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Facebook Has Reached Its Microsoft Bing Moment -- History Shows the Results Won't Be Pretty (cnbc.com)
As we noted recently, Facebook continues to duplicate every core feature that rival app Snapchat adds to its service. A new report, which cites multiple Facebook employees, sheds more light into how Facebook operates. The company, the report claims, created a "Teens Team" to figure out how to grab teenagers back from Snapchat, and has been up front about its tactics within the company: The internal mantra among some groups is "don't be too proud to copy." Matt Rosoff, an editor at CNBC says this whole tactics by Facebook is nothing new in the tech industry. From the article: Flash back to the early 2000s, when Microsoft was the undisputed king of the tech industry, with two unassailable monopolies -- operating systems and productivity apps for personal computers. It faced a lot of competitors, but the one that scared it the most was Google, which was in a completely different business. Google didn't start by creating alternatives to Windows and Office, although it did so later. Instead, it created a suite of online services -- first search, followed by email and maps -- that threatened the entire purpose of a personal computer. Why rely on Microsoft software running locally when you could get so much done with web apps? Microsoft's response? Trying to build the exact same service that made Google famous -- a search engine, first known as MSN Search, later rebranded to Bing. Eleven years later, Bing is a small minority player in search, with less than 10 percent market share on the desktop and less than 1 percent in mobile.
Best porn image search engine there is. Beat that, Google!
Good Artists Copy .. Great Artists Steal....
Stealing everyone's ideas has done apple well....
Zuckerberg blows goats
Ironic that Facebook isn't learning lessons from the masters of copying ideas.
I use MySpace, so I avoided all this drama.
history shows what happened in the past, not what will happen in the future.
So I still don't have a facebook account.... can I stop wondering do I or don't I?
Or maybe it's the other way around? Maybe all these little nothing apps want to be Facebook?
Seriously, why is there a;; this bitterness when Facebook adds a totally obvious feature that some Wannabe IPO thought they had exclusive rights to? Please...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Remember WhatsApp copying Blackberry Messenger? And all the iterations of IM app from ICQ, AIM, etc?
Teens have zero money. I would focus on the bigger market.
Eleven years later, Bing is a small minority player in search, with less than 10 percent market share on the desktop and less than 1 percent in mobile.
The summary appears to imply that Bing went from being a major player to a small player in the search engine market. Bing has always been a minority player. The reality is that the 10 percent market share represents growth, considering that Bing was a non-existent presence in the market 11 years ago, so the analogy is fatally flawed.
You can't just copy your competitor and expect their userbase to come back to you, and why would they when they already have what they want with Snapchat? You need new ideas, and I don't think Facebook is capable of that if all they can do to fight back is steal other peoples' ideas.
The company, the report claims, created a "Teens Team" to figure out how to grab teenagers back from Snapchat,
In related news, an "Ex's" group is created and meets to figure out how to lure back the person that left them. Reports indicate that candy and presents will play a predominant role.
Let's see, I'm a teen, my parents and relatives are all on Facebook and I'm going to actively use the platform why?
Look, no matter how much you talk it up, it's not a thing.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
That's the direction Facebook is going, that's abundantly clear from the evidence of them copying everything else. They're clearly out of new ideas and this behaviour marks the begin of Facebooks' decline into being Failbook. Before you know it they'll just be another footnote in the history of tech, along with Myspace, Livejournal, and AOL. Sure am glad I never fell for the Facebook meme.
Am I mistaken or didn't Facebook buy Snapchat? How can Snapchat be Facebook's rival app if Facebook owns Snapchat?
Microsoft is still king of the tech industry as the only company still producing its own operating system instead of ripping off open source Unix clones.
Facebook is not producing tech at all. Facebook is a tech consumer.
It seems every day there is another story on /. about Facebook copying Snapchat. No new information about it, really. Just more complaining.
But really Facebook's approach is the right one based on game theory. When you're in a race and you're behind (like Snapchat is in user base), it's in your best interests to innovate to try to make up the distance. When you're ahead, it's in your best interest to maintain the status quo, and do exactly what your rivals do so that you maintain your lead while minimizing risk.
I'm sure Snapchat hates it. But it's sound logic.
It returns the best search results.
I have no idea what you are talking about. Google maps loads instantly for me. It doesn't do much beyond map related functions, so I'm not sure where you are getting "bloated" from.
MS was still around.
No kidding. That and every freaking thing that you comment on or like gets broadcast to all of your friends/family/coworkers. So I just stopped interacting with Facebook, which means I just don't go there any more.
