An interesting analysis of the Instagram takeover by Facebook:
First, to understand this deal it’s important to understand Facebook. Unfortunately everything about Facebook defies logic. In terms of user experience (insider jargon: “UX”), Facebook is like an NYPD police van crashing into an IKEA, forever — a chaotic mess of products designed to burrow into every facet of your life. The company is also technologically weird. For example, much of the code that runs the site is written in a horrible computer language called PHP, which stands for nothing you care about. Millions of websites are built with PHP, because it works and it’s cheap to run, but PHP is a programming language like scrapple is a meat. Imagine eating two pounds of scrapple every day for the rest of your life — that’s what Facebook does, programming-wise. Which is just to say that Facebook has its own way of doing things that looks very suspect from the outside world — but man, does it work.
Now consider Instagram. If Facebook is a sprawling, intertextual garden of forking pokes, Instagram is no more complex than a chapbook of poetry: It lets you share pictures with your friends and keep track of strangers who post interesting pictures. It barely has a website; all the action happens on mobile devices. Thirty million people use it to pass time in the bathroom. You can add some fairly silly filters to the photos to make the pictures look like they were taken in the seventies, but that’s more of a novelty than a requirement. So that’s Instagram. It’s not a site, or an app. What it is, really, is a product.
[. . .]
To some users, this looks like a sellout. And that’s because it is. You might think the people crabbing about how Instagram is going to suck now are just being naïve, but I don’t think that’s true. Small product companies put forth that the user is a sacred being, and that community is all-important. That the money to pay for the service comes from venture capital, which seeks a specific return on investment over a period of time, is between the company and the venture capitalists; the relationship between the user and the product is holy, or is supposed to be.
So if you’re an Instagram user, you’ve been picking up on all of the cues about how important you are, how valuable you are to Instagram. Then along comes Facebook, the great alien presence that just hovers over our cities, year after year, as we wait and fear. You turn on the television and there it is, right above the Empire State Building, humming. And now a hole has opened up on its base and it has dumped a billion dollars into a public square — which turned out to not be public, but actually belongs to a few suddenly-very-rich dudes. You can’t blame users for becoming hooting primates when a giant spaceship dumps a billion dollars out of its money hole. It’s like the monolith in the movie 2001 appeared filled with candy and a sign on the front that said “NO CANDY FOR YOU.”
It’s easy to claim one wouldn’t be a sell-out … until someone comes along and actually offers to buy you out.
I like my house, where I live, well enough. If someone offers me more than market value, then it’s SOLD brother and I’ll be out in a month. Same should be true of any business I start.
I have a theory that the software an org uses defines them. Proscribes limitations. Probably more than they’d like to admit.
Not so much desktop software … although I wonder if the decline of Western Civ can be traced to the overwhelming dominance of Microsoft Office …
Anyway. Talking the software at the core of the org. Facebook is PHP which is a find language as far as it goes but the thought of building a huge enterprise with PHP at the core is … something. Like long-distance freight hauling with a fleet of mini-pickup trucks. It works, the trucks are less expansive than a Peterbilt and you can hire pickup truck drivers cheaper than you can OTR licensed operators but .. you don’t realize what you can’t do because you’re stuck with the paradigm of ‘small trucks’.
Here, we’ve run into a huge, unanticipated problem. A new customer (cool) likes us, we’re in year two of a lucrative deal but their bills of material are huge, complicated, and our system just can’t handle them. Bugs that are unnoticed with standard BOMs are being exposed as this huge bolus of data is rammed into the database.
Software architecture choices, made years ago, are affecting ‘how’ we do business today.
Comment by Brian Dunbar — April 11, 2012 @ 10:20
The eye-popping number that Facebook offered to the owners of Instagram indicate that it was not a solicited bid. Facebook was willing to pay far more than they’d have to do if Instagram had been actively looking to be bought. I’m not looking to sell my house or my business, but if someone wandered past and offered me twice what they were worth, I’d be cashing their cheque before they came to their senses.
One of my clients is in a similar situation. They made certain technological choices a few years ago which allowed them to solve an immediate problem and keep that particular customer happy. Now, they’re having to find ways to work around some of those historical decisions (because they can’t just scrap everything and start from scratch).
Comment by Nicholas — April 11, 2012 @ 10:35