Steve Jobs didn’t show up to the first Macworld Expo, which was held in San Francisco in January 1985, one year after the introduction of the Macintosh. He was in the city, but he spent most of his time holed up at the Union Square Hyatt Hotel with his strikingly beautiful blond girlfriend, whom I only knew as Tina.
I think Facebook is about to reach a very critical point in its development. It needs to answer a very basic question: Does it want to be needed or loved as a brand and as a service? I always pondered this question back in the good old days of AOL’s development. Is it a fun, community-based service that is free and aside of one’s life focused on one-to-one communications and chat? Or is it a utility that becomes a front page and starting point for its customers who pay with time and click streams and live their life on the Net? Is it consumer based or more of a B-to-B platform for others to reach consumers? Very few franchises get to be BOTH needed and loved.
1. Get out of the newspaper business. Culturally, you can’t look and define your business as the delivery mechanism. The business is truly content and distribution across all pipes. The asset is journalists and the brand. A print-based property is just one of the many ways to distribute the digital bits. Most newspapers have in charge of their leadership “newspaper men.” They should turn over the reins to young execs, women and people with diverse backgrounds, who are Web-based and consumer savvy and will NOT be wed and enamored with the print-based delivery system of the past.
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That is why we have made even more changes to Voices to ensure we do this in the most transparent and timely way. While we don't expect that everyone will agree with our policies, we have made changes that reflect our intent in pointing to content outside our site.
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