And for the love of god, stop changing the default search order. Just put the things that I've liked (And not the things you think I'd like) in chronological order.
Whst exactly is the point of this article besides wasting space to mitter out some thoughts without an actual conclusion?
As I recall, (and somebody can correct me if I'm misremembering), when Netscape came out with their browser, Microsoft pooh-poohed the whole thing publicly while scrambling to put together Internet Explorer. Employees at Netscape were really worried about Microsoft with good reason. Then Microsoft bundled IE with their OS so naturally users of MS automatically started using it, and that was the end of Netscape, the innovator.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
They started with Microsoft BASIC written by Bill Gates, and MS-DOS from Tim Paterson that was basically a CP/M knockoff. Windows was an obvious attempt to copy the Mac, C# and .NET obviously cloned the Java language and JVM, etc. They got SQL Server from Sybase, and Internet Explorer from Spyglass, using their unequal leverage with companies in dire financial straits.
Microsoft rarely comes up with any original products. One of the exceptions that proves the rule: Visual Basic (a genuinely innovative product), which was handed to Microsoft by a developer named Alan Cooper.
After the way Facebook has influenced politics around the world, Facebook's end can't come sooner.
Facebook wouldn't even exist if we had a better open platform for socializing than email. Now a private company with crappy ethics controls the means most people communicate with family and friends via the Internet. I do hope they lose their dominance in this regard, but a few teens using some fad of the year/generation apps isn't going to do it. And it does seem like Facebook is taking the place of Microsoft as the most widely disliked tech company, but due to what I mentioned above, most people still end up on it at some point.
The issue with Microsoft, Facebook, and increasingly, Google, is that they have no intention of respecting their users. People feel locked in to Windows and Office, and would gladly jump ship due to Microsoft's abusive attitude, if only they could. Network effects keep a lot of customers stuck there. If people felt good about Microsoft, they'd use Bing and be happy.
The same goes for Facebook. They could have treated their users (note I don't say "customers") well, and they wouldn't face such a challenge from upstarts like Snapchat. But if Snapchat offers any way to reduce dependence on Facebook, people will jump for it.
Google is increasingly alienating its users in the same way, with the attempt to force Google+ down our throats being only the most egregious recent example.
I hope the next big innovator will be a company that learns how to treat people with respect. They will wipe the floor with these jerks, and good riddance.
I always mod up spelling trolls.
When will Bing run on my Zune?
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
I managed to shock my friend's kid when I told him that when I was his age, my parents weren't on the Internet, at all. Didn't even have email.
Of course, at his current age I wasn't on the internet yet, either, but there were over ten years when I was and they weren't. Fifteen for anything other than email.
Bing is still up and running?
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
You ruined the digital camera; you make it easy for people to cheat on each other and helped create a "hookup" generation; you made it easy to join and impossible to leave (2 week waiting and peer pressure); everything that's posted on your servers is accessible as biometric data to intelligence agencies; your messaging app has been caught repeatedly listening to inaudible TV signals for "advertising"; you "now" monitor messages sent and despite all your crap, people idiotically trust WhatsApp; you are incredibly vague as to what Facebook actually is and it's to avoid from being accused as a monopoly, meanwhile millenials make "1984" jokes like their "cool and cultured" and still carry on with their face glued to their screens as if to say "oh well." You used to be a platform for college students (college email needed to join). Now, you cater to every idiot on the planet, including new parents making accounts for new-borns. You've become the new generation's World Trade Center. And despite what people are saying, you can never go bankrupt and you know it. People in FB will be "replaced" before the U.S. government allows it. Facebook has a net worth of 190 billion dollars; that's more than what is in Fort Knox.
It was not "it created a suite of online services -- first search, followed by email and maps -- that threatened the entire purpose of a personal computer" thats total bull shit. Google was making a Billion dollars per quarter at a time when it was thought that the average company which had an annual profit of say 35-100 million was doing great. And at the rate google was banking money pretty soon it could afford to purchase even the largest companies in the tech-industry. Google changes those ideals, and coused most company to be extreamly gready. The new goal is to make a profit of a billion a day, and the componies that will most likely reach these new goals are Comcast{Spectrum}, and AT&T.
The keyboard was indestructible. The case was a tank. The monochrome monitor displayed 25 rows of 80 columns, including upper and lower case letters.
Unfortunately, the IBM PC also included a few deliberate sandbags.
