Why Facebook badly needs Steve Jobs
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Why Facebook badly needs Steve Jobs
1–10 of 73 posts
Re: Why Facebook badly needs Steve Jobs
#2Respectfully I disagree. I think facebook did the right thing by walking away from email in its current form. I think subjects in messages are no longer needed and just because there are mismatches between the different systems, doesnt mean an attempt should be made to unify them.
Just looking at this long term, one can see that facebook will likely try to push their interface as a standard communications interface to everyone that you want to reach (business or otherwise) and ultimately let users choose how they can be contacted. This has far reaching implications for a product trying to reach their customers. Maybe they will even break this out into a paid product for businesses to reach their customers, who knows. Theres alot that can be done with a system like this. And im surprised it took so long for someone to do it. I believe the market has been begging for something like this for a while.
Re: Why Facebook badly needs Steve Jobs
#3I don't see how this is any different receiving a tweet. You can choose to receive a text message (SMS) from a particular follower if you wish and that works great.
Uhh, if you base your SMS arguments from the U.S. outlook alone, you have clearly missed the point. The rest of the world has adapted to SMS much better than the U.S (well, the stupid charges here are to blame) and facebook clearly has a global outlook.
Abstracting the communication medium is actually solving a pain - because you, the receiver, have decided where you will be available. So, if you decide not to get a text, you can do that.
Having said all that, I find the whole thing creepy for now facebook will know not only who you are friends with, who your family is, and who your ex is, but also where you were last night; but, the zinger is facebook can now gauge your social signals in real time. That's a scary thought!
Re: Why Facebook badly needs Steve Jobs
#4This argument would be more compelling if Apple Mail weren't so awful.
Re: Why Facebook badly needs Steve Jobs
#5re: Apple Mail, it just depends on who you ask. If you prefer Gmail, then Facebook could have mimic'd Gmail UI instead. The point is that unifying the different transports doesn't solve a real user problem. It's not like people are having problems sending email or SMSes to each other today.
Re: Why Facebook badly needs Steve Jobs
#6re: Apple Mail, it just depends on who you ask. If you prefer Gmail, then Facebook could have mimic'd Gmail UI instead. The point is that unifying the different transports doesn't solve a real user problem. It's not like people are having problems sending email or SMSes to each other today.
It doesn't solve a user problem per se, but it may make it more convenient to have a 'one stop shop' for managing all of those things.
Supermarkets carrying things other than groceries (e.g. lightbulbs) didn't necessarily solve a user problem (i.e. people just went to the hardware store for light bulbs), but that decision was still a win for supermarkets.
Re: Why Facebook badly needs Steve Jobs
#7An interesting thesis. I can see both sides.
On the one hand, the idea of mixing all these messaging formats together sounds like it might be a confusing mess -- a Google Wave-level UI disaster. As he points out, these media have very different usage patterns that may not turn out to mesh that well.
On the other hand, saying "Facebook should just do a beautiful, elegant implementation of what everybody else has already done" is a very low-risk strategy. It doesn't innovate or solve any new problems. As a strategy for an industry-defining company, this is a route to irrelevance.
So is it better for Facebook to risk failure, or risk being boring? I have to say they've recovered well from failure in the past (Beacon, early mis-steps with news feeds), so my vote would be for the gutsy, risky, change-the-game strategy.
Re: Why Facebook badly needs Steve Jobs
#8Facebook has never been good at explaining their products. Remember "Once every 100 years media changes"? That doesn't mean their products don't work. I've never had the impression that Facebook was overflowing with incredible technical challenges (well, they have scaling problems, but the impact there isn't user-visible), their brilliance has always been on the product side.
That said, first and foremost, Facebook is a contact management app. Allowing people externally to send messages to a FB account is the next step in managing contacts. The UI enhancements are unimportant in comparison.
Re: Why Facebook badly needs Steve Jobs
#9If Facebook didn't solve 'real' problems then it wouldn't exist. Apple doesn't need Zuckerberg and Facebook doesn't need Jobs.
Both companies to a large degree embody their founders and because of that take wildly different courses of action.
Jobs at Facebook would be a disaster because the company has not been setup in a Jobs-friendly manner.
Both companies are also wildly successful because they avoid design by committee. Facebook is about sharing your information with everyone, it's not the place for privacy nuts. Apple is about delivering the best computing experience possible, it's not the place for tinkerers.
Jobs heading Facebook would be a platypus, it just doesn't make sense. Jobs has been on a roll for a while, maybe Messaging is Zuckerberg's Newton. Maybe it isn't. Calling it on the first day is something I would not do.
Re: Why Facebook badly needs Steve Jobs
#10People keep saying Zuckerberg/Facebook doesn't know what they're doing. Yet competitors keep falling and Facebook keeps growing. Maybe things aren't so obvious?