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Why Facebook badly needs Steve Jobs

raysun.blogspot.com

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Re: Why Facebook badly needs Steve Jobs

#61

Post by sudont »

legooolas wrote: post #40
apl wrote: post #35

SMS and email are different. SMS costs $ per message. Email does not. In the Facebook UI, if you add a SMS user to an email thread, he will receive numerous SMSes from email users who don't realize that they're racking up his bill. Wait a minute, is that true? Do you pay for receiving text messages in the US? That does seem a little crazy from a European perspective.

Many US mobile/cell plans include paying for receiving text messages. Clearly no-one in the US gets any text message spam, or they'd be _really_ angry about paying to receive that.

U.S. Cellular has no charge on inbound messages. That nicety aside, I'm switching away from them.

Re: Why Facebook badly needs Steve Jobs

#62

Post by padmanabhan01 »

Growing number of people seem to believe they can second guess Steve Jobs. Well, if it were so easy why aren't they just doing it themselves?

The author basically thinks he is smarter than the guys who founded facebook, and that they should do something he believes Steve Jobs would have done had he been with facebook?

Re: Why Facebook badly needs Steve Jobs

#63

Post by mikeryan »

ams6110 wrote: post #52
gommm wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, I've always liked Apple Mail, simple and to the point. I do use MailTags though ( http://www.indev.ca/MailTags.html )... Before that, I used to use Foxmail, then Thunderbird and then Evolution and none of them have been as good as Apple Mail

I haven't used Apple Mail in at least 5 years. Last time I tried, it was adequate for one email account (which is probably what 80-90% of users have). Though it supported more, things always seemed to go weird after a while if you tried to use that. Maybe it's better now? When I last used it, it pretty much still seemed to be the NeXT Mail.app ca 1990.

I've used it for sometime now and it handles multiple accounts just fine. I run 3 IMAP accounts on it (served from Google Apps) and it handles all of them fine.

Its my favorite email client by far because of its simplicity in function and UI. I get some extended functionality from indev's products, in particular Mail Act-On for quickly sorting mail and Mail Tags. I'd love to see it with slightly tighter calendar integration but otherwise I love it.

http://www.indev.ca/

Re: Why Facebook badly needs Steve Jobs

#64

Post by Dbug »

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…

Apple has been far from low risk. Their ditching the floppy, changing ports, switching processor families (more than once), all those iMac form-factors, moving to LCD while they were still quite costly, replacing the operating system... are all examples of them being willing to make major transitions to move forward. Some say dumping Flash is risky. There was risk getting into phones, a market that already had many very well established players, and starting with a product that cost MORE than what was out there. It's kinda funny how now people act like Apple had some early entry advantage. Apple took a risk offering a tablet that DID NOT have binary compatibility with their desktops.

After the 9/11 attacks, Apple was still working hard on development while others cut back. Many thought Apple was crazy to build fancy retail stores at very costly locations. Many said that targeting the high-end of the market was doomed to fail in a weak economy, but Apple kept expanding.

Maybe the choices Apple has made just don't seem so risky after seeing them being so wildly successful? The Gateway stores are long gone. I haven't seen details of the revenue per square foot at Microsoft stores.

Re: Why Facebook badly needs Steve Jobs

#65

Post by polynomial »

aces wrote: post #2

Respectfully 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 t…

> I think subjects in messages are no longer needed

Full stop. While the messaging landscape is definitely changing, the notion that the subject field is now obsolete seems extremely premature, to say the least.

Re: Why Facebook badly needs Steve Jobs

#66

Post by wvenable »

ams6110 wrote: post #54
wvenable wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't know, I think the new nano is too small. Apple did a good job with the UI-on-a-postage-stamp, but the thing is just physically too small to hold and use with one hand. If the body were a bit longer so you could hold it with your fingers and use your thumb to navigate, that would be better. IMHO.

Apple does make mistakes -- the buttonless shuffle was universally panned and now the new one has buttons again. If the new nano is too small, the next nano will be bigger. But, getting back to the original point, these product changes are purely evolutionary.

Re: Why Facebook badly needs Steve Jobs

#67

Post by bretthellman »

edanm wrote: post #34
ThomPete wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Maybe now (and that's a big maybe.) But there were at least several years of growth during which Facebook could've been "taken down". Besides, MySpace also had a huge network effect, and lost to Facebook.

well said

Re: Why Facebook badly needs Steve Jobs

#68

Post by Dbug »

wvenable wrote: post #23
liuliu wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It seems you've forgotten Visual Voicemail. Prior to the iPhone, every phone I ever saw required playing through messages sequentially instead of jumping to what I wanted to hear. That's a huge improvement in usability.

I guess entering a new market with a higher priced product and many established competitors doesn't count as risky if the product is really good? That's hardly a failing.

I guess when man first used fire to cook, you might argue that eating something warm wasn't a new concept. After all, some animals had eaten fresh kill or each others droppings before they cooled off.

The idea of Apple having retail stores wasn't a new concept. Risk there?

http://www.pcworld.com/article/115507/gateway_to_close_all_r...

Re: Why Facebook badly needs Steve Jobs

#69

Post by v21 »

bad_user wrote: post #32
ray_sun wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It's unfortunate, but it's the way the world is today. You're saying it as if it's a bad thing. Email is asynchronous. IM and SMS are disruptive. And on IM versus SMS, the sender of a SMS usually doesn't know if the recipient received the message, while the default behavior of IM is to notify your contacts list if you're online. These are different mediums people use for different kinds of communication / contacts.…

"the sender of a SMS usually doesn't know if the recipient received the message" - is this true? Delivery reports are pretty reliable with SMS. I know some people use them and some don't but I'd be curious to see the figures. Email, by contrast, hasn't got any reports that any decent human being would use. And IM is somewhat different again, in that it broadcasts availability, as opposed to receipt.

But yes - different methods of communication have different semantics, as Marshal McLuhan never said. But it is nice to group them, and to be able to seamlessly transfer between them. No doubt I'd love Google Chat's "This person is now offline. Click here to send a SMS" if they had any support for anywhere but the States. And I look forward to the Sense UI concept of crossing the streams coming to stock Android so I can use it myself.

Re: Why Facebook badly needs Steve Jobs

#70

Post by wvenable »

Dbug wrote: post #68
wvenable wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It seems you've forgotten Visual Voicemail. Prior to the iPhone, every phone I ever saw required playing through messages sequentially instead of jumping to what I wanted to hear. That's a huge improvement in usability. I guess entering a new market with a higher priced product and many established competitors doesn't count as risky if the product is really good? That's hardly a failing. I guess when man first used f…

Add visual voicemail to the mix -- another solved problem. The point is, Apple didn't develop a completely new device that nobody had ever seen before. It's all incremental improvements.

Apple was very careful entering the new phone market -- they heavily leveraged their existing iPod market and technology.

However, if you go back far enough Apple was one of the pioneers of touch screen portable computers with the Newton. Apple invented the term PDA. In terms of invention, that was something very different. They got a long of things wrong with that device that was corrected by competitors doing it much simpler.

I'm not saying that Apple doesn't take risks -- your other post was filled with good examples. It's just that their most successful products tend to be low-risk slow-burn affairs.

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