For years, Facebook marched on like an arrogant little child, trampling on users rights and privacy with impunity and showing zero regards for the concern of users, user groups, system administrators and analysts. For year, it had no real competition and so Mark Zuckerberg made a point to lecture us all - "who needs privacy?"
It is true that corporations are want to take user needs for granted while squeezing the most profit from them, even if that profit is at the expense of other competing needs. Netflix, riding on wave of its gynomouse success - redefining movie renting business and destroying all its major competitors and forbearers, including the once mighty Blockbuster, decided to stick it to the customers. It forgot the reason it became popular in the first place (it was by far cheaper than Blockbuster with its $5/month rental model). For years, Blockbuster tried several incremental approaches including reducing and then eliminating its punishment on its customers who keep movies longer than the 4 day rental period (even though such punishment over exceed the cost of the media the customers kept), and later trying a monthly subscription of their own, that never really matched Netflix nor attempted to usurp it by offering much lower rates and better services by leveraging its vast distribution network. Blockbuster focused on squeezing more from the customer and went under doing so. Netflix may well end up with a similar fate.
But Zuckerberg and Facebook's hubris is even worse. For years, MySpace, the one time undisputed king of social networking floundered by ignoring consumer needs and bombarding its subscribers with ads to make as much pennies as it could. The model seemed so successful that Rupert Murdoch had to buy the "next platform" for media (by that he means ads) distribution. Under Murdoch's ownership, MySpace went even more hubristic until a viable alternative finally saw to its demise. That alternative then was Facebook, a company that sought to avoid many of MySpace's pitfall including its then minimalist presentation that completely departed from MySpace's clutter. But no sooner has Zuckerberg begin to succeed that Facebook became the world largest spam engine and the biggest violator of user privacy.
In 2007, I had observed that 90% of email traffic to a 20,000 user email provider customer of mine was Facebook notifications. I sent an email to Zuckerberg, and left a post on his Facebook page, pleading that he address the notification bomb and offering him some suggestion on how to do it. That message was never acknowledge nor were the recommendations ever implemented, at least not in full. Even though Facebook later increased user controls over notifications, the default setting was still more notification, rather than less as I had recommended.
But less than 90 days after Google+ release and just 24 hours after Google made its service available to the general public, Facebook seems to be getting the message - but hopefully not too late. Today, I received the following message from Facebook that shows it was finally paying attention - Years after I had to rely on administrative blocks to limit the spam bomb on my customers' mail infrastructure.
Once upon a time, the social networking kingdom was Facebook's to loose, just like it had been MySpace's to loose. Now, it seems like Facebook my be loosing the key to that Kingdom, so long as Google+ does not make its owners to arrogant to notice that the users matter.
In another case of hubris, Microsoft finally "figured out" a way to make PCs less attractive to Linux enthusiasts. Problem with that approach is that Microsoft forgot there is something called VMWare, and that Mac's continues to gain market share. Microsoft may be gorging itself on unfounded intel that its Windows Phone platform may be catching on and may be deciding that it may have found its voice finally - but the company remains tone deaf and Steve Ballmer's instinct to stick it to the consumer may ultimately lead to the final demise of Microsoft from the OS market. competition is a bitch!
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