Zuckerberg: Facebook paused feature development for a year during mobile rewrite
Mark Zuckerberg · The Mark Zuckerberg Interview · Acquired · Sep 18, 2024 · at 39:20
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg describes the company's crisis response when pivoting from HTML5 to native mobile apps around Facebook's 2012 IPO.
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“We basically took, I think it must have been like a year or something, we were just like, look, we're gonna pause feature development of the company, Because it's hard enough to do a rewrite, right? So if you look at, like, the history of the tech industry, there are all these examples like Netscape and, you know, these things that, like, they tried to do a rewrite, they needed to reestablish their technical platform, and they also tried to add features. They basically just, like, never terminated. So that's a real risk, right, when you're, like, completely changing your underlying platform that you're gonna miss it. It's like, alright, we gotta minimize the chance that that happens, so we're not gonna ship any new features. We're just going to rewrite it.”
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