Zuckerberg: Betting On HTML5 Was Facebook's Biggest Mistake 290
An anonymous reader writes "Speaking yesterday at TechCrunch Disrupt, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged that the company's stock performance was disappointing. He also made an interesting remark about Facebook's development efforts over the past couple of years: 'The biggest mistake we made as a company was betting too much on HTML5 as opposed to native. It just wasn't ready.' According to Mashable, 'the benefits of cross-platform development weren't enough to outweigh the downsides of HTML5, which pulls in data much more slowly than native code, and is much less stable. ... Now, Zuckerberg says, Facebook is focused on continuing to improve the native mobile experience on iOS, as well as bringing a native app to Android.'"
Correction... (Score:5, Insightful)
Zuckerberg meant: The IPO Was Facebook's Biggest Mistake.
There, fixed that for him.
Re:Correction... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Hardly, the IPO was an amazing success for facebook. They managed to sell the company for twice the current market price!
That doesn't mean it was a success for Facebook, only that it was a success for:
Anyone who had facebook shares before the IPO (which is who facebook was doing the IPO for) did rather well out of the deal.
Don't confuse the share holders with the company. Collect all the share holders and put them together, and they'll produce nothing. The value of the company is its assets (physical and intellectual), employees, customers and in true evolutionary spirit, its ability to adapt.
The money the IPO brought increases assets short term, but long term, the investors want their money back, and more. Unless a company can continuously out
Re:Correction... (Score:4, Insightful)
Unless a company can continuously outgrow the investors' increasing demands, it will, in the end, get the short stick.
So far practically everything on the web has been supplanted by something else. What's really and truly long-running, and in the No.1 spot? Has any of it occupied that spot since the beginning? The internet archive is still the first archive, but where is Hotbot? Where is IUMA? Who cares about Myspace? Are people still using Microsoft for email? Etc. (Lycos, Internet Archive, Apparently some musicians still, and only Microsofties, respectively... they're rhetorical questions you bastards.)
Re:Correction... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Correction... (Score:5, Insightful)
Google dominating for what, 8 years now?
Our young geeks may NOT remember a time before Google, but there was a time where the "hot" search engine changed every two years, and there were new engines launching all the time.
The Wild West phase of the Internet is over, but we're still on the frontier.
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Hardly, the IPO was an amazing success for facebook. They managed to sell the company for twice the current market price! Anyone who had facebook shares before the IPO (which is who facebook was doing the IPO for) did rather well out of the deal.
Actually they managed to sell the company at ten times the market price. The estimated value of the company according to valuation terms used in finance would have been $10bn and the company sold for over $100bn. The valuation is made on the basis of the profits a company is making and market price is a max of 10 times that so Facebook was a huge bubble when it had its IPO at 100 times the profits of the previous year. That said, the early stakeholders in FB made a great deal when the IPO was done.
Re:Correction... (Score:5, Interesting)
Zuck holds 57% of the "voting" stock and specifically told everyone in the IPO prospectus that he wasn't going to listen to them. Nobody has the ability to oust him and he isn't leaving on his own. The guy knows what he's doing.
I knew what he was doing, too, which is why I didn't buy any shares, and will continue to not buy shares until they're at around $10.
Re:Correction... (Score:4, Interesting)
Zuck holds 57% of the "voting" stock and specifically told everyone in the IPO prospectus that he wasn't going to listen to them. Nobody has the ability to oust him and he isn't leaving on his own. The guy knows what he's doing.
He got married.
I wouldn't be surprised if Priscilla divorces him after a few years, and sells the shares she got out of it. Unless he has a iron clad prenup, that will lose him his control.
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Yeah because it's not as if relationships ever last, and women only ever marry for the divorce settlement don't they?
Perhaps you have had a rather traumatic marriage experience, but it is equally possible that they do actually love each other and get on great such that they will actually remain together until the day one of them dies.
