

The Facebook Home disaster - anielsen
http://www.salon.com/2013/05/09/the_facebook_home_disaster/

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xpose2000
What a horrendous article. There is so much more to the story here.

Sure there are problems with it, but it's not quite a disaster... yet. It's
limited to a small group of phones and is only the initial release. The idea
is still solid and needs fine tuning.

Even Siegler can see its upside [http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/09/htc-first-
facebook-home-rev...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/09/htc-first-facebook-
home-review/)

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jasonkolb
I see what you're saying, but the fact that a $99 phone that's on the market
today--in fact the only one offering a heavily-marketed selling point--didn't
see enough demand to keep even that low price point.

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guimarin
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.

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mortenjorck
"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.

~~~
shock-value
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.

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smallegan
I tried out home on my Nexus 4 and the biggest issue I had was that I felt
weird having pictures of other people's kids scrolling by as the background on
my phone.

~~~
Zimahl
I think the marketing and reality just didn't seem to mesh (although it
usually never does). On the commercials and ads for Facebook Home everything
was a professional picture that looked great. Meanwhile, in reality, you get
today's toddler picture #4 from your co-worker and the plate of food your
friend's dad just got from the Szechuan place in Kahului.

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smokinjoe
This article gives _way_ too much weight to App Reviews. There are so many
1-star "haters gon' hate" ratings that probably should be [completely]
ignored.

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pchristensen
It'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!

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jonknee
> 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.

Except people liked Tesla cars from day 1. People don't seem to like Facebook
Home, even when it is free. It's not that they don't like Facbeook (the
regular app and the Messenger app are both very popular), it's that they
specifically don't like Facebook Home.

Update: Look at the reviews / install count and most importantly install
trend. Brutal.

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.facebook.h...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.facebook.home)

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onedev
What a garbage article. That guy should reconsider writing as a career.

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ebbv
This 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.

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danso
How many people on Hacker News criticizing the U.S. drone war on terrorists
are actually terrorists?

~~~
rhizome
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).

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ed209
Good info coming from <https://twitter.com/jguynn> on this press conference.

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bjhoops1
Not every day you see a Salon article on the HN front page.

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rhizome
No, it's pretty much every day. Twice on Saturdays.

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vladnyc
They should just separate the chat heads functionality.

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agscala
They did. Facebook Messenger app on android has chat heads without the
obnoxious homescreen

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dbg31415
The 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 be improved? Yes. Will they slowly? Yes. Are we all generally happy with
what we already have? Yes.

Facebook doesn't need an OS, it needs an App.

~~~
untog
_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.

