entirely by users and with revenue generated from advertising. In some respects,
Facebook is a classic, ad-supported business, but the company’s operations have gone
far beyond traditional, firm-centric organization design. To support the website and
manage traffic, Facebook depends on the Internet and World Wide Web protocols (free
rules); the Internet’s physical infrastructure, both wired and wireless (regulated
modules); personal computers and smartphones (low-cost modules); and four major
open-source codebases (free modules). By recombining those and other components
from the distributed innovation of a business ecosystem, Facebook was able to capitalize
on lucrative opportunities in the emerging field of social networking