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Can Facebook's Home survive its own execution?

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Strategy is choice and execution. It’s not one, or the other, it’s both. If you have a good idea, it’s only as good as your ability to execute on that idea.  It’s entirely possible to turn a good idea into an unfortunate outcome, and successful firms are not at all immune from this. Kodak’s Kodamatic instant camera, New Coke, and Frito-Lay’s adoption of Olestera, were probably all good ideas, at least in some point in their consideration, yet it was their inept execution that made them memorable. Boeing's 787 Dreamliner is living this nightmare right now!  This week,  Facebook’s launch of ‘Home’ provides us with yet another possible illustration of how this should work, or not.  Just how well is this initiative likely to play out?

Let’s start with some facts. Facebook is an extraordinary success; a good idea, executed well.  With approximately 1.06 billion monthly users, Facebook would be the third largest nation if we could turn the home screens that it is located on into real-estate. Furthermore, with 680 million of these billon-plus “netizens” already using mobile devices as their primary means of accessing Facebook, it has become the ultimate “killer app” as well. This is one successful company!

Since mobility is undoubtedly the keystone attribute of digital lifestyles, and since we’re all headed, like it or not, for a digital lifestyle, anything that Facebook, or its competitors, can do to give them greater influence over the entry-ways into digital living, and adding even more “real-estate”,  would seem to be a great strategic choice. If you could gain this without having to take-on assets, or change your balance-sheet, you would appear to have the perfect strategic dream.

‘Home’, in fact, is an intriguing and surprisingly sensible approach to extending Facebook’s reach into mobility. Rather than joining the rest of the pack by rushing into device manufacturing,  ‘Home’ allows Facebook to piggyback onto many [but not all!] Android home screens,  so that when you turn your phone on you get a burst of about 80% of your Facebook home feed, instead of  being greeted by your Android welcome page.  By creating “an application layer, or skin, that sits on top of the Android operating system”  ‘Home’  preempts  the Android OS from being the first thing you see, and this means that a rather large number of mobile phone users could possibly be diverted to Facebook whenever they are accessing mobile services.  Sounds good, if you are Facebook!  Maybe not, if you are Google?  In fact, The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg  has called ‘Home’  “the boldest attempt by any non-hardware company to alter a phone's native user interface.” Not a bad appraisal of Facebook’s strategic choice from a seasoned and well-respected observer of technical offerings.

However, just because Facebook is one of the biggest success stories of our time, there is no reason to believe that it is exempt from now doing dumb things when it comes to execution.  In fact, we’ve seen them already flirt with their fair share of clumsy moves over content ownership and privacy. Are we about to see another?

The basic litmus test that I would recommend for soberly assessing how “smart or dumb” is likely to be the execution of  a new idea was originated by  the late Professor Everett Rogers, last of the University of New Mexico, who created an approach to understanding the diffusion of innovation  that still serves us well not only in explaining why innovations were successful, but also in appraising how promising an innovation might be in terms of winning rapid adoption. The essence of Rogers’ work is that an innovation’s rate of adoption is determined by five key – execution --  variables:

  • Benefit/cost ratio: this has to be large & visible. “Visibility” is in italics because even in many cases where the ratio between benefits and costs turns out to be large, it’s not obvious. And, it’s the obviousness that is critical, because if you can’t see it, you all too often don’t think to measure it.
    • Complexity: the more complex the idea, the less likely adoption is to take place, Simple ideas are adopted much faster than complex one. These doesn’t mean that you should dumb-down an innovation, simply that it should be presented in its simplest form to the potential adopting public.
    • Compatibility: an innovative idea will get a better chance of success if the adopter does not need to change everything. The more things that I have to change in my life to satisfy your innovation, the less interested I am.
    • Trialability: adoption is encouraged by the ability to reduce risk through trials. If I can try it, before I buy it, I may, in fact, really like it and buy more, or at least give it a real try.
    • Observability: If you can make the trials observable, then you don’t have to establish a trial for every prospective adopter

Whenever I hear a “good” new idea, and I hear a lot of them, I quickly run the execution idea through Rogers’ logic, in a predictive fashion, to see how well the idea does, keeping in mind that any variable which registers a low probability of success will affect every other variable in a multiplicative fashion, turning the overall probability downward. Let’s see how Facebook’s 'Home' does in such a test: 'Home' starts off with the benefit of being free, which always helps make the Benefit/Cost relationships easier to look good. And, apparently, it’s relatively easy to navigate, relying on all the familiar finger-swipes that we’re now all so used to, but maybe “relatively” is just not good enough when you consider Complexity? The New York Times’ David Pogue comments: “if [navigating in a ‘Home' environment] sounds confusing, that’s because it is….. Facebook has had to reinvent the way you open programs on your phone….” Whenever you hear the word “reinvent” with respect to something that you are happily comfortable with, beware! Pogue also uses the term “vaguely incoherent” which is an even more troubling sign.

Not only is ‘Home’ preempting Android, it is also preempting your Wallpaper, your  family photos, and the app notices that you have come to rely upon, as well as maybe reducing my ease of accessing these apps at all, or quickly accessing my camera,  and you no longer have the time displayed, your signal strength nor your battery life. I think that this is the big dumb move: this contradicts the importance of preserving compatibility and that is always worrisome. I like my life the way it is, and now they’re creating a disruption in my life, and there is the likelihood that soon the Facebook “cover feed” will include less welcome advertisements, as well. But, there is one more worrisome flaw: trialability & observability are both challenged by limiting ‘Home’ to those who own Android phones – and not all Android phones, at that, which, while a large segment,  excludes all of us who have some other OS.  Is this dumb? Well, it’s certainly unfortunate, and most probably not smart. Either way, it reduces the likelihood of success, or success fast enough to have confidence that a startled Google won’t respond in a fashion that significantly reduces Facebook’s novelty.

So, all in all, how promising is ‘Home’?  Although it’s a good idea – strategic choice, it is the execution issues that make it hard to be ecstatic about its potential. Simple as it may be, it’s not completely simple, and even more problematical is that it’s not compatible with what I think most phone owners want from their home page; which is photos of loved ones, or pets, and alerts from apps that are now such a part of their lives. ‘Home’ asks them to replace those with whatever your Facebook friends are supplying at the moment. In addition, no one that I know is looking to turn their home screen into a portable billboard, but that’s what ultimately is going to happen. All of this might, or might not, be eventually acceptable, but it’s the hesitation that will accompany such a decision that is what is really worrisome, as it slows down the speed and likelihood of adoption. Finally, the limitation of the launch to only Android OS, and actually only a subset of that, limits ‘Home’’s trialability and observability  as well, neither of which is good for adoption rates.

My conclusion: don’t bet on ‘Home,’ at least version 1.0. Is it a “good strategic choice”? It sure sounds like it!  But the devil is more likely to be found in the execution details, and good strategic choices executed in a clumsy manner are not a recipe for success. Version 2.0 could be completely different in terms of execution, especially if Facebook learns from this initial launch, but now the clock is ticking, and Google is likely to respond in a manner that complicates the playing field for any future launch.

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Bill Fischer is the co-author of  Reinventing Giants (with Umberto Lago & Fang Liu) (Jossey-Bass), as well as The Idea Hunter (with Andy Boynton & Bill Bole)  (Jossey-Bass, 2011).  This post benefited from the advice from my good friend Charlie Fine, of MIT's Sloan School of Management.  I take all responsibility for all flaws in the argument.

Bill Fischer can be followed on Twitter at @bill_fischer