spanish Xavier Olivandesignated to replace sheryl sandberg As the chief operating officer of Facebook’s parent company Meta, summarizing the change in a post, said, “Although I will have the same title, it will be a different role.” It’s not just about the fact that Ms. Sandberg and Mr. Olivan, both Facebook veterans, are involved in different aspects of the company’s operations, but also that they are two different personalities. after the founding Mark Zuckerberg, Ms. Sandberg has been the most visible face of the social networking company. In his post, Mr Zuckerberg called him “a superstar who defined the role of COO in his own unique way”.
His successor does not expect his role to have “the same public-facing aspect”. As COO, the low-profile Mr. Olivan will continue to work with the development, integrity, infrastructure and other teams. Mr. Olivan, 44, earned an engineering degree from Stanford with an MBA, and worked as a product manager at Siemens Mobile before joining Facebook. He has since been a behind the scenes person working on enhancing the products and projects.
in an interview with Venture Beat 12 years ago, Mr. Olivan, who was only three years into his job at Facebook at the time (when MySpace was still the big platform), talked about how the social media platform hopes to touch a billion users, At that time its number had doubled. As head of international development, Mr. Olivan’s mandate was to tap emerging markets such as India, Indonesia and Russia at the time. In other words, the target then was a market heavy on feature phones and low on bandwidth.
development challenge
In 2010, Facebook The social media leader was not what it is today – it was behind Mixi and Twitter in Japan, yet to catch up with Orkut in India and Brazil, and far behind Vkontakte in Russia. Cut Now: As per Meta’s 2022 first quarter resultsTextEditor3.64 billion users are using at least one of its products (Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram) every month.
By the time Facebook crossed the one billion mark, it faced yet another development challenge. This time, the topic was messenger app, which evolved into a separate product in 2011, notably after the company acquired a service called Beluga. When the pace was slowing down, it was Mr. Olivan who was tapped to speed up. That, as detailed by a report Wired.comIt was found that those using the standalone app sent more messages than those using Facebook’s messaging feature.
Mr. Olivan was also a key part of the organization’s effort for Internet.org, a free service promoted by Facebook and some partners to give a taste of the Internet to those who cannot afford it. It was criticized because Facebook became the Internet gatekeeper for those who signed up for it. in 2014 Time Magazine reports, Mr. Olivan explains how Facebook worked Networking companies like Ericsson To recreate conditions in areas like rural India. “Then we brought some phones, like very low-end Androids, and we invited people here from the valley – the eBay people, the Apple people. It’s like, hey, come and test your applications in these conditions! Anything works! Didn’t,” he was quoted as saying.
He has also been acknowledged as pushing Mr Zuckerberg to consider major acquisitions, including WhatsApp. It has been reported that, at one point, the company was concerned with the growing popularity of WhatsApp, and it was felt that it might eventually eclipse Facebook as a social networking alternative. It was also reported that some company leaders felt that it would get worse if a Facebook rival bought WhatsApp. Mr. Zuckerberg eventually closed that deal for $19 billion.
Mr. Olivan’s appointment comes at a time when the company is under pressure to keep its daily active users from falling. New challenges like privacy-related changes to Apple’s operating system are plaguing the meta. New platforms also present challenges. But then there’s also a long-term opportunity that it wants to create and grow. This is known as the metaverse. As Mr Zuckerberg said in a recent analyst call, referring to the Metaverse, “I think it is important to lay the foundation for the next era of social technology as well”.