On the one hand, the idea of mixing all these messaging formats together sounds like it might be a confusing mess -- a Google Wave-level UI disaster. As he points out, these media have very different usage patterns that may not turn out to mesh that well.
On the other hand, saying "Facebook should just do a beautiful, elegant implementation of what everybody else has already done" is a very low-risk strategy. It doesn't innovate or solve any new problems. As a strategy for an industry-defining company, this is a route to irrelevance.
So is it better for Facebook to risk failure, or risk being boring? I have to say they've recovered well from failure in the past (Beacon, early mis-steps with news feeds), so my vote would be for the gutsy, risky, change-the-game strategy.
The low-risk strategy is exactly what Apple does; they did a beautiful elegant implementation of what everybody else had already done. The original iPhone, outside of being a beautiful implementation of a smartphone, had very few features compared to the existing competition. Since then, they've been making fairly low-risk updates to their platform and they're hardly on the route to irrelevance.
The problem here is that they're creating a wildly complex solution to a non-problem. It's not a question about being boring -- it's already boring because only software engineers care about unifying people's inboxes.
The original iPhone did have a niche, more than just did a beautiful elegant implementation. The touchscreen prior to iPhone sucks, and no body used the multi-touch screen yet. With your analogy, iPhone created a rather complex solution (in implementation perspective) to a non-problem (they can use keyboard, touchscreen is a non-problem!). It feels to me to be ignorant to say what original iPhone have done is what everybody else had already done.
Touchscreen phones existed before the iPhone (my first such phone was from 2003) but, as you said, they all sucked. The other thing that sucked on all these phones was mobile browsing. Those were the very real problems that Apple solved.
The concept of a mobile web browser or a touch screen phone wasn't new -- everyone had already done that. Apple just did it better. Multi-touch is most unique feature of the original iPhone, but that was hardly a risky move.
It seems you've forgotten Visual Voicemail. Prior to the iPhone, every phone I ever saw required playing through messages sequentially instead of jumping to what I wanted to hear. That's a huge improvement in usability.
I guess entering a new market with a higher priced product and many established competitors doesn't count as risky if the product is really good? That's hardly a failing.
I guess when man first used fire to cook, you might argue that eating something warm wasn't a new concept. After all, some animals had eaten fresh kill or each others droppings before they cooled off.
The idea of Apple having retail stores wasn't a new concept.
Risk there?
Add visual voicemail to the mix -- another solved problem. The point is, Apple didn't develop a completely new device that nobody had ever seen before. It's all incremental improvements.
Apple was very careful entering the new phone market -- they heavily leveraged their existing iPod market and technology.
However, if you go back far enough Apple was one of the pioneers of touch screen portable computers with the Newton. Apple invented the term PDA. In terms of invention, that was something very different. They got a long of things wrong with that device that was corrected by competitors doing it much simpler.
I'm not saying that Apple doesn't take risks -- your other post was filled with good examples. It's just that their most successful products tend to be low-risk slow-burn affairs.
Apple has been far from low risk. Their ditching the floppy, changing ports, switching processor families (more than once), all those iMac form-factors, moving to LCD while they were still quite costly, replacing the operating system... are all examples of them being willing to make major transitions to move forward. Some say dumping Flash is risky. There was risk getting into phones, a market that already had many very well established players, and starting with a product that cost MORE than what was out there. It's kinda funny how now people act like Apple had some early entry advantage. Apple took a risk offering a tablet that DID NOT have binary compatibility with their desktops.
After the 9/11 attacks, Apple was still working hard on development while others cut back. Many thought Apple was crazy to build fancy retail stores at very costly locations. Many said that targeting the high-end of the market was doomed to fail in a weak economy, but Apple kept expanding.
Maybe the choices Apple has made just don't seem so risky after seeing them being so wildly successful?
The Gateway stores are long gone. I haven't seen details of the revenue per square foot at Microsoft stores.
I disagree that Apple have a low-risk strategy, remember the iPod mini? this thing was wildly successful and yet Apple killed it and replaced it with the nano. I can't think of another company that would take that kind of risk.
And although it may not seem so today - launching a glass-fronted phone with a single button, was seen by many to be completely nuts.
I think that sounds rather more significant than it was. The Nano was very much a natural successor to the Mini, I don't think there was any doubt that it would be at least as successful.
Learning that people like small iPods and making an even smaller iPod is not risky -- that's just common sense.
Touch-screen phones in almost the same configuration as the iPhone existed years before it's release. There was really nothing nuts about making improvements to that design. Even if there was no guarantee that the iPhone would be wildly successful, it was certainly not going to be a total failure.
I don't know, I think the new nano is too small. Apple did a good job with the UI-on-a-postage-stamp, but the thing is just physically too small to hold and use with one hand. If the body were a bit longer so you could hold it with your fingers and use your thumb to navigate, that would be better. IMHO.
Apple does make mistakes -- the buttonless shuffle was universally panned and now the new one has buttons again. If the new nano is too small, the next nano will be bigger. But, getting back to the original point, these product changes are purely evolutionary.
On the one hand, the idea of mixing all these messaging formats together sounds like it might be a confusing mess -- a Google Wave-level UI disaster. As he points out, these media have very different usage patterns that may not turn out to mesh that well.
On the other hand, saying "Facebook should just do a beautiful, elegant implementation of what everybody else has already done" is a very low-risk strategy. It doesn't innovate or solve any new problems. As a strategy for an industry-defining company, this is a route to irrelevance.
So is it better for Facebook to risk failure, or risk being boring? I have to say they've recovered well from failure in the past (Beacon, early mis-steps with news feeds), so my vote would be for the gutsy, risky, change-the-game strategy.