By we I mean the general public, of course. Maybe I’m making too many assumptions, but if the movie about facebook is accurate at all, Zuckerberg did indeed steal the idea from those twin fellas. The monetary settlement seems to bolster this too. There is a current pistachio commercial that is what made me think about this.
I’ve seen multiple examples of the public turning on someone for less. So why are we seemingly ok with this guy? Why have we not boycotted facebook? Why do we turn out in droves to hear this guy talk?
Is it cause he’s rich? Is it because this kind of theft is not thought of as theft by people? I really don’t get it.
I hope I got the right forum for this question. I’m just curious about why he has not gotten more backlash.
Possibly no one cares too much? I don’t think you can take anything from a movie, and a settlement may have been the most convenient way out without spending more in a Court.
I have no idea whether it is his idea or not, but I think he has paid his dues.
I don’t know about turning out to his speeches, but the main reason there’s no huge backlash is that people by and large like and use Facebook. So the ire is just at the same level as the ire for Steve Jobs in the recent past or Gates even further back.
Wait, I do know one reason people go to his speeches: He’s making a lot of money. Other than that, it doesn’t make sense, as he isn’t offering anything, like Gates or Jobs were.
It’s one thing to have some vague “idea” about what kind of website you want to make. It’s a completely different thing to actually know how to go about coding it and promoting it.
The movie was entirely one-sided, and didn’t attempt to be anything but. Remember that MySpace and friendster were already hugely popular, so the idea for Harvard connection was barely an idea. The success of Facebook was in the details, and its hard to argue that the details weren’t wholly owned by Zuckerberg. Harvard Connection went on to become ConnectU, so the Twins’ idea was eventually realized and proved to be a massive flop. I think its fair to say that he owed them a little something, but he paid them way more than a little and they kept whining.
Facebook’s privacy practices are reason enough to hate them without inventing notions of IP theft.
This. Getting from “idea” to “product” is a lot of work, and there’s no guarantee that it will come out right, be marketed effectively, hit the market at the right time, etc. etc. Most people not in the business have no idea how much work it really is to put together a piece of software; I work all the time with clients who have great ideas and money, but who get completely overwhelmed during the actual building process when they realize just how many details there are to think through.
For example, think of a simple process that a lot of web sites do: they track customer names and addresses. You’d think that would be straight-forward and easy, but even that requires a fair bit of design:
Are you tracking customer first/middle/last name? What about suffixes and titles?
Do you want to track customers from several different countries? What kinds of info do you have to track for the various countries (ie, postal codes, provinces, etc). Do you put a list of provinces in a drop-down like a list of states, or do you let people type it in?
What format do you want to store the telephone numbers in? What about telephone numbers from out of the country?
Are you storing sensitive information, like social security numbers or credit card numbers? If so, we’ll have to build in some extra security.
Will you ever delete this information? Or does it need to be archived for a period of time?
And I could go on and on. And that’s a simple example, where if you ask the right questions, everything will get figured out and it will work. When you’re building something new that doesn’t have a lot of established examples to use as a base (like Facebook was at first), you don’t even know the right questions to ask or what answers you need.
So overall, I think the twins vastly overestimated just how much their idea was worth. Sure, the had a good idea. But Zuckerberg’s the one who made it a product.
I agree. Much of the success of Facebook is due to decisions made by Zuckerberg. Would the Winklevoss twins have made the same decisions? Who knows? The $200 million or so probably fairly values the company at the time that their involvement ended.
We are OK because he is rich. If he did not get rich, we would have treated him differently. But in America it matter less how you made it, but that you did.
It’s very difficult to think of the Winklevoss twins as victims. At some point in the movie the Zuckerberg character says something like “They’re upset because this is is the first time in their lives that something didn’t go their way” - and that rings true. They had an extremely wealthy background, they’re huge jocks, and there’s two of them. If they’re anything like the way they were depicted in the film - and I believe they are - then I’m all for them getting ripped off.
Early in the film, he logs into the various “facebooks” of each house at Harvard, so the idea being fought over was to take this thing that already existed and make it bigger.
I’ve railed against this here before, but the movie isn’t accurate in any way, shape or form. The book it was based on (The Accidental Billionaires) paints Zuckerberg’s connection to the twins in a very loose light and the only idea the twins seemed to have is “we want to make a social site, but limit it to Harvard students.” The parallels to MySpace and Friendster are really important here as that proves this idea was already out there (and public profiles used on other community-based sites prove the idea was around in baby form when Zuckerberg still thought girls were icky).
Secondly, The Accidental Billionaires was written thanks to interviews with the twins and Eduardo Saverin. Neither party ever has a poor word to say about Zuckerberg in the book and all three acknowledge that he took Facebook from an idea to a product. Which is the most important step in software development. Otherwise, I invented the eReader when I was 8. Where’s my check Amazon?
Because people just don’t have any reason to care. It doesn’t matter to me who allegedly stole what from whom when they started Facebook.
I mean, I don’t really give a crap what the political machinations were when Coca-Cola started up business. I just like drinking Coke.
Because as has been pointed out the details are not really all that clear. Furthermore, the issue of what was “Stolen” is nebulous and hard to define in this case.
Because nobody was impoverished; everyone walked away with a lot of money, and
The two people who were allegedly the most scammed, the Winklevoss twins, are, according to all the available evidence, two of the most despicable and unlikeable people you will ever meet. They’re a couple of spoiled rich boys who treat people like dirt and live with a sense of superiority and entitlement, the kind of assholes who were born on third base and think they hit a triple. Between them and Mark Zuckerberg it’s hard to find anyone to root for.
The interesting thing is that for all Facebook has done to change the way people interact, no one knows jack shit about “the real” Mark Zuckerberg. The chat logs cited above are pretty damning evidence of his asshole-ness. But they were also written when he was 19. Who among us wasn’t a pompous asshole when we were 19?
Two, a lot of the really damaging stuff in The Social Network (like his obsession with Rooney Mara’s character), never actually happened. Her character is complete fiction and, by all accounts, Zuckerberg has been in a long-term relationship with the same girl since before Facebook was a gleam in a Winklevi eye.
From everything I’ve heard and read, the Winklevoss twins are not very likable, but that quote makes Larry Summers look like the asshole in the room. The situation to which he is referring is the scene shown in the movie in which the Winklevoss twins met with Summers in his office at Harvard, regarding their dispute with Zuckerberg. So two undergraduate students who had a meeting scheduled with the university president chose to wear business suits, and he’s calling them assholes for doing so? It sounds like they did so out of respect for the office.
And BTW, on Tuesday of last week, the guest on The Daily Show was the author Ron Suskind, and in the course of the interview, even Jon Stewart called Larry Summers an asshole.
Wait till you see the 1999 TV movie Pirates of Silicon Valley. It shows both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs as being utter jerks. Gates and Jobs come across as being a lot like Zuckerberg. They all made lots of money from the computer business despite being no smarter, no more original, and no harder workers than a lot of people that they took advantage of. This is how business works. A lot of intelligent people are there at the beginnings of any new industry. A few people who are slicker and more willing to use the hard work of others (and who usually come from a richer background than them, so they aren’t as deluded as others about wealth coming strictly from hard work) get themselves into a position where they can make most of the money from the business. If necessary, they pay off anyone who claims part of that money with some small percentage of it.