He's a geek, not a Hollywood actor or rock star, he married someone he's known before he got rich, he married someone he loves, because he loves her, not because she's the late
Re:Correction... (Score:5, Informative)
If he lives in California and the divorce proceedings are started there that prenup is worthless after 5 years.
Under California Law, she's not entitled to property he owned prior to getting married (gee, I wonder why he waited until the day *after* the IPO to get married!?). She'd be entitled to any gains the stock made after they were married, but she's probably in for a long wait before the stock rises to meet the IPO price again.
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Under California Law, she's not entitled to property he owned prior to getting married (gee, I wonder why he waited until the day *after* the IPO to get married!?).
Interesting, I didn't know this. Very shrewd.
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Re:Correction... (Score:5, Insightful)
"The guy knows what he's doing".
LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL!!!!
If he knew what he was doing, he wouldn't still be about a sinking ship.
Let's see.. The guy made billions on the deal, and simultaneously kept control of his company. You somehow have a superior knowledge on the subject and know better. How exactly does that work? If anyone didn't know what they were doing it would be the investors who bought the overpriced shares. Zuckerberg, on the other hand can laugh all the way to the bank - or wherever else he might want to go. Because that's the sort of thing you can do when you're a multi billionaire. Cocksucker might be a good description if you ask the other shareholders, but I don't think the incompetence you're pretending he has is really there.
Re:Correction... (Score:5, Interesting)
"The guy knows what he's doing".
LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL!!!!
If he knew what he was doing, he wouldn't still be about a sinking ship.
Let's see.. The guy made billions on the deal, and simultaneously kept control of his company. You somehow have a superior knowledge on the subject and know better. How exactly does that work? If anyone didn't know what they were doing it would be the investors who bought the overpriced shares. Zuckerberg, on the other hand can laugh all the way to the bank - or wherever else he might want to go. Because that's the sort of thing you can do when you're a multi billionaire. Cocksucker might be a good description if you ask the other shareholders, but I don't think the incompetence you're pretending he has is really there.
A company is only as good as its employees, and having demotivated employees is not good for any company. If the employees are underwater on their stock for the forseeable future, it's going to be hard to keep them motivated. It's also going to drive up labor costs since they'll have to start paying out bonuses to keep employees happy as well as hire replacements for those that quit. Higher operating costs mean there's even more pressure to bring in more revenue.
Zuckerberg is set for life, there's no doubt. Facebook as a company is ok for now,but I'm betting it will eventually go the way of Myspace. If Google put some marketing dollars behind Google Plus they might have a chance to take some serious marketshare from FB -- and not just online marketing, they need to reach a broader audience. Many non-geeks still haven't even heard of it.
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A company is only as good as its employees, and having demotivated employees is not good for any company. If the employees are underwater on their stock for the forseeable future, it's going to be hard to keep them motivated.
LOL. Underwater? Oh no, the free stock they were given is only worth $1M instead of $2M. Oh the horror.
I don't know how long-term "founding" employees are treated (i.e. Zuckerberg), but my stock grants have always had a "fair market value" attached to stock grants, even pre-IPO stock. You'd have a hard time proving to the IRS that stock that was granted to you a day before a $40 IPO was worth $0. It's entirely possible that for some employees the tax liability on the stock is higher than the current market price.
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We don't have to guess about this, articles about the nature of employee stock compensation are readily available: http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-lockup-release-2012-8 [businessinsider.com]
The employees are being granted stock in phases, which is priced at the time of grant. They thus are getting paid in stock, and will be taxed at the market value. They can pay those taxes by selling off some of their shares.
This is not a problem for employees, though their stock when they get is worth less than they had expected.
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FB took of because Myspace was godawful terrible. FB doesn't have the glaringly obvious problems that G+ can fill the gaps in on.
Have you seen the new Timeline pages? They're only one wrong background color and a couple blink tags away from MySpace.
MySpace was shit, even compared to Facebook (Score:5, Informative)
You badly, badly misremember the awfulness of MySpace. Please don't make me post this more than once, the memories are painful...
