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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
> 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.
Here's another question: How many people in the world, who are current or potential Facebook users, might like to have Facebook as their first and main interface to the world?
Facebook asked that question by making such an interface available. Guess what? In the world of rational beings (which might not include knee-jerk business reporters), it might take a while to answer that question.
Here's another question: Of the current or potential Facebook users who want Facebook as their main interface to the online world, how many will spend more time and money on Facebook as a result of having that interface? Gee, I don't know. Let's let Home out into the world, and find out. Snarky folk can declare it a disaster or failure after a month--I'm sure Facebook is happy to have it out there as one of several options, and learn from actual experience. Radical concept, no?
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).
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.
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.
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...