Facebook的第二次机会

    早在2010年，马克•扎克伯格做出了一个非常糟糕的决定。他并没有针对iPhone、安卓（Android）、黑莓（BlackBerry）、诺基亚（Nokia）设备，甚至微软（Microsoft）手机单独开发应用，而是要求工程师们设计了一款能够在任何智能手机上运行的Facebook应用。实际上，他当时笃信，随着不同操作系统之间为控制移动设备而展开激烈竞争，独立应用会逐渐消失，很快我们就会通过手机浏览网页，就像我们在个人电脑上做的那样。

    事实证明，扎克伯格错了。谷歌（Google）的安卓系统与苹果（Apple）的iOS很快就成为占据主导地位的移动操作系统。而按照扎克伯格以网络为核心的理念设计出来的Facebook应用在这两个平台上的表现都不尽如人意。Facebook应用问题多多，运行缓慢，而且经常崩溃。2011年，Facebook曾经推出了一个更新，第一个月内就在苹果应用商店得到了19,000个一星评价。三月底，扎克伯格在加州门罗帕克市的Facebook总部接收笔者采访时表示：“它应该是我们犯过的最大错误。”

    成立六年以来，Facebook一直是社交网络时代的领头羊，然而它却错过了下一次巨大的技术变革。全球消费者都开始放弃台式机，转而选择移动设备，他们每天沉浸在令人眼花缭乱的应用当中。这些应用都是针对小型触摸屏和移动人群而专门设计的。【你见过有人在台式机上玩《愤怒的小鸟》（Angry Birds）吗？】而与此同时，Facebook却只有一名专门针对iPhone的工程师；Facebook移动团队的大部分工作都是针对移动网络浏览器进行设计。

    硅谷成功的公司并不少见，但是鲜为人知的是，更多的公司因为未能抓住下一波科技潮流而最终灭亡。扎克伯格并不想重蹈它们的覆辙。但要想解决公司的移动问题，这位在职业早期便取得巨大成功的天才青年将不得不承认失误，然后对这家年轻的公司进行结构与文化方面的改革——而这种改革和他与生俱来的天性是相互矛盾的。移动开发者不应该一味追求更快的发展速度（这几乎已经成为Facebook的一种信仰），相反，必要的时候必须暂停发布新版本。他们应该停止加大对移动网络的投资，而是应该着手开发应用。Facebook应该放弃通过一款杀手级产品吸引尽可能广泛的用户群体的尝试，而是应该选择其中的某一种操作系统，证明自己在移动领域的能力。他说：“我认为，不论对公司正规开发过程进行多大幅度的重组都不为过。”（财富中文网）

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    译者：刘进龙/汪皓

    Back in 2010 Mark Zuckerberg made a very bad decision. Instead of building separate apps for iPhones, Androids, BlackBerrys, Nokia devices, and, yes, even Microsoft phones, he put his engineers to work designing a version of Facebook that could operate on any smartphone. In effect, he was betting that as different operating systems jostled for control of mobile devices, standalone apps would go away and soon we would surf websites on our phones, just as we do on PCs.

    Zuckerberg was wrong. Google's Android and Apple's iOS quickly became the dominant mobile operating systems, and Facebook's applications, which were built with its CEO's web-centric worldview in mind, didn't work well on either platform. They were buggy and slow, crashing often. A 2011 update garnered 19,000 one-star reviews in the Apple App Store within the first month. "It's probably one of the biggest mistakes we've ever made," Zuckerberg tells me during an interview at Facebook's Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters in late March.

    Just six years after it had been founded, Facebook (FB) -- the company that had ushered in the social-networking era -- was missing the next big shift in technology. Around the world consumers were abandoning laptops for mobile devices, busying themselves with a dizzying array of downloaded apps designed specifically for small touchscreens and people on the go. (Have you ever seen anyone play Angry Birds on a desktop?) Facebook, meanwhile, had only one engineer dedicated to the iPhone; most of its mobile team was coding for mobile web browsers.

    Hidden among all the Silicon Valley success stories there are hundreds more companies that fail to catch the next wave and die. Zuckerberg was determined not to be among them. But to address his mobile problem, the wunderkind who had tasted enormous success so early in his career had to come to terms with failure, and he had to make sweeping structural and cultural changes at the young company -- moves that often went against his instincts. Instead of going faster (virtually a religion at Facebook), mobile developers had to take a pause on new releases. Instead of doubling down on the mobile web, they had to embrace apps. And instead of trying to reach the broadest possible audience with a killer product, Facebook ultimately would have to pick one operating system to show off what it could really do in mobile. "I can't overstate how much we had to retool the whole company's development processes," he says.