Embedded Flash objects in the page. Lots of them. All set to auto-play when the page loads. Facebook doesn't allow embedding arbitrary content, and doesn't allow auto-playing video on your page either.
Incredibly atrocious CSS, like text that ballooned to 40pt on hover or that was in incredibly unreadable fonts, or covered up / replaced navigation links on the page... Facebook doesn't allow custom styling.
I'm not sure if this is the fault of ColdFusion or just of MySpace programmers being incredibly shitty, but every 5-10 navigations on MySpace would usually result in a server error. Sometimes, you'd get a server error when the server tried to serve the error page! Facebook has had occasional stability issues, and PHP is lame (but then, apparently very little of their backend is still PHP), but it's rock-solid by comparison.
Back when MySpace was hemmorhaging users to Facebook, there was a limit on the number of pictures you could host on MySpace. Considering that one of the main uses of Facebook for some people seems to be "host every single picture my phone can take" you can see why this appeals.
Strange though it may be to think of Facebook and security together, they beat the pants off MySpace, which has such glamorous characteristics as being the first site to host an in-the-wild XSS worm (because it was trivial to inject script into your page, and somebody figured out how to exploit that).
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FB doesn't have the glaringly obvious problems[...]
Terrible privacy track record?
Besides, it's not only about problems. Does FB do anything exceptionally well? I see an evolution from ICQ, MSN, Skype, Second Life, Facebook, so I expect something else will pop up in the next 2-3 years that will absorb most of the attention of the consumers.
I don't think FB will be replaced by something that does the same thing like Google+ but it just might if FB continues to blatantly disregard users privacy rights.
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FB doesn't have the glaringly obvious problems[...]
Terrible privacy track record?
Besides, it's not only about problems. Does FB do anything exceptionally well? I see an evolution from ICQ, MSN, Skype, Second Life, Facebook, so I expect something else will pop up in the next 2-3 years that will absorb most of the attention of the consumers.
I don't think FB will be replaced by something that does the same thing like Google+ but it just might if FB continues to blatantly disregard users privacy rights.
I used both at the time. Back then, facebook had a clean and easy to use interface where myspace was a mess of a site to visit. Facebook has changed for the worse over the years, and now facebook is a mess and G+ has a nice clean interface. Unfortunately G+ doesn't have the people, which is why I haven't logged into my G+ account in months.
I think you're right about your prediction, though...
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Huh, why? Didn't it make him, you know, rather rich?
Re:Correction... (Score:5, Insightful)
Zuckerberg meant: The IPO Was Facebook's Biggest Mistake.
There, fixed that for him.
You meant: The IPO Was Investors Biggest Mistake.
There, fixed that for you.
Re:Correction... (Score:5, Interesting)
Zuckerberg meant: The IPO Was Facebook's Biggest Mistake.
There, fixed that for him.
You meant: The IPO Was Investors Biggest Mistake.
There, fixed that for you.
You meant: The IPO Was The Biggest Mistake of Speculators Trying to Get Rich Quick Off an IPO Pop.
The investors who actually SOLD shares on the IPO made out like bandits.
Re:Correction... (Score:5, Funny)
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I said the IPO was FACEBOOK's biggest mistake, not Mark's. If you don't see the difference, oh well...
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There's a guy running for president who disagrees.
He knows corporations are people because he's fucked his fair share of them.
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The IPO debacle hurt Facebook's image as a company. Share prices expect to soar, they fell instead. Company image affected.
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Making Facebook exclusively a teenaged time waste instead of giving it a single redeeming quality for business or professionals was probably a bigger mistake. When the fad ends, Facebook will inevitably go the way of MySpace.
Correction... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Correction... (Score:5, Interesting)
Company-wise, their IPO certainly was a bigger mistake than using HTML5 in iOS.
The IPO was inevitable and unavoidable. It was a bad idea, but it was inevitable and unavoidable.
