Let me start by saying that based on my past experience launching new products: Facebook Home is likely to fail. I do not say this with malice, I’ve just seen a lot of new products come and go, and too many are no-go’s because in the process of wanting to build them companies skip over the most important step: assessing if the product should be built. Here are the highlights:
1) The #1 reason new products fail is a lack of value proposition. For the life of me I can’t come up with a clear reason why Facebook Home exists or what the core value is for customers (the core value to Facebook is more than clear – ubiquity, data collection and, soon enough, ad revenue). With apps readily available, what is the value to a customer of an immersive experience?
2) Which brings me to another point of failure: not talking to customers. It is just a guess, but I don’t think they did any pre-build interviews or observations. I can’t imagine, except for a few fanatics, that anyone was begging for a phone that had Facebook as the central feature.
3) And speaking of consumers, another reason products fail stems from not knowing who your customers are or how many of them there are (known as size of market). Size, for Facebook, is everything. With over 1 billion users, anything less than 10’s of millions of phones with Facebook Home could be seen as a failure or worse a decline in engagement of the platform. I’d love to know if they did any analysis of how many would likely convert.
There are other issues that have been mentioned, like how it has to be downloaded (not resident on the phone) and only to a limited number of phones (only the AT&T phone will be pre-loaded). When it comes to the basics of building a new product, Facebook Home looks to have been built without a blueprint.
See the Facebook Case Study; slide 23 in The New Product Economy for more on their struggles with mobile solutions.