Apple has always been a hardware and software company with a very specific philosophy about user experience being everything. The digital music revolution gave Steve Jobs the opening to create the iPod that basically resurrected the company. That ply has been extended into phones and mobile computing.
Google is (from a revenue perspective) a search and advertising company. Their business model is predicated on how much you use the internet. So what Google is concerned with is everything between you and the internet. They've done Chrome, Android, etc to commoditize every link in that chain. Everything they do is about you using the internet easier, cheaper, in more places or more often.
Microsoft is about one thing and one thing only: selling Windows and Office licenses to enterprise and OEM customers. Nothing else matters. Look at the Kin: they bought Danger (with its once successful Sidekick) but then spent the better part of two years rewriting its OS as some Frankenstein version of Windows mobile. It arrived way too late and was dead before the first unit was sold (in large part due to the enormous data costs that Verizon saddled it with as they'd lost patience with the delay). Windows Phone 7 has the same goals.
Facebook is all about capturing and cultivating your relationships. They are a silo. They want to own that data because that data is their business and their entire value. Integration with everything else is about allowing other people to give Facebook more data.
What sense does a mobile platform make in that context? Absolutely none that I can see. How does it let them capture and control more data? Apple has had huge success with the iPhone because they have the industrial design, UI experience, supply chain management (which shouldn't be underestimated), iTunes (as much as many--including me--hate the application it is a near-monopoly in digital content) and retail channel.
For Facebook to succeed in the mobile space they would need most if not all of these things. It's a huge risk for relatively little gain and a small payoff. I can only thing that by leveraging a mobile platform of their own they could essentially lock out other platforms. The problem is that Facebook is usable with any Web browser.
I can't imagine Facebook doing any more than controlling the Facebook experience on all mobile platforms, an area they're still sadly lacking in (iPad app anyone?).
Basically this makes as much sense as Twitter making a mobile phone.
A phone could give FB plenty of new chances to capture data. What if, instead of sending a text message to someone, the FB phone sends a FB message or initiates a FB live chat session with them instead. If the FB phone became ubiquitious enough, they could challenge the space currently owned by texting (which would be really annoying for developers and the market, but great for FB). FB locks everyone in, AND they get to use all that social data too.
SMS is so ubiquitous because everyone with a (mobile) phone number can use it. IM always had this problem: some of your friends on MSN, some on AIM, etc.
I certainly agree there are opportunities for better FB integration into mobile devices but I don't think that translates to a viable business in making mobile phones (imho).
It's a bit like developing your own OS to compete with Windows because you want a better version of Outlook.
Facebook is all about capturing and cultivating your relationships. They are a silo. They want to own that data because that data is their business and their entire value. Integration with everything else is about allowing other people to give Facebook more data.
That's a very poor analogy--selling Macs, iPods, iPhones, iPads, Windows, Office, and AdWords are profitable and lucrative business models, while owning social data is only a potential basis for a future business model. How do you turn that social data into revenue? Sell phones to your users with a persistent connection to the social graph? That's a reasonable pivot. The social graph is a value-add to the phone, not an end in itself, not until they find some other way of monetizing it.
"...--selling Macs, iPods, iPhones, iPads, Windows, Office, and AdWords are profitable and lucrative business models, while owning social data is only a potential basis for a future business model."
Indeed,
Has there even been an entity having only "a potential basis for a future business model" that has grown so large it can out to whole other industries?
What sense does a mobile platform make in that context? Absolutely none that I can see. How does it let them capture and control more data?
It opens the possibility for more location-based services, and therefore more location data. I can imagine a mobile "Like" button that when pressed reports your current location a la Foursquare. A location-aware mobile platform would also create some interesting tie-ins with Facebook games/apps. For example, go to Home Depot and hit the "Like" button on your phone and get more fertilizer in FarmVille,
But Facebook can/does already do all that on existing mobile platforms. Developers are usually more than happy to use tools provided by Facebook in exchange for getting easy social features and access to FB's social graph. Widespread use in 3rd party apps on all mobile platforms will give Facebook a much larger reach, for much less effort, than trying to launch their own phone.
I didn't make it clear in my earlier post, but I was thinking a physical context-aware "Like" button on the phone, like the search button on Android phones.
You're right though, all of these features can be achieved on existing phones, but at a much higher price point. The article suggests that Facebook is targeting the $50 phone market to get the phones into as many hands as possible. That's a different market from the BlackBerry/Android/iPhone/Windows Phone market. It sounds like the KIN strategy.
Not what Kin turned out to be, but what Kin was originally intended to be: the phone that is to social networking what the Blackberry is to enterprise email.