First, Facebook had already taken more than a billion dollars from investors, including half a billion from Goldman-Sachs alone. So that means that an IPO (aka pump and dump) was inevitable.
Second, Facebook is the new MySpace and everyone knows it. An IPO (aka pump and dump) is the fastest way to cash in on the latest fad before the bubble pops.
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Wait, no matter how much money from whom.....I thought that one person had control......no? That was the claim
He who can destroy a thing controls it.
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And the most important thing, the IPO put a LOT of money into facebooks own coffers. Facebooks IPO was a resounding success for the company. they sold out every share they were offering.
The only thing the IPO was a mistake for were the speculators that thought it was a good idea to buy an overhyped stock that current available financial data was absolutely unable to justify the price they were asking.
i could even link some of my past comments, saying how overvalued i thought it was. however i still don't
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Sorry Apple has growth, billions in free cash flow, lots of cash on hand, significant IP and real property, and multiple income streams, both hardware, software, services and media/content and a so far very loyal userbase.
Facebook has some cash flow financed by ads and market research, and shrinking usage in their primary markets.
Re:Correction... (Score:5, Insightful)
> Apple is a far far far larger bubble than Facebook.
Apple's net revenue doesn't match the sharp downward slope, that Facebook kept under wraps, until Facebook's IPO. Apple is not a bubble by the simple fact that there's almost no speculation involved. People who own an iPod will get the next iPod etc. Apple's income is not dependent on leveraging potential advertising monetization (read: we'll figure it out later). Google's income is derived from potential advertising profits, with a great track record, in stark contrast to Facebook's published metrics and inability to come up with a working profit model.
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You think apple sales are consistent? You might want to look at what they admitted in the samsung vs apple case, in which they acknowledged that was not the case at all. People simply were not aware of alternatives and the lawsuit has raised this to people's attention.
Re:Correction... (Score:5, Interesting)
Apple most certainly is a "bubble"... It's not going to burst though, its going to be a "slow" leak back into mediocrity. One of the reasons Apple is so involved in lawsuits is they see the writing on the wall. History repeats itself. (see the 80's and Apple vs PC's). Their "profits" are based off the insane prices they charge. They can charge that much because of the "perception" by the public that Apple products are that much better.
The gap between iphone and the others (android,windows) is MUCH smaller then 2 years ago. There's still a perception of a much larger gap then really exists and that is being propped up isheeple AND the wireless carriers. That is what is keeping Apple's dominance "a float" right now. Carriers are so desperate for the "iPhone" that they are eating the insane premium Apple charges themselves, making it seem as though the iphone is comparable. That is changing though. In a year or so the price of a iphone compared to a Android of the same quality is going to double/triple. Once "Consumers" start seeing they'll have to pay 500 for a iphone of 150 for a Android that works as well or better... Repeat the PC market, Apple will slip back into being a niche company...
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The fact is that Facebook's use of HTML5 was distinctly sub-par, thus making their apps incredibly frustrating to use. Losing all the data, no apparent caching, etc, on a platform that you are using on a mobile device that often loses connectivity. Madness.
I don't give a Zuck! (Score:5, Insightful)
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The problem with html5 apps is javascript. That language is just not designed to delopment of huge applications.
Re:I don't give a Zuck! (Score:5, Insightful)
If that were really the problem in this case then the Facebook website would have exactly the same issues, and you'd have to download a Facebook client app for desktop use.
The real problem is that browsers on mobiles still suck.
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Thing is, a web thing can have many of the things that we expect from a non-web application these days and usually do it well, things like drag and drop should work smoothly even on most portable platforms if the browser is worth one tenth of one crap.
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Chrome for Android actually does rather well, as does firefox for android... It's the default browser that has issues and really should have died with 4.0 (ICS) android, but instead it stays the default (for backwards compatibility) as much as it sucks. Ironically it was also the browser flash worked in up til the most recent android flavor (even Chrome couldn't use flash on a 4.0 setup).
