Zuckerberg on platforms and mobile →
I don’t subscribe to Techcrunch, too much emphasis on making gossip out of the minutiae of start-ups and venture capital. It’s the wrong blog if you’re interested in doing innovation yourself.
But there are some good insights in this interview with the founder of Facebook, a guy who understands platforms.
This blog is about openness - Facebook is NOT my favourite model out there so I’m posting for that reason.
Choice quotes:
“Our whole strategy is not to build any specific device or integration or anything like that. Because we’re not trying to compete with Apple or the Droid or any other hardware manufacturer for that matter.”
“Our strategy is very horizontal. We’re trying to build a social layer for everything. Basically we’re trying to make it so that every app everywhere can be social whether it’s on the web, or mobile, or other devices. So inherently our whole approach has to be a breadth-first approach rather than a depth-first one. And we work on all of these different things at the same time, so I’m sure whatever leak you got was probably accurate for whatever the person said. But it was probably just one part of what we are doing. Anyhow. I just wanted to give that context.”
“It seems like games are often an early indicator of a platform spreading to other verticals. You kind of saw that with the iPad or iPhone, probably more iPhone than iPad. Even early PCs. So our view is that over the next few years we should expect in all of these different industries for there to be a lot of disruption…by either the incumbent in this space or some new entrepreneur coming in and building a social version of whatever it is, whether it’s commerce or media. It could be a number of these different verticals, and Mobile will really just be an extension of that and will eventually get to a larger scale than the web.”
