instagram used Facebook's social graph so acquisition made even more sense.
On the other hand WhatsApp had hundreds millions users at the time of acquisition and Larry Page was very close to acquiring it before Zuck but Facebook offered more money that's why it turned out to be one of the biggest acquisitions in the history of Internet($19bn). WhatsApp's huge userbase and rapid growth could've endangered Facebook Messenger that Zuck was about to separate from main Facebook app and make it standalone instant messaging Facebook app.
So both Instagram and WhatsApp were no-brainer and made perfect sense and Facebook had cash pile to do it so they did it.
In 1.5 years Instagram had 50 million monthly active users[0]. Yea it was no-brainer considering other mobile photo apps existed and Facebook and Twitter were also doing photos.