Facebook probably should have looked at how even Google has a native app for youtube on android and taken a similar route
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The problem is more complex than that: Mobile devices lack CPU grunt to do things which are easier to do on a desktop systems.
Because of this the mobile OS builders concentrate what little CPU they do have to make sure their apps run the best as they can at the cost of anything else you may wish to run on top of that. In fact I think they even cripple Javascript on iOS to make sure the OS keeps ticking nicely, for example native scroll events take precendence over Javascript scroll events. I think the main
Re:I don't give a Zuck! (Score:5, Informative)
The problem is more complex than that: Mobile devices lack CPU grunt to do things which are easier to do on a desktop systems.
Because of this the mobile OS builders concentrate what little CPU they do have to make sure their apps run the best as they can at the cost of anything else you may wish to run on top of that. In fact I think they even cripple Javascript on iOS to make sure the OS keeps ticking nicely, for example native scroll events take precendence over Javascript scroll events. I think the main reason that flash was killed in iOS was because it was a closed source CPU hog that they couldn't cripple.
The only thing that will change this for mobile development is more CPU power, which is difficult if we don't want to have personal hand warmers in our pockets.
I don't have a problem with JS for application GUI development as long as there is enough juice to run it.
I suppose that *is* a problem, but really the big thing that Facebook has screwed up in mobile is not having the infrastructure (server side) to push all content as updates to the app. Instead, each time a user wants to browse their wall, they have to download the whole flogging thing again. The absolute biggest threat to mobile experience is the actual content download itself, it requires the user to stand around and wait, and it eats battery like crazy. Twitter got this right, partly because that's the entire model of their service, but if you look at how well their app runs on mobile you kind of get tired of even tolerating Facebook at all.
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Javascript isn't a real problem, it's the developers writing code using it. We're talking about a client application that is mostly doing REST/JSON calls to the main backend servers, and then displaying it in the correct place on the existing page, and persisting it to a HTML5 local DB. Except it didn't do the latter, and all too often lost even the in-memory cache of data, making the app a PITA to use, especially scrolling back in history.
You only need to look at Twitter clients to realise that timeline-ba
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The problem with html5 apps is javascript. That language is just not designed to delopment of huge applications.
Javascript is not the problem. Plenty of big applications are done in Javascript. The problem is that iOS's implementation of Javascript is quirky, buggy, and almost impossible to debug. There in no error console in a UIWebView. Html5 audio is broken. Canvases don't work quite right. So you can't develop in a browser, and then deploy in an app, because they don't work the same.
A conspiracy theorist might conclude that Apple is making html5 difficult intentionally, because it is against their interest f
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Or, if you're making an HTML5 app, why are you making a native app be what is effectively a locked-down web browser?
There are plenty of reasons to do this. The app can use callbacks from the UIWebView to use iOS services such as the accelerometer (tilt, direction, etc.), access a database, use GameCenter, etc. These services are not available from a browser.
I once tried to do 90% of an app in Html5, and 10% iOS/Android specific. I soon realized it was easier to just do it as a native App on both. A complete reimplementation was easier than getting Html5 to work.
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It does particularly on the 2.x series.
Heck, Google Maps (the web based version) didn't run on the browser shipped with Gingerbread. Thankfully FireFox mobile with the UserAgent faker (Googles map servers provided invalid javascript for the default mobile UserAgent) made it work.
Jelly Bean seems to be fine but it will be a several years before Gingerbread disappears.
Re:I don't give a Zuck! (Score:5, Funny)
Not supporting the type of moble App Facebook were trying to write is a feature of HTML5 not a wrinkle to iron out.
Re:I don't give a Zuck! (Score:5, Informative)
Just because HTML5 might have wrinkles to iron out doesn't mean that it's a failed endeavor. Rather, it means that the browsers, companies behind said browsers, and the users have created a massive cluster of epic proportions.
So, basically, blame everyone but the people who wrote the spec? Sounds like the consortium's made up of entire middle-managers.
