It bothers me that journalists take this view often with technology that can only be used by a small fraction of users. It also bothers me that companies feel it's necessary to do a big dog and pony show for a feature that's only available at launch to a minority of users. I feel for companies of all sizes. If you launch a product and for whatever reason it is not available immediately or to everyone, without fail it is lauded as a 'cool new idea' and reported almost in the same breath as a commercial disaster. A better strategy for almost all facebook products IMO would be a campaign that is much more targeted and limited in scope. especially when the product is similarly limited in scope. recent examples of Graph Search and Facebook Home come to mind.
The Facebook Home disaster
11–20 of 24 posts
Re: The Facebook Home disaster
#12What a garbage article. That guy should reconsider writing as a career.
Re: The Facebook Home disaster
#13"From $99 to 99 cents" sounds like a comically drastic fire sale only if you know nothing about the mobile industry in the US and the basics of how handset subsidies work. If the retail price of the phone is $500 and the carrier normally shifts $400 of that into your monthly bill over two years, selling the phone for $100 less is a 20% off sale.
I don't know whether the writer is intentionally being obtuse to write a hit piece or genuinely doesn't understand the market, but a 20% discount sounds like the First isn't quite hitting sales forecasts, which is a considerably less interesting headline.
Re: The Facebook Home disaster
#14This article is light on content and heavy on sensationalism, but it's also not wrong.
How many of the people in this thread jumping on the author are actually running Facebook Home?
Exactly.
Re: The Facebook Home disaster
#15This article is light on content and heavy on sensationalism, but it's also not wrong. How many of the people in this thread jumping on the author are actually running Facebook Home? Exactly.
How many people on Hacker News criticizing the U.S. drone war on terrorists are actually terrorists?
Re: The Facebook Home disaster
#16The thing is... and it's true for Windows Phones or Blackberry Phones... people think of iPhones as the standard. Android is a close runner up, but the others are all distant nobodies. To your average user, another interface is just annoying to learn how to use. Try giving your mother this phone, see what she says. At this point with the evolution of mobile devices, people are just used to what they have. Could they…
people think of iPhones as the standard
The tech crowd does, but Android outsells iPhone by a ton each year. There isn't such a central concept of "an Android", but that means plenty of people are used to differing UIs, from HTC's Sense or Samsung's Touchwiz. A Facebook OS layer could work just as well as they do.
Re: The Facebook Home disaster
#17"From $99 to 99 cents " sounds like a comically drastic fire sale only if you know nothing about the mobile industry in the US and the basics of how handset subsidies work. If the retail price of the phone is $500 and the carrier normally shifts $400 of that into your monthly bill over two years, selling the phone for $100 less is a 20% off sale. I don't know whether the writer is intentionally being obtuse to write…
As I understand it, the phone buyer is going to have to sign up for the same two year contract, regardless of what phone is chosen. So essentially this indicates that consumers are basically assigning zero value to Facebook Home as a feature (or perhaps negative value compared to other phones). Seems like a significant story.
Re: The Facebook Home disaster
#18This article is light on content and heavy on sensationalism, but it's also not wrong. How many of the people in this thread jumping on the author are actually running Facebook Home? Exactly.
How many people on Hacker News criticizing the U.S. drone war on terrorists are actually terrorists?
I remember when I went through a phase where every HN comment I posted was likely to get downvotes. Now I think a little bit first and try to come up with a better way of making my points (usually).
Re: The Facebook Home disaster
#19It's easy to see Home as a failure because Facebook is so huge, but it's an early product. They can't develop all the capabilities to ship a mobile phone without getting their hands dirty, and Windows and Blackberry are proving that a good mobile OS doesn't mean you have distribution.
They have "Facebook phones" in stores and they didn't have to: - invest in hardware - develop a new OS - fork Android - bootstrap retail distribution
This approach is eerily like Tesla, where even if your initial product doesn't match your end goal, you have a realistic path from reality to vision.
Remember, when the iPhone came out, it had 2G internet, no copy/paste, no apps, and it cost $600. It wasn't competitive with the phone marketplace (it was better, but sold few absolute units compared to the whole market). But it got better every year, and sales ~doubled every year, and now there's no comparison between an original iPhone and the iPhone 5.
I'm not a FB fan but congrats to them for shipping!
Re: The Facebook Home disaster
#20Not every day you see a Salon article on the HN front page.
No, it's pretty much every day. Twice on Saturdays.