That would have been Facebook buying LinkedIn or GitHub.
The fact that they ceded both to Microsoft boggles the mind.
Facebook looks a lot like Microsoft of the 90s, obsessing over stagnant or slow growing business lines to the exclusion of new opportunities.
Whereas Amazon, Google, and Apple (to some degree) seem to realize it's expand or become irrelevant.
You can build a world-scale business on one great idea, but every idea isn't great. And a lot of successful companies forget they got a lucky roll on their first idea (by definition). Shotgunning and pruning >> all-in.
I think Microsoft of 2019 looks a lot more like Amazon of 2006?
Specifically, recognizing that for large, mature businesses, growth has to be driven by new product types that customers are demanding.
And that at that scale nothing starts off "big", but by observing metrics, demand, and properly incubating and then funding launches of internal projects, small popular services can indeed become huge revenue drivers.
Just spitballing, but as Facebook use declines I'd imagine their huge data center resources will become increasingly less utilised. They clearly have some incredible data center engineers (see https://www.opencompute.org/). FB could have made for an interesting AWS competitor. It would've certainly hedged their bets because right now unless Instagram/WhatsApp are utilizing capacity which FB's stalled growth is ceding I see them outsourcing data center operations to another vendor eventually.
There's so much potential in FB or was till very recently (Open Compute and React to name two very impressive projects) - I imagine employee retention can only have become harder as the privacy scandals have hit and the share price gains have slowed.
Facebook, as mentioned in parent comments, has essentially tapped out casual social networking as a growth driver.
But casual (e.g. your mom and uncle) is the key there. There are many other kinds of social networking: not as large, but large enough to be worth even Facebook's time.
Developer networking is absolutely a large and valuable demographic. Facebook has demonstrated competency is compiling and making social graphs useful.
Ergo, buying GitHub would allow Facebook to move into a new market while offering new features that GitHub couldn't build on their own.
(Note: I'm charting out an "If Facebook decided not to be stupid and just slap ads on GitHub" business case here)
The fact that they ceded both to Microsoft boggles the mind.
Facebook looks a lot like Microsoft of the 90s, obsessing over stagnant or slow growing business lines to the exclusion of new opportunities.
Whereas Amazon, Google, and Apple (to some degree) seem to realize it's expand or become irrelevant.
You can build a world-scale business on one great idea, but every idea isn't great. And a lot of successful companies forget they got a lucky roll on their first idea (by definition). Shotgunning and pruning >> all-in.