Saturday, April 6, 2013

Zuckerberg: Google Can't Stop Facebook Home on Android

At Facebook‘s mobile strategy event yesterday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg was surprisingly confident of Google‘s inability and unwillingness to prevent Facebook from rolling out Home on Android, because of the search engine commitment to opennness.
But when Google realizes Facebook Home is hijacking Android, drawing users to the social network’s services and ads, away from Google’s, things might turn ugly.
Below are Zuckerberg’s comments on the matter:

Zuckerberg on the relationship with Google
Google is aware of what we are doing and we talked to them about this and all of that. But fundamentally Android is just a more open system, so we don’t have to work directly with them in order to build an experience like this. So we can even go deeper that we’re talking about today. They’ve designed Android from the ground up to support deep integration.

Can Google stop Facebook Home?
We think that Google takes its commitment to openness in this ecosystem really seriously. These features that we are plugging into aren’t like a surface feature of Android that you can easily paper over… they’re operating system really is designed from the ground up to support these things. And it is theoretically possible that they go back on there commitment to openness but I don’t think that they will and it will take a lot of effort, a lot of really concerted effort to change the rules of something like this and make the system different. So it won’t just be some subtle thing that they choose to do. It will have to be a complete 180˚ in their philosophy and promise of openness to the community if they go back.
 
But what if they decide to do it?
If 20% of the time that people are spending on their phones are in [Facebook] Home or in other Facebook experiences then I really think that they’re going to have a hard time making a rational decision to do that and looking at themselves in the face and saying that they are building the best experience that they can… Every company that I know wakes up in the morning trying to build the best experience. And Google too!
(src http://www.forbes.com)

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