?Facebook: The Inside Story? author Steven Levy on how the company compares to Apple and Google

Levy had access to Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and many of their top lieutenants and other employees over the past three and a half years, and the result it a revealing look at what the past 16 years have looked like from the offices in Palo Alto and Menlo Park.The broad outlines of Facebook’s story are well known. Levy also has the best account yet of the Cambridge Analytica fiasco — he’s appropriately skeptical of the motives of everyone involved, and lays out in great detail how Facebook sowed the seeds for that particular comeuppance.“We gave Mr. Levy wide access to our executives, who were forthcoming about the most painful moments in Facebook’s past,” the company told me over email today. But if you want to know why Facebook is the way it is — how its leaders think, what their blind spots are, and why the company’s plans have so often gone awry — The Inside Story is an excellent starting place. Was there a part of Facebook’s story that turned out to be different than you assumed once you dug into it?Steven Levy: I wouldn’t say the early accounts were wrong, but telling the history with benefit of hindsight I was able to identify decisions—usually Mark’s decisions—that would wind up costing Facebook (and in some cases us users) dearly. I also found tons of wonderful, previously untold or under-covered stories, like the ill-fated Facebook phone, the Twitterization of the News Feed, and the Analog Research Lab, a silk-screen operation which churned out those propaganda posters you see all over Facebook HQ.The book opens with Zuckerberg getting peeved in Nigeria when he discovers that the teens there don’t like Facebook as much as they like Instagram. (“What I would do if I wasn’t afraid is try to be the Facebook CEO and grow this business and say I’m a feminist.”) It’s consistent with almost all of her appearances in this book, where it seems like she is trying to avoid discussing whatever the topic at hand is in any real detail. (Google, while no less ambitious, was more grad school and science; Apple revered design.) Sandberg professionalized Facebook’s culture to some degree, but “the engineering mindset” and the “move fast” ethic — both explicitly touted by Mark — are still in effect. (AFP)⭐ Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Amazon lost more than $238 billion in value yesterday, as part of a broader market dive due to concerns about the spread of the coronavirus.