One thing I like about Facebook, evil aside, is how Zuckerberg-centric it seems. They spent two billion on Oculus because Zuckerberg liked Ready Player One and thinks the chance of that is awesome. Zuckerberg publicly released a machine learning project in college and now Facebook is spending more on machine learning than anyone.
If you had effectively infinite money to make any idea you can think of into reality, would you use it building cool things that you are personally interested in, or would you use it to start another cloud company dedicated to prices so high it's practically highway robbery?
It would make sense if Facebook was ran by Larry Ellison, but money is pretty pointless as an end itself.
I don't think so; it seems like most of Facebook's decision-making in terms of expansion is arbitrary and whim-based. He admitted to that being the reason he bought Oculus.
It's possible that they are less focused than similar companies, but I would expect that it takes more to seal an acquisition than Mark Zuckerberg just going "let's buy that company, they look cool" and it being done.
If you had effectively infinite money to make any idea you can think of into reality, would you use it building cool things that you are personally interested in, or would you use it to start another cloud company dedicated to prices so high it's practically highway robbery?
It would make sense if Facebook was ran by Larry Ellison, but money is pretty pointless as an end itself.