They were the founders of Instagram — the hot Social Media property that kids actually LIKE, instead of the parent company, where their granny shares pictures of cats — but they’ve fallen out with Zuckerberg. Now what?
Everything changes at light speed in the digital world.
Do you still remember AOL? Yahoo? MySpace? Blackberry?
Old News. All of them were replaced by young up-and-comers.
They, in turn, will wind up looking over their shoulder for the ‘next big thing’ hoping to take their place.
Facebook is huge, absolutely.
But it still hasn’t really caught the interest of the younger generation who grew up with it and think of it as ‘yesterday’s news’.
In an industry built on the idea of planned obsolescence, being seen as yesterday’s news can be a serious problem.
So Facebook has been doing the same thing other top-tier companies have done before it: buy out and absorb the promising new talent.
That’s been working pretty well…
…until now.
The two founders of Instagram — which Facebook bought for a Billion dollars in 2012 — are walking out. Those founders would be Mike Kreiger and Kevin Systrom.
Here’s Mikes’ recent tweet, referencing that decision:
https://twitter.com/mikeyk/status/1044471743178465281
That’s following hard on the heels after the Whatsapp founder walked out over Facebook’s attempts to use WhatsApp user data and weaken the encryption.
This announcement comes at a time when the President is getting ready for an Executive Order setting their sights on Big Tech abuses of censoring a platform tech executives keep claiming is ‘open’ (because they are exposed to enormous risks of liability if they were to officially take editorial control of the content and call themselves ‘publishers’).
Do the other execs see the proverbial writing on the wall? Is Zuckerberg trying to monetize information from platforms that once promised privacy?
Is there something else going on behind the scenes?
Or are these just high-profile examples of product inventors who’ve got their nose out of joint because they sold ‘their baby’ and don’t like what someone with a different vision of the future is doing with it?
And what’s going to happen when that Executive Order comes out?
Good question. That’s still uncharted territory.