HTML5 is the poster-child for designed-by-committee, slow-as-molasses processes that are out-paced by everyone else because, in the real world, things actually need to get done this decade, and the rest of us can't wait. HTML5 has been in development for eight years, and their current target is another two years before it becomes a Candidate Recommendation. Bearing in mind that they've already missed all their previous targets, Ian Hickson estimated that they'd have the requisite two, independent working implementations in 2022. That's eighteen years from start of development, 10 years from now.
By the time the spec is completed, devices will have been forced to roll their own solutions, simply because the spec isn't done. Now, they might have some inter-operable features, if that aspect of the spec had been fully codified before they had to implement it, but that's precisely the situation we had in the Netscape v. IE browser wars - each had a somewhat common base, but were independently adding new features to try an improve the browser. The features they added were mutually incompatible because there was no common standard - and we're staring straight down that road again. It's a very clear example of perfect being the enemy of good.
Re:I don't give a Zuck! (Score:5, Interesting)
HTML5 is the poster-child for designed-by-committee, slow-as-molasses processes that are out-paced by everyone else because, in the real world, things actually need to get done this decade, and the rest of us can't wait.
HTML5 was compromise of existing implementations and small improvements, adopted because the XHTML standards were being ignored. Your rant is misdirected: HTML5 is a solution to the lack of standards progress, not a cause of it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5#History [wikipedia.org]
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HTML5 was compromise of existing implementations and small improvements, adopted because the XHTML standards were being ignored. Your rant is misdirected: HTML5 is a solution to the lack of standards progress, not a cause of it.
HTML5 was pushed through by the very same people who refused to implement the new XHTML standards. So, in that sense, it's a solution to the problem that they have created themselves.
w3What? (Score:3)
The w3c started out describing how web browsers worked and somehow they mistakenly decided they were a standards board. They still get ignored. They will always be ignored fro connivence.
For Mobile (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:For Mobile (Score:4, Funny)
HTML5 is projected to be finished in 2022. By that stage, vendors will have adopted proprietary standards, not because they want to, but because the open standard was simply too damn slow to get done.
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Don't stop believing! Hold on to that feeling!
Re:HTML 5 Java (Score:5, Informative)
"HTML5 is roughly equivalent to Java as far as a multi-platform programming language and development platform."
No, not in the slightest. Not even close
"The only successful approach I've ever encountered to using a virtual machine was employed by the Digitalk VM which cached successive VM invocations so that you ran at native 'raw iron" machine speeds after encountering the performance hit the first and only time an pseudo-instruction was executed in a method.".
When did you last read anything about the JVM? 1995?
"The lethal performance problems that WordPerfect encountered trying to implement their suite of office products in Java still apply."
No, no they don't. That was the best part of a decade before Hotspot even came along, which was basically a complete rewrite.
You could've typed your post about 15 years ago, and you might've had a point. Now however, your post makes absolutely no sense, and shows an understanding that only someone who had literally been living under a rock for 15 years would have. Java has changed a lot since 1997, and your criticism is nonsensical in the context of those changes.
Biggest mistake - HTML5? (Score:5, Funny)
So not any of FB's many privacy "mistakes" then?
Re:Biggest mistake - HTML5? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Those weren't mistakes.
I'd second that. He's spot on with this. (Score:5, Insightful)
Zuckerberg isn't dumb. This judgement on the whole HTML 5 craze goes to show. Techwise HTML5/CSS3/Ajax is a huge step backwards compared to other approaches, like, for instance, Flash. Flash is proprietary and invites doing all kinds of non-sense (sic), but it *is* a far better x-platform VM.
Going HTML5 is not to be triffled with and will bog down your systems performance way further than other VM solutions such as Java or Flash/AS. Any web developer worth his salt could have told Zuckerberg that.
