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Why Facebook badly needs Steve Jobs

raysun.blogspot.com

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Re: Why Facebook badly needs Steve Jobs

#21

Post by JeremyBanks »

Hari_Seldon wrote: post #15
wvenable wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think that sounds rather more significant than it was. The Nano was very much a natural successor to the Mini, I don't think there was any doubt that it would be at least as successful.

Re: Why Facebook badly needs Steve Jobs

#23

Post by wvenable »

liuliu wrote: post #19
wvenable wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ev…

Touchscreen phones existed before the iPhone (my first such phone was from 2003) but, as you said, they all sucked. The other thing that sucked on all these phones was mobile browsing. Those were the very real problems that Apple solved.

The concept of a mobile web browser or a touch screen phone wasn't new -- everyone had already done that. Apple just did it better. Multi-touch is most unique feature of the original iPhone, but that was hardly a risky move.

Re: Why Facebook badly needs Steve Jobs

#24

Post by wvenable »

Hari_Seldon wrote: post #15
wvenable wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Learning that people like small iPods and making an even smaller iPod is not risky -- that's just common sense.

Touch-screen phones in almost the same configuration as the iPhone existed years before it's release. There was really nothing nuts about making improvements to that design. Even if there was no guarantee that the iPhone would be wildly successful, it was certainly not going to be a total failure.

Re: Why Facebook badly needs Steve Jobs

#25

Post by ray_sun »

paul wrote: post #4

This argument would be more compelling if Apple Mail weren't so awful.

re: 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

#26

Post by scorpion032 »

ray_sun wrote: post #20
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.

Yes. I should have added, I agree with the author. :)

Re: Why Facebook badly needs Steve Jobs

#27

Post by ThomPete »

bretthellman wrote: post #10

People 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?

Facebook keeps growing because of network effects, not because of all the great things they do IMHO.

Re: Why Facebook badly needs Steve Jobs

#29

Post by jackvalentine »

samratjp wrote: post #3

I 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. A…

> 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.

This is very true, I don't know if it is common knowledge inside the US but the rest of the world doesn't generally pay to recieve messages.

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