Facebook Tries Again on a Smartphone
bits.blogs.nytimes.com
bits.blogs.nytimes.com
I find this to be an affront to engineers and designers. It trivializes the amount of time and effort it takes to make a well engineered product.
Can someone elucidate why it might be important for Facebook to have it's own hardware? Why wouldn't apps on an Android or iOS or Windows Phone be good enough (of course with seamless integration like Twitter on iOS)?
P.S. With Facebook's current alliance with MS, doesn't Windows Phone make for a good platform to build upon. Note, I believe that Windows Phone will eventually take off.
Doubly so, because RIM's previous management's product roadmaps and actions (i.e., let's just buy QNX and TAT - we'll have something workable in no time!) were an affront to engineers and designers.
Also, it's a revenue stream. Facebook has a huge userbase but very few of their users actually pay them money. If they started selling hardware they could collect money from those users.
The idea that they're going to make their own OS and apps that are as polished or feature complete as their competition which is already possibly too statured is hilarious at best, sadly delusional at worst.
The real key, however, is the OS layer; they cannot really use Android, for obvious reasons, but I can't see any other mobile OS lying around, after the Great Purge of 2011 that killed Maemo/Meego, WebOS and pretty much everything else except iOS and Android. Betting on Windows Phone is extremely risky at the moment, and anyway Ballmer has his own priorities which may or may not align with Zuckerberg's.
Facebook should get into mobile hardware but not in such a short time. Im sure there is lower hanging fruit they should be aiming for that could help boost their revenue many times over and get them back in the good graces of their shareholders again (if they care about that :) ).
If they get into the mobile space by having their own device it seems like such a high barrier simply to add to their advertising revenue, it almost seems like they are leaving their web and mobile apps business cause in terms of revenue, what they have (in web and mobile apps) is all they can figure out and NOW they need a new platform to expand on ?!
Also, does RIM have particularly nice phones, hardware-wise, these days? Another reason I'd rather see them work with MS is that then anything particularly cool they bring to the software side could run on gorgeous Nokia hardware.
Like MySpace. Although MySpace never really had the mass, and is I suppose currently a white dwarf.
A massive security breach that puts everyone's personal information in the hands of lulzsec? That would be one hell of a scary spectacle...
I wonder if facebook could release it's own phone (linked to a FB account) and then restrict access of other smartphones to it's platforms and APIs (so that they become a crippled shell) while adding features that were exclusive to the FB phone.
Could dominate the entire smartphone game in one move.
They have already opened up enough APIs to allow for decent third party clients - if they make a policy to withdraw it, developers and users who have already bought a smartphone will not only panic but probably revolt as well.
Alienating existing userbase, when alternative platforms like Quora are just starting to get very popular would be suicidal. In fact my university is already seeing a mass migration from Facebook to Quora and reddit (and HN).
They would have to stop this from becoming just another "me too" phone , the only way I can think of doing that would be to somehow leverage their existing userbase and make sure that using FB from their phone is a much better experience. The only way I can think of them doing that is by restricted what other phones can actually do.
While I don't think they'll try to cripple other phones, they'll most likely make new features a priority for the facebook phone.
One of the challenges of creating a startup is building a business which not only provides solutions/products to customers, but also works with other businesses. Attempting to cripple competitors platforms will quickly and easily be interpreted as monopolistic behavior(2).
1) Originally Mach 3 to Xnu and GNU and *BSD system utilities with only a proprietary layer on top, Quartz.
Whether they develop their own system from scratch or not is largely irrelevant , especially if they use BSD licensed code.
You would really be relying on a court finding them to be a monopoly which might be difficult to do if it was implemented in a subtle enough way.
Nothing subtle about that.
Count me in as someone who would never use a Facebook phone. Might as well use a CIA phone. I'm all for watching the competition though.
Reminds me of all the talk previously about Google making a free phone service. Google and Facebook both make all their money from ads. So they might be able to do something like that, which doesn't make sense to hardware companies.
Except that, by its own admission, Facebook hasn't figured out how to make advertising money on mobile devices.
It's just crazy talk. Facebook has a headcount of 3,500, and people seriously think they can feasible buy out RIM, with 17,500 people, and then just magically integrate them and poof produce a great phone? It's madness.
If you take the article at face value, Facebook have already tried developing their own hardware and had it implode due to a lack of experience. So for the author to seriously suggest the solution should be to acquire HTC or RIM when Facebook have equally little experience doing large mergers and acquisitions makes no sense to me.
RIM/QNX make great hardware and (now) software. No one would disagree that they need help on the user experience side of things. They've made great strides in this area too, but that's where Facebook can help. RIM can stick to what it's good at.
That said, I really hope that doesn't happen.