I assume this is completely unintentional, but the narrative that Facebook was just expanding into new markets is pure revisionism. It was very clear around the time of purchase that Facebook considered Instagram to be a competitor, and that fact has since been verified through leaked Facebook emails and documents.
Facebook's concern was that social paradigms would shift and that Facebook would not be the predominant way that people communicated in the future. To get around that problem they aggressively targeted almost every small company in the space. Their goal was to make it so that the market couldn't shift quickly in any direction at all until Facebook had already become the dominant player within that shifted market.
The purchases were designed to make sure that there was never any opportunity for a competitor to build a large, secure userbase before Facebook had an opportunity to replicate their features.
Here's the direct quote from Zuckerberg himself[0]:
> One way of looking at this is that what we’re really buying is time. Even if some new competitors springs up, buying Instagram, Path, Foursquare, etc now will give us a year or more to integrate their dynamics before anyone can get close to their scale again. Within that time, if we incorporate the social mechanics they were using, those new products won’t get much traction since we’ll already have their mechanics deployed at scale.
Facebook's concern about horizontal integration was not about expanding their business, it was about protecting the company from potential changes in the social landscape. This tactic was being discussed as recently as 2020, and we literally have scores of internal documents describing Facebook's mindset. How are people's memories so short about this?
I assume this is completely unintentional, but the narrative that Facebook was just expanding into new markets is pure revisionism. It was very clear around the time of purchase that Facebook considered Instagram to be a competitor, and that fact has since been verified through leaked Facebook emails and documents.
Facebook's concern was that social paradigms would shift and that Facebook would not be the predominant way that people communicated in the future. To get around that problem they aggressively targeted almost every small company in the space. Their goal was to make it so that the market couldn't shift quickly in any direction at all until Facebook had already become the dominant player within that shifted market.
The purchases were designed to make sure that there was never any opportunity for a competitor to build a large, secure userbase before Facebook had an opportunity to replicate their features.
Here's the direct quote from Zuckerberg himself[0]:
> One way of looking at this is that what we’re really buying is time. Even if some new competitors springs up, buying Instagram, Path, Foursquare, etc now will give us a year or more to integrate their dynamics before anyone can get close to their scale again. Within that time, if we incorporate the social mechanics they were using, those new products won’t get much traction since we’ll already have their mechanics deployed at scale.
Facebook's concern about horizontal integration was not about expanding their business, it was about protecting the company from potential changes in the social landscape. This tactic was being discussed as recently as 2020, and we literally have scores of internal documents describing Facebook's mindset. How are people's memories so short about this?
[0]: https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/29/21345723/facebook-instagr...