On Thursday, Chris Cox, who had served as the chief product officer at the social networking behemoth Facebook and was also one of its earliest employees, announced that he has decided to exit the company. The departure of Chris Cox comes shortly after Facebook's billionaire Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg declared his plan for the future of the company. He said that he has altered his vision for the organization and is now planning to transform it into a messaging company built on the foundation of strong encryption.
Facebook's future vision
The 36-year-old engineer was also known for functioning as the right hand for Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg. He would have been handed the serious responsibility of making Mark's vision of creating the company's three subsidiaries Whatsapp, Facebook and Instagram into basically just one application a reality if he hadn't resigned from the company. Chris stated in a blog post that his departure from such an unbelievably great culture-oriented company comes with a ton of sadness. He dropped out of a graduate program at the prestigious Stanford University to work at Facebook in 2005 in the role of a software engineer and can also be given a great deal of credit for building the company's news feed feature from the ground up.
Chris said in a Facebook post while addressing his departure, that as Mark is moving towards an entirely new direction for product development of the company centered on building a secure encrypted messaging network, the company will be needing individuals and tech leaders who are equally excited as Mark to make this new vision a reality.
The leaving of Chris removes a significant layer from the social networking giant's management system. This allows Zuckerberg to hasten the process of creating his vision of fusing all the apps belonging to the organization into a single app. Facebook shares went down by 1.7 percent after the announcement of Chris departure went public.
Apart from Chris Cox, WhatsApp's vice president Chris Daniels is also leaving the company, adding yet another high-profile executive to the list of individuals who have exited from Facebook this year. And they were mostly from its product and communication department. This is the second major shakeup that the company has faced since being targeted by many of the world's government organizations, primarily for the circulation of fake news on its platform. The company was notified about a month ago regarding his decision to leave. Jasmine Enberg, an EMarketer analyst has clearly said that such changes or resignations are quite usual whenever a company is entirely restructuring.
Facebook's restructuring process
Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that from now on, WhatsApp will be operating under the leadership of Will Cathcart, the vice president of product development at Facebook and Fidji Simo, head of games and monetization will be the new head of the Facebook application. Both the new heads, Cathcart and Simo, are supposed to be working closely with each other with the aim of creating new video uploading tools as well as high-level video content for Facebook. Though the company has currently no plans of filling Cox's role in the company, Zuckerberg has said that the new heads of Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram will be reporting to him directly.
Facebook's strategy of combining its three apps was mainly headed by Chris Cox and Javier Olivan which presently has now been passed onto Javier Olivan, who will be the main lead for this project.
With Cox and Daniels' departure from the company, Zuckerberg still has a long army of engineering geniuses at his side which include the Vice President of Hardware Andrew Bosworth, Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer, and the Vice President of Engineering Jay Parikh.
