Facebook President and Napster co-founder Sean Parker explained why Myspace succumbed to Facebook in an interview with Jimmy Fallon at the
NExTWORK Conference in New York.
"where did MySpace go wrong?"
?The failure to execute product development,? Parker replies. ?They weren?t successful in treating and evolving the product enough, it was basically this junk heap of bad design that persisted for many many years. There was a period of time where if they had just copied Facebook rapidly, they would have been Facebook. They were giant, the network effects, the scale effects were enormous.?
Parker goes on to credit the ingenious move of targeting college kids for Facebook?s eventually market dominance, ?Facebook entered the market through college and the reason we went in through college was that college kids were generally not Myspace users. College kids were generally not Friendster users ??
Taking an almost Machiavellian tone, Parker also alludes to the latter social network?s displacement being deliberate, ?It was this completely open market and it was a real longshot. Nobody actually believed, outside of us three or four people in Palo Alto, that you could enter the market through this niche market and then gradually through this carefully calculated war against all the social networks become the one social network to rule them all.?
?Carefully calculated war against all social networks? is a very interesting word choice by Parker especially when coupled with the extremely self-aware statement that ?if they had just copied Facebook rapidly, they would have been Facebook,? a line which seems like it came straight out of The Social Network.
Well now is as good as a time as any to mark the end of that war; Myspace is selling for comparative peanuts while Facebook is valued at $70 billion. To the victor go the spoils, at least for the moment.
the video is available to watch here and is well worth watching:
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http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/28/sean-parker-on-why-myspace-lost-to-facebook/