The "problem" (lets just call it that for now) here is that geeks, i.e. opinion leaders, are willing to make huge technological concessions if the technology is more open than the alternatives. Some devs would rather chop their right arm off than develop against (semi)prorietary systems like iOS or countless versions of Android. Hence we've got native looking apps, that are web UIs in disguise, slowpoking about at speeds we know from Windows 95 Applikations back in the day. I presume Zuckerberg got himself talked into this by his devleads, who are, just like any respectable geek, probably way more concerned with system openess and anti-lock-in development wise than with business critical performance and end-user experience issues. That's my guess anyway.
You can say and think what you want about Zuckerberg and Facebook - I dislike the whole direction thinks have taken with this FB thing just as much as the next geek - but his conclusion is spot on. He's a developer himself and it's to his credit that he recongnises where his company bet on the wrong technology. You have to give him credit for that.
My 2 cents.
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Some would say that those who hedged their bets on HTML5 in the first place, especially from so early on, were the dumb ones and not the naysayers.
To be honest - I don't see much advantage as a user (the last time I touched HTML seriously was just after CSS became popular, so I don't really speak as a developer here). Take Facebook for example - what do I get from all the fancy code that adorns those pages and slows down my browser (design decisions like Timeline aside)? I get little buttons to hide posts
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"Zuckerberg isn't dumb. This judgement on the whole HTML 5 craze goes to show. Techwise HTML5/CSS3/Ajax is a huge step backwards compared to other approaches, like, for instance, Flash. Flash is proprietary and invites doing all kinds of non-sense (sic), but it *is* a far better x-platform VM."
So by going Flash for mobile one of two things would have happened....
1) They would develop a Flash web app that didn't work on a platform that garners 65.9% of the mobile web traffic and was abandoned by Adobe for th
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This is about mobile apps. They don't even HAVE Flash or other VMs on the iPhone. You either use HTML or write a native app.
Re:I'd second that. He's spot on with this. (Score:5, Informative)
From the actual quote [tobie.me], it does not sound like Zuckerberg is really down on HTML5 overall. I think, rather, he is saying that the company invested too much time trying to optimize the HTML5 client for mobile clients, when the company was ultimately able to get better performance with less effort by developing native apps.
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The "HTML5 vs. Native controls" nerd-war is currently being waged where I work, and for whatever reason, emotions really run high on this one. It's much uglier than Windows vs. Linux or whose text editor is best. It's a fight over whose skills are relevant. When half of your developers are HTML/Javascript people and the other half are Obj-C/C/Java (native) people, and a new mobile project is proposed, every tech lead makes passioned arguments that THEIR TEAM should get the project and that those other teams
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Zuckerberg isn't dumb. *HE* probably would have read the article before posting and realized this is about mobile apps and not the main Facebook.com web site.
So HTML5 is not very optimised (Score:2)
Maybe I am being dense, but surely there is some way to optimise it. Better machine-specific interpretors, the kind of pre-execution optimisation that compilers do, anything....
HTML5 (Score:2)
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I'm just glad that they're finally working on the issue. The Facebook apps for both iOS and Android were complete rubbish, and was often both faster and more reliable just to use the mobile version of the web site.
The new iOS version of the app seems a lot more responsive. I hope that they do something similar for Android soon.
Magic native app networking (Score:3)
Is he talking overhead of HTTP headers? Handshaking on websockets?
The worst part of the facebook app has been the fact that when you load it up it wipes out the screen of any data you had last time, then pulls in a full new set over a crappy mobile network connection which very often timed out. Had the app cached (HTML5 localStorage?) postings and displayed what you already had, while trying to get new ones, it would have been much more useful.
He can blame HTML5 all he wants, but poor design decisions could be made for any language and platform.
Whole quote (Score:2)
Re:Whole quote (Score:4, Funny)
Nothing to do with their Android app once wiping out your phone contact's email addresses and replacing them with @facebook.com equivalents?
People use the web version not because it's more convenient but because it's safer and you KNOW what it has access to.
