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Is Facebook Evil? Part 2

Posted by Nick O'Neill on May 16th, 2008 3:29 PM

Back in November I asked if Facebook is evil. At the time, the post was referencing Beacon which was eventually killed. For argument’s sake Facebook returned back to being good as it applies to Facebook Beacon. It appears now that the discussion has resurfaced as it applies to competition. Umair Haque states Facebook is “hell-bent not on changing the world, but on dominating it: on playing the cheesy, lame, thoroughly obsolete games of competitive strategy.”

First, I just want to say that a post complaining about competitive strategy on a Harvard blog is pretty ironic in itself. Second, I just want to say that Umair is horribly unfair for singling out Facebook. Facebook is in the process of opening up their platform. They were the first to open an internal platform and they will be the first to open up externally. There is no way in hell that Umair can expect any business to just completely open up overnight as it inherently goes against their own business practices.

Opening up businesses will not take place overnight. Right now the discussion about it is what’s valuable. Is Facebook evil for not opening up completely and letting you take your data with you (in theory completely removing it from their site)? I don’t think so. This is all part of the process, so suggesting that Facebook is evil for not playing under Google’s terms of engagement as Umair does is absolutely ridiculous. We are moving forward, not backward and singling out the one company that helped start this movement probably won’t help things progress.

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This entry was posted on Friday, May 16th, 2008 at 3:29 pm and is filed under Analysis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Viewing 3 Comments

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    The short answer is: Yes, they are still evil.

    Btw - I just got a banner welcoming me as a google reader when I actually clicked through my desktop RSS Reader.
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    Most big cos. tend or have to be a bit evil. But think you're right Nick, F/Book is a very young company & these things take time & large cos. have to put a lot of thought into major developments. Should be enough just for now that F/Book is taking steps down that road.
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    Better thing to ponder is finding an open platform case study that is successful, sustainable and profitable (not just hyped up in ST value). I agree with Umair's assertion that Facebook is closed, but don't agree that Google is open as its profit driver is equally closed (= have you tried to build a partner list from your most valuable publishers from AdWords? most valuable advertisers from AdSense? You can't, that's Goog's job and it is opaque for a reason).

    I've heard the phrase, "closed is for leaders, open is for everyone else" in reference to Apple's position in media. Also, M$ has made a lot of money by not letting other players compete at the OS level. Two pretty solid examples of a closed strategy that meets the successful, sustainable and profitable hurdles.

    Put another way, if Facebook keeps pushing ground breaking functionality and innovation, then no one will ask whether it matters if they are open or closed. Slow down even a little bit and everyone starts asking.

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