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Comment by amartya916 | Hacker News Reader

"It could easily scoop up an infirm company like Research in Motion, which is valued at less than $6 billion, and drop a beautifully designed Facebook operating system on top of RIM’s phones."

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.

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>> 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.

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.

It's about control. On my smartphone, its easy to start using google plus instead of Facebook. If I had bought a Facebook phone, they could lock it in to Facebook services so that i use Facebook as my primary social network for at least the life of my phone.

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.

Also it's about the control that Facebook, like Apple, might be able to deliver better UX if they could design for and thoroughly test on very specific combinations of hardware, instead of trying to function across so many different chips and screen sizes.

But Facebook, unlike Apple, has no practical choice about operating across those many different chips and screen sizes. Social networks are driven by exceptionally strong network effects. If Facebook doesn't reasonably operate across those chips and screen sizes, they run a serious risk of losing out to a competitor that does, especially since there's a significant one waiting in the wings.

So far, Facebook has been unable to deliver a working iPad app...

Facebook needs to fire their entire mobile app development staff. The mobile app does everything the desktop app does minus Push Notifications and yet takes easily 10-20 times as long to load. It's pathetic. There is no good tablet app, etc, the list goes on and on.

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.

Their current mobile offer is... underwhelming. This is mostly due to them not being able to integrate deeply with any platform, because they don't control anything else in the stack (browser -> OS -> hardware). They seem to be looking for ways to fix this by acquiring other layers, starting from the browser -- they're in talks with Opera. This rumour about them building hardware goes in the same direction.

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.

Why couldn't they fork Android in exactly the same way Amazon has done with the Kindle Fire?

I think that would entail them building their own hardware...

Seems like an opportunity to do a deal with Amazon.

i somewhat feel this is facebook trying to justify the massive IPO money and hence expanding into other areas that will make use of this money. Its the typical scenario were a company gets more funding then they probably need and in turn leads to that company addressing areas they might not have, given they had less money.

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 ?!

Facebook is already quite (but not perfectly—the big thing I've noticed is that the non-chat "messages" part of FB requires going into the FB app) well integrated into Windows Phone. And unless they have some truly groundbreaking interface ideas, I'd also rather see them continue to work more with MS on integrating into and pushing that platform, rather than introducing yet another one.

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.

Not being totally integrated leaves them vulnerable to being replaced. Windows Phone isn't an option, it has no room for customization at all.

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