When I'm introspective about the last few years I think the biggest mistake that we made, as a company, is betting too much on HTML5 as opposed to native... because it just wasn't there. And it's not that HTML5 is bad. I'm actually, on long-term, really excited about it. One of the things that's interesting is we actually have more people on a daily basis using mobile Web Facebook than we have using our iOS or Android apps combined. So mobile Web is a big thing for us.
Related Quotes
Facebook originally got started around the same time as a bunch of the early smartphones and those platforms got started. So we didn't really get to play any role in developing that platform.
We're a community of a billion-plus people, and the best-selling phones - apart from the iPhone - can sell 10, 20 million. If we did build a phone, we'd only reach 1 or 2 percent of our users. That doesn't do anything awesome for us. We wanted to turn as many phones as possible into 'Facebook phones.' That's what Facebook Home is.
We think the fact that Instagram is connected to other services beyond Facebook is an important part of the experience...This is an important milestone for Facebook because it's the first time we've ever acquired a product and company with so many users.
Our strategy is very horizontal. We're trying to build a social layer for everything. Basically, we're trying to make it so that every app everywhere can be social, whether it's on the web or mobile or other devices. So inherently, our whole approach has to be a breadth-first approach rather than a depth-first one.
At Meta, we've been building social experiences for 20 years now. Originally, it took the form of a website, then mobile apps. But the thing is, I never thought about us as a social media company. We're not a social app company, we are a social connection company.
We started off as this platform inside Facebook; and we were pretty clear from the beginning that that wasn't where it was going to end up. A lot of people saw it and asked, 'Why is Facebook trying to get all these applications inside Facebook when the web is clearly the platform?' And we actually agreed with that.
Popular Authors
