Perhaps you are like me, if not reminded by others, it would be hard to realize that Facebook has been online for nearly a decade.
Yes, just one year ago, when the world's largest social network rang the bell on NASDAQ, the new generation story of "Harvard dropouts changing the world" seemed to still be the most popular Silicon Valley legend. In other words, although it took nine years from Facebook's birth to its IPO, it has always been growing rapidly in user numbers, connecting people around the world and triggering broader effects. It continuously demonstrates its platform value to third-party developers and advertisers, and Google has long shown wariness towards it... All this makes us continue to view Facebook as a "leader among the young generation disrupting giants."
However, the truth is that Facebook is no longer "young".
I say this because in the past year, games, advertisements, and stock prices have almost become the main themes of news related to Facebook. Meanwhile, they seem to also be the only areas where Facebook has managed to live up to the expectations of its "audience." On the product level, however, the company's actions can only make people say "sorry" to it.
The most typical example is Facebook Poke. After Snapchat, an app where messages disappear after being read, became popular and its acquisition was rejected, Mark Zuckerberg personally led a team to quickly replicate a similar app called Poke within 12 days. Ironically, with Facebook's influence and "demographic dividend," Poke initially topped the iOS popular apps list quite quickly, which made Zuckerberg proudly boast about his team's execution and "hacker spirit." But it didn't last long. Since it failed to grasp "how to balance people's desire to share with privacy," this misguided copy ended up failing miserably.
In the entire incident, Evan Spiegel, the CEO of Snapchat, who responded with "Welcome, Facebook. Seriously" (a reference to Apple's 1981 ad welcoming IBM to the market), came across more like a true challenger with real "hacker spirit."
Four months ago, Facebook once again demonstrated logic similar to Facebook Poke in Instagram—after Twitter launched Vine, a short video social app, Mark Zuckerberg decided to add a short video feature to Instagram, which he had acquired and which already had 150 million users. Although there were some differences between Instagram Video and Vine in functionality, putting videos into Instagram wasn't actually a good idea—whether considering user overlap or content quality standards, videos and pictures are not the same thing. Combining them would cause more information redundancy for most users.
The current situation proves this point: even though it was born relying on Instagram's 150 million users, from the data since its launch, Instagram Video hasn't posed any threat to Vine, which has been growing rapidly from scratch.
Another example is Facebook Home. While it could be seen as Facebook's innovation challenging Google's Android ecosystem, the product design was abysmal—in Facebook Home, all functions, interfaces, and interaction designs are centered around Facebook. There are no familiar Android app groups or desktop widgets, and even the action path for making phone calls, which requires quick operation, has been extended.
In other words, Facebook Home did not consider how to integrate with the Android operating system in its design but hoped to completely cover the home screen. In reality, unless someone is a heavy Facebook user, Facebook Home would only disrupt their smartphone usage habits. As a result, this self-centered approach, which disregards user interaction experience and forcibly occupies entry points, earned Facebook Home more than half of its reviews as one-star ratings on Google Play.
Therefore, the three most important products Facebook launched in the past year all followed the trajectory of "initial hype, followed by a disappointing conclusion." And Mark Zuckerberg, the Harvard genius once hailed as the "next Bill Gates," seems somewhat at a loss outside the core domain of Facebook—copying Snapchat, launching the Home app designed entirely around the Facebook world, hoping to swallow the short video field by relying solely on Instagram's user base... We might say these are failures of today's Facebook or Zuckerberg’s logic: when faced with challengers, prioritize acquisitions; if acquisitions fail, quickly launch a similar product; when designing product features, prioritize strategic layout; finally, rely on their "platform advantage" or "demographic dividend" to win.
This Facebook and Zuckerberg show both fear and trepidation towards new challengers while being overly confident and reliant on their size advantages. Do you still think such a Facebook is still young?