Well, he has a point, but I wouldn't call that visionary; many people have suggested before the possibility of a future where an important part the connected population never used a PC before and rely exclusively on their smartphones. And understandably so, the only way companies like Facebook or Google can grow is by getting the "remaining" population online, and that in turn might be enabled with the advent of the cheap smartphone. Of course whether it will happen and what would be the impact if so are different questions.
Analogy time: would you call someone who has $1bn someone who "gets" hard work, perseverance and financial savvy because they won the lottery (editors note: the author is not comparing Facebook's success to winning The Powerball per se), based only on the notion that they have a surplus of money in the bank?
Let's move away from the lottery for a minute, but keep our handsomely wealthy hypothetical person in the picture. You meet Bob. Bob shows you a bank statement with $1bn on the balance line. Bob tells you his business is doing great and he's living his dream.
I will put down 1/7 of my next paycheck that the very first question you ask Bob is: "What's your business" or some variant thereof.
The point: Bob has a lot of money and you want to find out what he did that 'got' him the money, right? He networked, he made a product, he refined the product, he took his product to market-eliminating what worked, building upon, refining and reproducing what does. Those are the indicators you look at.
Simply having the users doesn't tell you a whole lot, or have we already forgotten the tale of MySpace (or Xanga, or Friendster)? I maintain it's how Facebook got and kept those users that matter to Facebook 'getting' social.
It's all mighty convenient that Facebook has the "vision" of having smartphones be about people, not apps, when Facebook's strength is people, not apps. I mean the so called "vision" is just an extension of their mission. Nothing really breakthrough from their point of view, although I could see how others from the outside would look at it like that. But for Facebook is just another extension of their mission, just like the auto-sharing feature. Facebook needs the web to rely on as much sharing as possible, and they now also need mobile to be about people - regardless of how good or bad it is for the user in the end (privacy concerns, etc).
