I genuinely think big tech co's top leadership have very sophisticated strategies/positioning that they simply cannot communicate or explicitly canonize due to their position as spokespeople for the company (and society writ large, news media, investors, customers, employees, vendors). Of course there are a lot of bozos and incompetent people flailing around and a lot of work ultimately gets wasted (which understandably bothers line employees a lot), but is inevitable and even necessary to eg hedge product strategy/comp and take risks on ideas and people.

It would not really be useful to have that conversation with employees because it's incredibly distracting (now product strategy is up for debate with way too many cooks in the kitchen), and very few employees have the exposure or skills to meaningfully contribute even if they think they do. I saw it firsthand at Google TGIFs.

Meta's strategy seems to be "personal agents" quite consistently. Remember they tried to buy Manus? And note that Muse Spark and the meta AI platform products clearly seem to prioritize web search, computer/browser use, and vision/language tasks over coding, which is something that had to bake for a long time. Also, this product launch itself is pretty interesting:

1. It's clearly a fast follow to the current FOTM hype startup Instinct with a much more comprehensive implementation and integration with their other agent products.

2. It's kind of like openclaw, which got a lot of non-developers very excited but was basically consistently unusable. Except this agent's compute runs remotely and presumably has slightly more sane development practices. IMO it's the first main openclaw-like product that has made it to the "just works" level of usability.

3. The focus on ecommerce is actually really really important, because Meta is trying to capture the intent/demand-driven purchasing flow that Google currently owns through search. Controlling the top of funnel is what enables google to make hundreds of billions of dollars per year on search ads. Meta is an advertising company and Google's search ads business is the most lucrative and centralized/well-defended advertising market in human history.

So it is actually a really big deal that Meta is trying to go after it (at least, the CUJ, it's possible that they'd monetize the agent-driven UX differently than search ads) because it's probably their best shot at disrupting that market and one of the few growth opportunities that would actually make a dent on their balance sheet. Obviously Meta is not going to lay out all that strategy stuff explicitly because for all intents and purposes it's a distraction and shifts the conversation in an unproductive direction (the strat behind the product, rather than the product itself). But it's pretty clear if you look for it.

Edit: Actually I thought about the advertising business more and I think in the short term this is partially about attribution/conversion. In 2022 the Apple tracking changes cost Meta $10B in lost conversion metrics; an agent-driven and proxied purchasing flow has built-in attribution and funnel measurement which is very valuable in its own right!