Anything that causes pain for Zuckerberg is fine (Score:5, Funny)
Anything that causes pain for Zuckerberg is fine by me.
Yeah! Go HTML5!
Facebook never bet on HTML5 (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.readwriteweb.com/mobile/2011/09/how-facebook-mobile-was-design.php [readwriteweb.com]
TL;DR:
If you think that's an HTML5 approach, I have some lean agile behavior-driven coaching hours for which I'd like to bill you.
Blame? (Score:5, Insightful)
Facebook is a webpage, not a 3D game that pushes the hardware. Is it possible he is blaming the technology for the failure of his coders? After all, we're talking about an app that when you viewed the comments on a photo you had to back out and come back several times in order for it to "refresh". Or sometimes clicking on a friend's name would take you to an entirely unrelated part of the app. And photos would take ages to load. Sometimes entering in a comment would work, sometimes it would say "you can't comment on something that doesn't exist" even though you could open up Facebook on a desktop computer and make a comment in the same place without a problem. I don't know of any other "webpage" app on the iPhone that performed that poorly, and granted I don't know what the Google+ app used but in comparison it blew the doors off of the Facebook app. Was it really the technology to blame?
HTML5 (Score:5, Insightful)
Well next time (Score:5, Insightful)
Flash (Score:2)
Iunno, I found it ironic that when Flash first came out, it was a way to create and inbed animation and sound into a website with very little weight. I actually used to make Flash sites actually smaller than HTML ones with raster graphics.
Then everyone decided to make Flash sites really heavy. Instead of going the route I thought it would go. The computers and the internet back then were too slow to handle those sites.
Now that we have the bandwidth and computing power, everyone seems to be bashing on Fla
BlackBerry FTW! (Score:2)
BlackBerry has had a native client since 2008 and it is solid. It ties in with BB's unified inbox and can interact with other apps like BBM if you choose to do so.
Once again, iOS is 4 years behind.
didn't do their homework? (Score:3)
If there was technical uncertainty before they embarked on the HTML5 route - why wouldn't they have done extensive feasibility testing before commencing? Lord knows they have the resources.
FB isn't developed by dumb or naive people - unless there's a realistic answer to this, I guess we can only assume he's bad-mouthing HTML5 for his own (nefarious) purposes.
He is showing his age .... lack of experience (Score:2)
If he had been around awhile he would have known that when you hear "write once & run anywhere" that it may not be all it claims to be.
i call BS (Score:5, Interesting)
HTML5, which pulls in data much more slowly than native code
How can this be? HTML5 is not relegated to some throttled network interface. the data all comes through the same pipe. I've made plenty of html5 implementations that had small streamlined exchanges of data with the server. My observations indicate that the facebook apps just pull in obscene amounts of unoptimized crap.
Well, since it's facebook data, i guess no implementation can get around the fact that you are pulling down crap.
Re: (Score:3)
Actually from all my observations their Achilles heel is their slow-ass web services. Both the desktop and mobile web apps initially load quickly enough, it's the subsequent data pulls via web services to refresh GUI fragments that lag badly. Haven't checked the granularity of their services, but on mobile fine granularity is particularly bad because of the typically atrocious latency (although LTE is heaps better than HSPA). Regardless, even in the desktop site you can see these ws call latencies, when you
Really? (Score:3, Interesting)
Really? Betting on HTML5 was Facebook's biggest mistake? You sure about that?
HTML5 sucks for apps (Score:3)
Talk about misleading (Score:3)
Zuckerberg didn't say HTML5 wasn't ready. They stuck in a mashable quote hoping to make it look like it was Zuckerbergs.
Zuckerberg did say native but he was clearly talking about mobile apps (which are of course native).
C'mon Slashdot, that kind of stuff really makes you look bad.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:BS (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
What you're saying is "I don't need it, so nobody needs it". I hope you know how stupid that sounds.
While true, you could invalidate his statement by giving just one example of someone who needs it.
I obey gravity, so everybody obeys gravity.
Re: (Score:3)