In the 1990s, according to The Independent, long before the memes conquered the public, there was one circulating with Bill Gates' photo as a "borg" - the famous cyborgs villains of the movie "Star Trek: The Next Generation ". If you are not a fan of science fiction, believe me: they are sickly individuals. Before the attacks, they decree: "We will add their biological and technological qualities to ours. Resisting is useless. "
This warning resonated with the industrial technology of the time. Under Gates' leadership, Microsoft became known as the company that would win at any cost. From productivity apps to web browsers, any competitor the giant could not afford would be crushed, as it would invent a similar competitive one that would be sold to its huge, already existing customer base.
Now Facebook has released Instagram Stories, which in essence is a clone of what already existed in Snapchat - even the name is the same. This is a movement that would not have been strange in Bill Gates's era at Microsoft and which establishes Mark Zuckerberg as the same kind of leader. The message that remains is: if you can not beat them or join them, you will end them. And it's Zuckerberg who's saying.
The young entrepreneur of 33 years has already suffered with the envy of Snapchat. By 2013, when the platform was still a startup, Facebook tried to buy it for $ 3 billion. A month later, Zuck's social network launched Poke, a Snapchat clone.
The novelty got nowhere, as did his successor, Slingshot, in 2014. But with these apps, Facebook's message to Snapchat was clear: there's nothing you can have that can not be taken away from you and There's nothing you can build that we can not build faster.
In the other years, the rivalry between Facebook and Snapchat has relatively disappeared. Snapchat grew slowly but steadily in both user and ad revenue. But now Zuckerberg and Facebook are ready to take the threat seriously.
The advantage of the platform
In Gates' time, Microsoft's cat leap was what became known as platform advantage. Ownership of Windows and Office, the two main ways for virtually anyone to do anything on the computer, made it easy to integrate any new product in a deeper and easier-to-use way than any competitor ever could.
Facebook itself is an advantage of the Facebook platform. Instagram has always thrived where other photo-sharing services have encountered difficulty as the two products are tightly integrated. This makes Instagram an easy and standard option for Facebook users and has driven the app to 500 million active users per month.
So by launching Stories on Instagram, Facebook is taking ownership of a crucial competitor resource and bringing it directly to a large, existing network of users. Specific applications and technologies are different from Microsoft in the 1990s, but the primer is very similar.
In the end, despite Gates' aggressive growth tactics and focus, consolidating Windows and Office led the company to lag behind the growth of the Internet.
Of course being like Bill Gates is not all that bad. Like him, Zuckerberg put much of his fortune into social projects.
While today's Microsoft is much friendlier to the competition than it was at the time of the billionaire who founded it, Facebook is the company that sets the pace today.
And finally, that means startups and tech companies in general should be worried as Zuckerberg is coming. Its biological and technological qualities will be added to Facebook. Resisting is useless.
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