IBM never figured this was their last entry into the PC business. It was supposed to be a trial balloon. They had a zillion reasons to cripple the first edition, both in terms of processing power and in terms of memory expansion capacity.
By the way, did you actually use a TRS 80, Commodore PET, or Apple II? I used all three. Realistically, these all sucked for any serious purpose—except for learning the difficult art of programming the hard way.
It was just the other night I realized how starting my programming career on a TRS 80 with the notoriously unreliable tape drive influence my programming style for years to come.
No, BASIC did not ruin me. (I also picked up APL, several dialects of assembler within a year, rudimentary Pascal, some LISP, some FORTH, and most of C just as soon as I could get my hands on it.)
What did ruin me was the inability to curate a subroutine library of my favourite helper code. It just too took long to merge one chunk of code off cassette into another. (I believe the merge mode was that whatever new BASIC program you loaded just wrote right over top of any existing line numbers.) The TRS 80 was the computer I could use at school for free, which I did after school every day. Never had one at home until much later.
There was a certain kind of robustness you just didn't worry about, because every single program was pretty much home-cooked from scratch. At most, one might load something vaguely similar and then cannibalize some of the common bits.
Agile, look out—you ain't gonna need it. Every line of code ended up written in the least general way possible, so long as it sped up the code entry process.
Fortunately, I never had to use a cassette drive on an IBM PC.
On the IBM PC, I still had to multi-pass the compiler by switching floppy disks during the compile and link cycle, but that's a whole other story.
You know, the "standards of the time" included Heathkit, and Hewlett Packard (back when that still meant doing the right thing), and Tektronix, and later Compaq. The hobby computers were junk in part because everyone knew it was going to be a brisk ride. SOMEDAY SOON THERE MIGHT EVEN BE LOWER CASE. Basic economics.
Except for the IBM sandbag trick. That was old school economics, a first sour taste of something us hobbyists had not yet had to worry about.
That was the true legacy of the original IBM PC. It was the first coldly calculated, deliberate consumer diss. We all hates it forever for exactly that one thing.
Without a search/directory tool, much of the web we want to access is inaccessible.
Original post compares this to a photo-swapping app that allows you to put cats ears on people, as if that's somehow a commercial threat.
Now either Snapchat thinks Slashdotters are a viable market for their nonsense and are chucking Bizx a bundle for fake content... or one of the editors really likes those cat ears.
Did someone dare offend the google fanbois?
While the desktop FB client is relatively free from the Snapchat nonsense the phone app is becoming horribly cluttered. Seemingly everyday a new "feature" is added that takes away from the core FB concept and relegates that screen real estate to functionality the FB client is not seeking.
In short, FB is running the very real risk of alienating adult users who simply do not care about all of shiny objects and prefer simplicity in their lives.
Caution: Contents under pressure
"Good artists copy, great artists steal."
... it's a global mental illness.
That aside, we all know that what Facebook does should be a regular Internet protocol and service and not some commercial website. The only reason FB took off and still is going strong is because E-Mail and Usenet and to some extent IRC are so very shitty and we, the Inet and FOSS community haven't built a viable modern communication service yet.
And no, Diaspora is an implementation of a non-service and not really a replacement. Yet.
Once a protocol and service that does what FB does is finished, FB eventually willbe replaced.
My 2 eurocents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
This. Every change to Facebook, and in particular to the iOS app, seems to make it a little bit harder to either get to the chronological or view, or to stay there. I couldn't care less about what's "hot", I want to see what's been posted since last time I looked.
How many others of you have noticed how Google Maps has gone from something relatively useful, to the bloated piece of crap that it is now, which takes a geologic age to load or really do anything, even on a fast computer with a fast internet connection?
Yep. I think a lot of the google stuff is designed based on the idea that everyone has gigabit ethernet to use on their bus based commute, with a side order of the Apple style of you're a right old saddo if you don't upgrade your computer often enough.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
So delete your account and use something else. Your continued use is a message to FB that what they are doing is ok.
I think that's true of Google in general. Before, when you wanted to search for a link or picture, you could copy the web address of that item directly. Now, when you try and take a copy, Google returns an "amped" address that goes through their servers. For this reason alone, I use Bing.
SC are trying to be a social networking company now and FB is trying to be an image sharing service.
I have excellent Karma and I am not afraid to Troll it.
Exactly. If Facebook wants the teens, it'll have to get rid of their parents.who is more important to your advertisers Facebook? The parents who have an income, or the teenagers who are about to enter the workforce and will be the most valuable market soon - young, single and not tied down in debt enough yet so they still have some disposable i come?