Imagine that they've been using bots driven by AI to follow each user, to learn their patterns, to emulate people, and eventually, to replace them. Oops.
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Facebook Working on Smart Watch to Compete With Apple Watch
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More fundamentally, Facebook has a serious issue here they think they can just handwave away. It‘s similar to Google’s largest issue. Google and Facebook both earned a reputation as firms that give things away for free. The problem with that is that if you get known for giving goods/services away for free or low price, it’s so much harder to move up-market. It’s like saying “well, why would I pay $40 for a premium meal from McDonald’s or $10,000 for a Dell computer or something-something premium something-something WalMart?” Neither firm has a reputation that allows it to sell things at a premium price point. Facebook and Google give away so much (in exchange for data) that paying money for Facebook or Google goods and services just wouldn’t occur to most people. In fact, both of their major “successes” with getting people to pay money for products are with other brands that they have acquired (Oculus and Android). What brand would Facebook sell this watch under? The Facebook brand? If so, it’ll be a tough sell getting people to pay $150-$400 for Facebook, it’s the same reason the Snapchat glasses failed.
The competition this watch will bring to the market will be about as much as the Facebook phone brought ?People laughing about this don’t understand that this is ultimately a good thing for competition and thus a good thing for us. Super glad you lot aren’t in charge of any major decisions
Do you remember the Facebook phone? And where is that now…
I realize I'm not adding much to the conversation here but, hahahahahahaha.
You can understand how competition works and still laugh at the companies and their competition. The Zune was great in that it spurred on better iPod development. It was bad in that it was a buggy POS.People laughing about this don’t understand that this is ultimately a good thing for competition and thus a good thing for us. Super glad you lot aren’t in charge of any major decisions
Possible to laugh at the Zune and still appreciate it kept Apple on its toes.
Did it though?
By the time the Zune was released in 2006, we know that Apple was already working on the iPhone, and I doubt they saw anything about it that prompted them to change course with respect to what they were already doing. I struggle to see anything in the iPod that can be attributed to the Zune.
Like I said, there is "competition" and there is meaningful competition. It probably elicited a few chuckles from Steve Jobs and his team and then they just went back to working on the iPhone.
Overheard at the Apple complex at the time:
"Man, what a piece of ****!"
"Yeah, but it is Microsoft, did you really expect any better?"
"Best of all, that **** brown color, so even the clueless people know the Zune is a POS."
yeah, so? Do you remember Ping? Newton? 2018 MacBook Pros? Just because a company released a garbage product doesn’t mean they forever will. Money can solve these kinds of quality/effort problems, and they got more than enough money if they cared enough.
Newton was not a garbage product.
It’s not about money. It’s about Facebook lacking the design-led product culture needed to make a product category like wearables succeed. Without the right mindset and processes in place, you can throw all the money you want at trying to make a smart watch work, and it still won’t.
Never ever would I wear a FB anything. That company is evil to its core.
So a watch that may one the future require a Facebook account or it may refuse to tell the time, or work?
if it’s anything like the Oculus debacle a little while ago, I’m not 100% sure this is going to go well...
if it’s anything like the Oculus debacle a little while ago, I’m not 100% sure this is going to go well...
I’d still be curious to see what it has to offer. Not that this would be a product segment for me from Facebook, [as I think the Apple Watch is the obvious choice for iPhone compatibility], but this is one of those products I feel will either completely fall flat or do really well. Nobody here knows what this company can actually produce. Time will tell. (<— Pun intended.)
Considering that article is over 6 years old, I had completely forgotten about it, and have never seen a single person with one ... I doubt many people felt much differently than you.