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comment by goobster
goobster  ·  1150 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The day Facebook was diagnosed with Stage 4 terminal cancer

    "Facebook does not have a good business plan. It has a business plan that was hastily taped onto the back of a running cheetah, and the cheetah doesn't care about the business plan.

    This is also inaccurate. Facebook's business plan is to sell its users to advertisers.

Facebook was built as a way to creep on girls. No monetization policy at all. It was only AFTER other websites moved to ad-based selling of their viewers' data that FB hastily pasted that capability on the top of the Feed. Ever since the platform has been rebuilt to support that mission, but that's not what it was designed to do.

From Day 1, Apple was designed and built to sell a premium product to a limited audience that appreciated those premium features, and - with one brief dark period under John Sculley's leadership - has Apple ever deviated from selling a premium product to people who will pay top dollar for quality/experience.

In my view of the world, your DNA matters. FB's DNA is fundamentally flawed and disrespectful of their users. Apple's DNA is to sell the best experience possible at a premium price.

One of these houses is built of straw and one of brick. The little piggies are squealing and the Big Bad Wolf is coming...





kleinbl00  ·  1150 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    Facebook was built as a way to creep on girls. No monetization policy at all.

That's a monetization policy. You sell the girls. Without Facebook? I can sell to this IP address with those cookies. With Facebook? I can sell to teenagers who like Nelly Furtado that browse Amazon on Tuesday evenings that live within a mile of an arbitrary lat/long combo. The tricky part is getting the girls: so you build a place for them to talk about their love of Nelly Furtado.

You can pretend that somehow they were never thinking about money but they've been selling their users since the very beginning.

    From Day 1, Apple was designed and built to sell a premium product to a limited audience that appreciated those premium features

Apple Macintosh MSRP, January 1984: $2495

IBM PC AT MSRP, August 1984: $6000

Yeah, a Mac cost more than a Commodore 64. But "from Day 1" Apple positioned themselves as the underdog. This was the case until the Powerbook G4, part of Steve Jobs' return from the wilderness, and a reflection of his adventures with NeXT, which actually was positioned as a premium product. Jobs wouldn't have been allowed to do it without Scully's clones, for sure, but Apple's market has always been prosumer: it's not an ugly tool like you would drag home from work but it's hella cooler than some crap you'd buy at Walmart.

Apple sells to the people using its product. Facebook and Google sell to the companies using the people that use their product. No need to fanboi the shit; Apple can do more user-centric shit because their users are their customers. Facebook and Google can't because the better you treat the sheep the less wool and mutton you can extract from them.