I mean, it makes sense – if a competitor is gaining momentum and begins to absorb its share of the market, you need to fight back, or you run the risk of losing its position as Facebook supplanted.
It makes sense that Facebook would not be too happy about new applications, that are gaining momentum, but unlike many other companies, Facebook has the resources to do something about it. And now taking extra steps to seemingly suppress the growing competition, before it can have an impact.
We have already seen this with the NPE Facebook team – in July last year, Facebook launched the command “Experimenting with a new product” for the purpose of:
New types of experiences for people and trying different ideas, creating a small, focused application to see whether people are certain functions useful or attractive.
So far, the team NPE sought a variety of application development trends, copying similar functionality to the tools available in TikTok, Clubhouse, Pinterest, and others. And now Facebook added another string to his bow.
In addition to the replication of any new trends in applications using experiments NPE, the NPE team will now also seek to invest in the growing social applications and tools to catch them before they become competitors.
As further marks of Axios, the detection of these growth tools at an early stage is a key point, like Facebook and Google under scrutiny for anti-competitive behavior, which means that Facebook, most likely, will not be able to make any major investments in key competitors. But if Facebook will be able to quickly fix them before they will have the opportunity to develop, it could be for us another way to crush the competition, before she even gets a chance to fly.
Of course, Facebook has always tried to keep an eye on its competitors. Early last year, Facebook was forced to close its tracking tool Onavo, which it used to track trends in applications among consumers to see where the attention of people changes over time. Onavo, which Facebook acquired in 2013, has presented itself as a way to help limit the use of background data applications but also keeps track of which users opened applications, and provides this information to Facebook.
This allowed Facebook to follow the trends, but after the forced shutdown Facebook had to resort to new methods. This led to the development of the NPE team that has since released eight test applications within six months.
This new investment fund will provide more opportunities on this front – and, as already mentioned, Facebook is under scrutiny over its attempts to stop the competition if it can replicate the functions and quickly buy trending tools, it can be a means to stop the other Snapchat or TikTok gaining momentum, helping Facebook to keep its position in the top of the social heap.
But then, of course, he can simply copy the latest trends. After Facebook copied the “History” of Snapchat, it largely cleared the way for him to openly “borrowed” from any other application, and move forward – even though this type of activity also angered antitrust investigators who are concerned that the dominance of Facebook in the market too much.
This is an interesting element to monitor, and this latest announcement is clear that Facebook is moving forward, despite the growing clamor from officials and regulators.
We’ll wait and see which Facebook app is invested in and how they are transferred to the new Facebook tools.
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