Facebook的第二次機會
????早在2010年,馬克?扎克伯格做出了一個非常糟糕的決定。他并沒有針對iPhone、安卓(Android)、黑莓(BlackBerry)、諾基亞(Nokia)設備,甚至微軟(Microsoft)手機單獨開發應用,而是要求工程師們設計了一款能夠在任何智能手機上運行的Facebook應用。實際上,他當時篤信,隨著不同操作系統之間為控制移動設備而展開激烈競爭,獨立應用會逐漸消失,很快我們就會通過手機瀏覽網頁,就像我們在個人電腦上做的那樣。 ????事實證明,扎克伯格錯了。谷歌(Google)的安卓系統與蘋果(Apple)的iOS很快就成為占據主導地位的移動操作系統。而按照扎克伯格以網絡為核心的理念設計出來的Facebook應用在這兩個平臺上的表現都不盡如人意。Facebook應用問題多多,運行緩慢,而且經常崩潰。2011年,Facebook曾經推出了一個更新,第一個月內就在蘋果應用商店得到了19,000個一星評價。三月底,扎克伯格在加州門羅帕克市的Facebook總部接收筆者采訪時表示:“它應該是我們犯過的最大錯誤?!?/p> ????成立六年以來,Facebook一直是社交網絡時代的領頭羊,然而它卻錯過了下一次巨大的技術變革。全球消費者都開始放棄臺式機,轉而選擇移動設備,他們每天沉浸在令人眼花繚亂的應用當中。這些應用都是針對小型觸摸屏和移動人群而專門設計的。【你見過有人在臺式機上玩《憤怒的小鳥》(Angry Birds)嗎?】而與此同時,Facebook卻只有一名專門針對iPhone的工程師;Facebook移動團隊的大部分工作都是針對移動網絡瀏覽器進行設計。 ????硅谷成功的公司并不少見,但是鮮為人知的是,更多的公司因為未能抓住下一波科技潮流而最終滅亡。扎克伯格并不想重蹈它們的覆轍。但要想解決公司的移動問題,這位在職業早期便取得巨大成功的天才青年將不得不承認失誤,然后對這家年輕的公司進行結構與文化方面的改革——而這種改革和他與生俱來的天性是相互矛盾的。移動開發者不應該一味追求更快的發展速度(這幾乎已經成為Facebook的一種信仰),相反,必要的時候必須暫停發布新版本。他們應該停止加大對移動網絡的投資,而是應該著手開發應用。Facebook應該放棄通過一款殺手級產品吸引盡可能廣泛的用戶群體的嘗試,而是應該選擇其中的某一種操作系統,證明自己在移動領域的能力。他說:“我認為,不論對公司正規開發過程進行多大幅度的重組都不為過。”(財富中文網) 閱讀英文全文請點擊此處>>> ????譯者:劉進龍/汪皓 |
????Back in 2010 Mark Zuckerberg made a very bad decision. Instead of building separate apps for iPhones, Androids, BlackBerrys, Nokia devices, and, yes, even Microsoft phones, he put his engineers to work designing a version of Facebook that could operate on any smartphone. In effect, he was betting that as different operating systems jostled for control of mobile devices, standalone apps would go away and soon we would surf websites on our phones, just as we do on PCs. ????Zuckerberg was wrong. Google's Android and Apple's iOS quickly became the dominant mobile operating systems, and Facebook's applications, which were built with its CEO's web-centric worldview in mind, didn't work well on either platform. They were buggy and slow, crashing often. A 2011 update garnered 19,000 one-star reviews in the Apple App Store within the first month. "It's probably one of the biggest mistakes we've ever made," Zuckerberg tells me during an interview at Facebook's Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters in late March. ????Just six years after it had been founded, Facebook (FB) -- the company that had ushered in the social-networking era -- was missing the next big shift in technology. Around the world consumers were abandoning laptops for mobile devices, busying themselves with a dizzying array of downloaded apps designed specifically for small touchscreens and people on the go. (Have you ever seen anyone play Angry Birds on a desktop?) Facebook, meanwhile, had only one engineer dedicated to the iPhone; most of its mobile team was coding for mobile web browsers. ????Hidden among all the Silicon Valley success stories there are hundreds more companies that fail to catch the next wave and die. Zuckerberg was determined not to be among them. But to address his mobile problem, the wunderkind who had tasted enormous success so early in his career had to come to terms with failure, and he had to make sweeping structural and cultural changes at the young company -- moves that often went against his instincts. Instead of going faster (virtually a religion at Facebook), mobile developers had to take a pause on new releases. Instead of doubling down on the mobile web, they had to embrace apps. And instead of trying to reach the broadest possible audience with a killer product, Facebook ultimately would have to pick one operating system to show off what it could really do in mobile. "I can't overstate how much we had to retool the whole company's development processes," he says. |