During an interview with The New York Times, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg defended his company”s ability to innovate and said that it is always working on new ideas that aren”t directly tied to the main social network.
In his first answer, which was in response to a question about Facebook”s “Creative Labs”, Zuckerberg said that unbundling the mobile app makes sense and they are working to figure out the best way to do that. His answer seems to tie in with Facebook”s current move to take chat out of the main app and move it entirely to Messenger.
Zuckerberg wasn”t afraid to recognize some of the company”s major failures as well, and in his eyes, Facebook Home may very well have been the biggest.
With Home, the reception was much slower than we expected. But it was a casino online riskier thing. It’s very different from other apps, let’s say Paper or Messenger. For those, you install it, and if it’s useful you’ll go back to it and use it. Home is your lock screen. When you install it, it’s really active, and if it does anything that you don’t like, then you’ll uninstall it. – Zuckerberg
Given the fact that Facebook”s acquisition of WhatsApp for $19 billion was perhaps one of the biggest moves it has ever made, The New York Times also questioned Zuckerberg about that decision. He responded by saying that although Facebook”s messaging apps are very successful, WhatsApp is entirely different when it comes to the way people use it.
Well, so there are a bunch of things here. One thing is that Facebook Messenger is actually a really successful thing. More than 10 billion messages a day that flow through Facebook’s messaging products. But I think we basically saw that the messaging space is bigger than we’d initially realized, and that the use cases that WhatsApp and Messenger have are more different than we had thought originally. Messenger is more about chatting with friends and WhatsApp is like an SMS replacement. Those things sound similar, but when you go into the nuances of how people use it, they are both very big in different markets. – Zuckerberg
Overall, Zuckerberg used the interview to make the case that Facebook is still continuing to innovate, but buying other companies sometimes makes more sense.
Question – Do you think Facebook is an innovative company?
Summary: The New York Times interviews Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. He made the case that Facebook is still innovating and that its current moves reflect that.
image credit: telegraph