OK, so I have not been the greatest Facebook fan in the world (but did just check my Facebook account for first time in a week, discovered that a friend's dog died. That was a waste of time). But even I am surprised that Facebook co-founder Dustin Moscovitz is leaving to start a company that...now get this, will be leaving to start a rerun of Lotus Notes (remember that program? It actually ran the majority of Fortune 2000 systems for a period of time). Huh?
According to Valleywag Dustin sent out an email to colleagues at Facebook, in which he said:
"I've seen us unblock ourselves time and again with new tools to
increase transparency and passive information flow and many times it
was the fruit of my own labors. While working on improving Facebook's
tools, however, I came to a very difficult conclusion: doing this for
all the companies of the world was not the same project as doing it for
one of them. This idea is one that needs an organization that was built
to do it, with every fiber of its DNA engineered in a way that
producing an extensible enterprise platform becomes little more than
the logical consequence of an organism executing its own nature." [emphasis added]
Wow. A bigger pile of [nonsense] would be difficult to find. Either Dustin is smoking some really good stuff, or five years of being poked finally got to him.
We all knew that keeping good people around would be almost impossible for Zuckerberg and friends would be difficult if the future at Facebook became cloudy, and cloudy it is. No business model, high overhead, and a stock market barely functioning. Moscovitz's stock is not vesting, its his, and I am sure he will have no problem raising big chunk of $$ from silicon valley VCs still starry eyed by Facebook fluff. He will be able to pay himself a nice salary, and dream about corporate organisms executing their own nature. Sounds like VC version of Adult content [read PORN] to me, but hey, if it sells...
Now nothing is impossible, and Dustin could very well have some incredible concepts for better corporate organization, although he probably should spend some time in real corporations that have real products (and things like revenues and profits) before thinking he has figured enterprise nirvana.
What does all this say to me? The consumer social network eco-system has run out of gas. When one of the stars starts talking about enterprise software, means VCs should head for the exit.
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