As mentioned in the grandparent post, Microsoft's dragged-out WinMo refactoring of Kin cost them their original deal with Verizon, but there's no reason Facebook couldn't negotiate a similar or even better deal for cheap data plans for the Farmville crowd. What Facebook would have to do to stand a chance is to go head-to-head with prepaid MVNOs and outgun them on features and Facebook integration while staying roughly within their price range.
The problem with the Kin was that it ultimately became lost in delusions of competing with mainstream smartphones instead of concentrating on its core competencies. The Facebook phone would have to have no such illusions, competing instead with two-year-old Kyocera featurephones that kids buy for $39.95 contract-free, but delivering a much better Facebook experience for very little more.
FB has the most complete contact list for a lot of people. It would be pretty cool if my phonebook ran off this and auto updates itself when people change their numbers.
It would. I currently use my Gmail contacts for this. Android integration is excellent. iPhone integration is decent.
To borrow a term I heard from Mark Suster though, it's a FNAC (feature, not a company).
Think about the supply chain, inventory management, retail distribution, OS development and so on that would need to go into this. I simply don't believe the business case for an FB phone exists. What's more, I don't believe FB believes it is either.
The blackberry facebook app attempts this, but it's not actually that useful. Variations in spellings of names confuse it, the 'type' of number (work, mobile etc.) can cause duplicates and a lot of my friends no longer store any useful contact details on facebook due to privacy concerns.
Some of these might be implementation issues, but I still don't think that even working perfectly it would be a killer feature for a phone.
Android phones with HTC Sense UI do this. It's pretty cool, it pulls a bunch of data (E-Mail address, birthday, last status message) and integrates them into your contacts. They also pull the profile image from Facebook and it's displayed when you get called.
If they offered it as the premier messaging device, with all of your FB chat contacts auto loaded then it would surely appeal to the younger generations.
The only reason kids now days buy Blackberrys over iPhones is because Blackberry has BBM, a chat feature they want.
In terms of market share, this could attack the same user as the Sidekick did years ago. The ultimate messaging and social device.
You're line of thinking is I think quite similar to Google's. Google seems to have this mindset of having no dependence on any outside party.
I can understand this from Google as it fits into their internet commoditization goal.
Apple's SN is all about selling more music, which is a core business for them. But to compare Apple and Google, Apple doesn't have a search engine.
WRT Ping, it's two biggest problems are:
1. Lack of FB integration; and
2. It's tied to an app (iTunes).
Apple wants (1). Betas had Facebook Connect. Rumour has it Facebook had "onerous" terms for the integration so it got killed. Lack of it is a huge problem. But that should tell you something: Apple needs FB because FB owns the much-vaunted social graph.
Apple has always been a hardware and software company with a very specific philosophy about user experience being everything. The digital music revolution gave Steve Jobs the opening to create the iPod that basically resurrected the company. That ply has been extended into phones and mobile computing.
Google is (from a revenue perspective) a search and advertising company. Their business model is predicated on how much you use the internet. So what Google is concerned with is everything between you and the internet. They've done Chrome, Android, etc to commoditize every link in that chain. Everything they do is about you using the internet easier, cheaper, in more places or more often.
Microsoft is about one thing and one thing only: selling Windows and Office licenses to enterprise and OEM customers. Nothing else matters. Look at the Kin: they bought Danger (with its once successful Sidekick) but then spent the better part of two years rewriting its OS as some Frankenstein version of Windows mobile. It arrived way too late and was dead before the first unit was sold (in large part due to the enormous data costs that Verizon saddled it with as they'd lost patience with the delay). Windows Phone 7 has the same goals.
Facebook is all about capturing and cultivating your relationships. They are a silo. They want to own that data because that data is their business and their entire value. Integration with everything else is about allowing other people to give Facebook more data.
What sense does a mobile platform make in that context? Absolutely none that I can see. How does it let them capture and control more data? Apple has had huge success with the iPhone because they have the industrial design, UI experience, supply chain management (which shouldn't be underestimated), iTunes (as much as many--including me--hate the application it is a near-monopoly in digital content) and retail channel.
For Facebook to succeed in the mobile space they would need most if not all of these things. It's a huge risk for relatively little gain and a small payoff. I can only thing that by leveraging a mobile platform of their own they could essentially lock out other platforms. The problem is that Facebook is usable with any Web browser.
I can't imagine Facebook doing any more than controlling the Facebook experience on all mobile platforms, an area they're still sadly lacking in (iPad app anyone?).
Basically this makes as much sense as Twitter making a mobile phone.