Slashdot Mirror
Zuckerberg: Betting On HTML5 Was Facebook's Biggest Mistake
An anonymous reader writes "Speaking yesterday at TechCrunch Disrupt, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged that the company's stock performance was disappointing. He also made an interesting remark about Facebook's development efforts over the past couple of years: 'The biggest mistake we made as a company was betting too much on HTML5 as opposed to native. It just wasn't ready.' According to Mashable, 'the benefits of cross-platform development weren't enough to outweigh the downsides of HTML5, which pulls in data much more slowly than native code, and is much less stable. ... Now, Zuckerberg says, Facebook is focused on continuing to improve the native mobile experience on iOS, as well as bringing a native app to Android.'"
Zuckerberg meant: The IPO Was Facebook's Biggest Mistake.
There, fixed that for him.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
I wish that guy would take a hike... As for his comment, well, let's see him come up with a markup language standard that appeases every vendor while supporting every aspect of media delivery for users. That's not an easy task. Say what you want about the consortium, but what they did in the amount of time they did it in is rather impressive... These things are done in baby steps--but their efforts delivered more than this. Just because HTML5 might have wrinkles to iron out doesn't mean that it's a failed endeavor. Rather, it means that the browsers, companies behind said browsers, and the users have created a massive cluster of epic proportions. The consortium is just trying to make everything more accessible while accommodating for everyone. Again, not an easy task at all.
Ooooh. What the article MEANS is "betting on HTML5 as a MOBILE strategy instead of writing native SMARTPHONE applications was a mistake." That's much less broad. Also, as HTML5 is still in its infancy and not yet a finished standard, I think it's kind of early to make this statement.
Zuckerberg isn't dumb. This judgement on the whole HTML 5 craze goes to show. Techwise HTML5/CSS3/Ajax is a huge step backwards compared to other approaches, like, for instance, Flash. Flash is proprietary and invites doing all kinds of non-sense (sic), but it *is* a far better x-platform VM.
Going HTML5 is not to be triffled with and will bog down your systems performance way further than other VM solutions such as Java or Flash/AS. Any web developer worth his salt could have told Zuckerberg that.
The "problem" (lets just call it that for now) here is that geeks, i.e. opinion leaders, are willing to make huge technological concessions if the technology is more open than the alternatives. Some devs would rather chop their right arm off than develop against (semi)prorietary systems like iOS or countless versions of Android. Hence we've got native looking apps, that are web UIs in disguise, slowpoking about at speeds we know from Windows 95 Applikations back in the day. I presume Zuckerberg got himself talked into this by his devleads, who are, just like any respectable geek, probably way more concerned with system openess and anti-lock-in development wise than with business critical performance and end-user experience issues. That's my guess anyway.
You can say and think what you want about Zuckerberg and Facebook - I dislike the whole direction thinks have taken with this FB thing just as much as the next geek - but his conclusion is spot on. He's a developer himself and it's to his credit that he recongnises where his company bet on the wrong technology. You have to give him credit for that.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
What you're saying is "I don't need it, so nobody needs it". I hope you know how stupid that sounds.
I'm Rocco. I'm the +5 Funny man.
Anything that causes pain for Zuckerberg is fine by me.
Yeah! Go HTML5!
Facebook is a webpage, not a 3D game that pushes the hardware. Is it possible he is blaming the technology for the failure of his coders? After all, we're talking about an app that when you viewed the comments on a photo you had to back out and come back several times in order for it to "refresh". Or sometimes clicking on a friend's name would take you to an entirely unrelated part of the app. And photos would take ages to load. Sometimes entering in a comment would work, sometimes it would say "you can't comment on something that doesn't exist" even though you could open up Facebook on a desktop computer and make a comment in the same place without a problem. I don't know of any other "webpage" app on the iPhone that performed that poorly, and granted I don't know what the Google+ app used but in comparison it blew the doors off of the Facebook app. Was it really the technology to blame?
"HTML5 is roughly equivalent to Java as far as a multi-platform programming language and development platform."
No, not in the slightest. Not even close
"The only successful approach I've ever encountered to using a virtual machine was employed by the Digitalk VM which cached successive VM invocations so that you ran at native 'raw iron" machine speeds after encountering the performance hit the first and only time an pseudo-instruction was executed in a method.".
When did you last read anything about the JVM? 1995?
"The lethal performance problems that WordPerfect encountered trying to implement their suite of office products in Java still apply."
No, no they don't. That was the best part of a decade before Hotspot even came along, which was basically a complete rewrite.
You could've typed your post about 15 years ago, and you might've had a point. Now however, your post makes absolutely no sense, and shows an understanding that only someone who had literally been living under a rock for 15 years would have. Java has changed a lot since 1997, and your criticism is nonsensical in the context of those changes.