No FOMO For Facebook
Facebook’s communications and policy chief, Elliot Schrage, said in a memo posted Wednesday that he was responsible for hiring the group, and had done so to help protect the company’s image and conduct research about high-profile individuals who spoke critically about the social media platform. Mr. Schrage will be leaving the company, a move planned before the memo was released.
Facebook fired Definers last week, after a New York Times investigation published on Nov. 14.
“Did we ask them to do work on George Soros?” Mr. Schrage wrote in the memo, a draft of which had circulated online earlier in the week. “Yes.”
He added: “I’m sorry I let you all down. I regret my own failure here.”
The New York Times again painted the world’s dominant social network in an unflattering light. The reporting is a stark reminder of various ways Facebook has a rotten core. Facebook's executives initially staunchly denied devious acts and complained about numerous inaccuracies in the article. But the stink of the problem only grew stronger throughout the week, and on Thanksgiving Eve, Facebook admitted they hired Definers Public Affairs to perform opposition research and spread adversarial news.
On paper, the business is incredibly profitable and hasn’t fully monetized other properties such as Instagram and WhatsApp. Their combined and fully-realized impact on Facebook’s bottom-line is still years away. A Hacker News thread comparing Facebook to Yahoo summed up the business well:
Yahoo failed because they were out-innovated. They weren’t the only ones. Lots of highly successful search engines got their lunch eaten by Google. Yahoo also suffered from a lack of leadership and some very poorly conceived acquisitions.
I don’t see any of that with Facebook. In fact it’s the opposite- people are uneasy with how effectively they’ve acquired users and their data and monetized it.
Further, they’ve pretty much only made incredibly savvy acquisitions and managed their integration into the Facebook ecosystem masterfully. Instagram not only exists today but has quickly become arguably the most valuable property. What about Tumblr? Flickr?
Say what you will about the ethics of the company but Facebook has demonstrated they have vision and the ability to execute and adapt. Yahoo didn’t. Most companies don’t. They have their existing business and customers and exist as long as the winds don’t change.
Regardless, I suspect lots of people identify Facebook as number one on the list tone-deaf companies.
The most notable example is not the bad behavior of the executives or the departures of various founders from WhatsApp, Instagram, and Oculus. Facebook is hardly the only company with top-level turmoil (read: Google and Nest). Among the most egregious examples of ignorance is a product called the Facebook Portal.
Tech press generally believes the Portal is a solid product. It allows people to communicate with each other and reduces camera-angle-fatigue, or in other words, the nuisance of pointing your camera at your face while you're babbling away about contemporary issues or debating Kylie's lipstick colors. The device achieves this feature with a second camera that tracks people and adjusts the angle and zoom in real-time.
I'm not sure whether Facebook gathers camera-tracking data, and for the moment, let's give the company the benefit of the doubt. Whether they track or not doesn't matter anyway as Facebook's platform collects and generates a vast number of signals tied to their product (e.g., users). The marginal difference to you, the Facebook user, is nearly meaningless. The release of the portal is odd for two other reasons:
Facebook hasn't given us many reasons to believe they are more trustworthy with our data than they were before the Cambridge Analytica and subsequent scandals despite the lack of attention from most Facebook users. But, they released a product with tracking capabilities anyways. Releasing a product hindered by poor optics is troublesome.
More importantly, is there a market for this device? My belief is no, and my brief breakdown follows next.
Video Calling Devices
As best I can understand, the market for stationary devices is frothy. Numerous legacy and more modern competitors are fighting for a type of interaction that seems as antiquated as ever: stationary-device video calling between consumers. A sampling of the product universe is below.
Amazon makes the Echo Show, which enables device-to-device calls using the built-in screen and camera. An important feature is an ability to video call from the Show to another non-Show (i.e., phone) or vice versa.
Google makes the Home Hub with a video screen. It's not clear whether the device pairs with other external cameras, but let's assume it does for now.
Google also makes its own Android phones and allows OEMs to install Google services -- such as video-calling software Duo.
Of course, Apple makes a plethora of devices such as iPhones, iPads, and Mac computers. Most come with cameras and Apple's proprietary video-calling platform: Facetime
Let's not forget about stationary PC users with cameras on their desks or attached to their screens. There are plenty.
Most consumers in the U.S. possess smartphones. A smaller but not insignificant number own more than one device capable of video calling. However, consumers are generally gravitating toward services designed natively for mobile platforms such as those on Android phones and iPhones. I don't think there are enough reasons that justify releasing stationary products, putting aside basic Alexa-enabled products such as the Echo Dot.
For better or worse, there’s an easy counter-argument to make: Facebook’s business generates more value for its customers (advertisers) when it is at the center of as many interactions between users as well as their interactions with brands. Why not sweeten the deal by adding more data about when and how these interactions take place? It is this line of thinking that clarifies Facebook’s motivation to release the portal, no matter how oblivious Facebook may be.