When FB released its first “phone” it was still unwilling to take mobile seriously. They left the head of mobile position open for a very long time. Zuck himself has said he missed mobile.

With the IPO around that time, making some major strategic investment in tech was not an option when the company was likely under a lot of pressure to make the stock price only go one way.

You give Apple Maps as an example, but that product was a major fumble at release. To the point Apple fired the exec in charge over it.

It’s taken major investment over many years to get that app sorted out and it still needs a lot of work.

I think FB did know better they just had a competing problem of revenue growth that was at odds with laying claim to the future.

If anything, I think FB is making an ongoing strategic mistake in lack of any obvious work to establish an Alphabet structure.

FB can recover by building a social network that monetizes via payments and subscriptions. This could be hooked up to a new fortnite-seeded metaverse and run exclusively through oculus.

The opportunity for a FB-parent Corp that distinguishes a new, private network away from the damaged brand of FB is still there.

Leadership just has to be way more daring now in what it’s willing to do.

It really has to or the ruling metaverse social network will be built by someone else for Apple hardware.