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Why Facebook badly needs Steve Jobs

raysun.blogspot.com

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Re: Why Facebook badly needs Steve Jobs

#11

Post by wvenable »

seldo wrote: post #7

An 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 alrea…

The low-risk strategy is exactly what Apple does; they did a beautiful elegant implementation of what everybody else had already done. The original iPhone, outside of being a beautiful implementation of a smartphone, had very few features compared to the existing competition. Since then, they've been making fairly low-risk updates to their platform and they're hardly on the route to irrelevance.

The problem here is that they're creating a wildly complex solution to a non-problem. It's not a question about being boring -- it's already boring because only software engineers care about unifying people's inboxes.

Re: Why Facebook badly needs Steve Jobs

#14

Post by ray_sun »

in response to bretthellman: Zuckerberg is sharp, and he filled a user need with the status update / news feed. But now he's hired a bunch of superhackers, and they are tending to solve superhacker problems. The problem is that superhacker problems are not the same as real user problems. This is the difference between Apple & most other tech companies.

Re: Why Facebook badly needs Steve Jobs

#15

Post by Hari_Seldon »

wvenable wrote: post #11
seldo wrote: post #7

An 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 alrea…

The low-risk strategy is exactly what Apple does; they did a beautiful elegant implementation of what everybody else had already done. The original iPhone, outside of being a beautiful implementation of a smartphone, had very few features compared to the existing competition. Since then, they've been making fairly low-risk updates to their platform and they're hardly on the route to irrelevance. The problem here is t…

I disagree that Apple have a low-risk strategy, remember the iPod mini? this thing was wildly successful and yet Apple killed it and replaced it with the nano. I can't think of another company that would take that kind of risk.

And although it may not seem so today - launching a glass-fronted phone with a single button, was seen by many to be completely nuts.

Re: Why Facebook badly needs Steve Jobs

#16

Post by scorpion032 »

"Joel Seligstein, a Facebook engineer, is relieved he no longer needs to keep track of which friends like texts vs. email vs. chat."

Joel seems to wrongly assume that the preference is defined by the person alone. Whereas more often than not, the medium is defined by the nature of the message and the sender _is_ the best judge. - It is an opaque abstraction to not let me choose the medium to deliver in.

Re: Why Facebook badly needs Steve Jobs

#17

Post by oceanician »

No one needs Steve Jobs? Just a personal sense of focus and increasing quality, and stepping back from problems to gain some sort of vision once in awhile. You can't hear people talking if you're head is located at the pit face next to the drill!

Re: Why Facebook badly needs Steve Jobs

#19

Post by liuliu »

wvenable wrote: post #11
seldo wrote: post #7

An 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 alrea…

The low-risk strategy is exactly what Apple does; they did a beautiful elegant implementation of what everybody else had already done. The original iPhone, outside of being a beautiful implementation of a smartphone, had very few features compared to the existing competition. Since then, they've been making fairly low-risk updates to their platform and they're hardly on the route to irrelevance. The problem here is t…

The original iPhone did have a niche, more than just did a beautiful elegant implementation. The touchscreen prior to iPhone sucks, and no body used the multi-touch screen yet. With your analogy, iPhone created a rather complex solution (in implementation perspective) to a non-problem (they can use keyboard, touchscreen is a non-problem!). It feels to me to be ignorant to say what original iPhone have done is what everybody else had already done.

Re: Why Facebook badly needs Steve Jobs

#20

Post by ray_sun »

scorpion032 wrote: post #16

"Joel Seligstein, a Facebook engineer, is relieved he no longer needs to keep track of which friends like texts vs. email vs. chat." Joel seems to wrongly assume that the preference is defined by the person alone. Whereas more often than not, the medium is defined by the nature of the message and the sender _is_ the best judge. - It is an opaque abstraction to not let me choose the medium to deliver in.

Yes, that is my point. Abstracting away SMS vs. email is an interesting intellectual exercise, but it doesn't solve any user problems. The sender is the best judge of what transport to use. It's unfortunate, but it's the way the world is today.
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