Is Facebook’s Success Largely a Product of Luck?

The New York Times:

Given that Facebook had virtually no mobile presence in 2012, [its mobile-first] transition is a huge turn that now puts the company at the forefront of the industry’s shift to serving people on the move.

The company deserves much of the credit for making that switch, said Nate Elliott, an industry analyst at Forrester Research. It revamped its once-clunky mobile apps and introduced better targeting.

But he said the company’s principal ad format—messages inserted among the stream of status updates and photos that users share with one another—became mobile largely because that was how users chose to reach their news feeds.

“Their users changed their behavior,” he said. “That was pretty much a stroke of luck.”