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Digital
Facebook’s future is mobile, says Zuckerberg
By CMU Editorial | Published on Wednesday 12 September 2012
Facebook top geezer Mark Zuckerberg used much of his high profile session at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco yesterday to talk about his company’s mobile future.
And, needless to say, the Zuck reckons his firm is now fully positioned to capitalise on the shift of social networking to smartphones, admitting that the company’s initial reliance on HTML5 apps in the mobile space was a mistake, and that it was the launch of native iPhone and Android apps earlier this year that put Facebook on the right track. The challenge now, he said, was to find a better way of integrating advertising into the mobile experience.
But all this talk of mobile does not mean Facebook is planning its own mobile device, Zuckerberg said, pointing out that his business is based on big numbers audience wise, and that relying in anyway on proprietary hardware would hinder that. According to the BBC, he told the conference: “If we make a phone we could get maybe ten million users? Twelve million users? That doesn’t move the needle for us. Building a phone is the wrong strategy for us”.
Of course what everyone really wanted to know is, what about Facebook’s share price, which has slumped since the social networking firm’s much (and arguably way overly) hyped IPO back in May. The share price slump was “disappointing” Zuck admitted, and had had a negative impact on morale he seemed to concede.
But, he added, “there are tons of people that are super-pessimistic, [but] I would personally rather be underestimated – it gives us latitude to go out and make some big bets”. Yeah, he probably should have told that to the people sent out on Facebook’s behalf to totally oversell the firm ahead of its flotation.
As for Zuckerberg’s thoughts on digital music. Well, “Spotify is killing it just now” he reckoned. And we think that means he thinks it’s doing rather well. Either that, or the Spotify app had just killed his iPhone.
