Stan Chudnovsky doesn’t remember when CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other top Facebook executives began talking about treating the company’s portfolio of services more like, well, a portfolio.
With some of the most thorny aspects of the integration plan not yet realized—such as end-to-end encryption spanning all of Facebook’s messaging products—this week’s announcements are just a start. But they still represent a meaningful pivot. “The first decade of the company was really focused on the more public space—feed, stories, large groups,” says Chris Cox, the longtime Facebook product czar who left the company shortly after Zuckerberg published his post, then rejoined as chief product officer last June. With the features being revealed this week, “if we’re successful, we’re a few [percentage points] of the way there in the long run, because we have so much more building to do.”
How the 2.47 billion people who use Facebook’s portfolio of services will react to these changes—and more to come—is unknown even to Facebook.