Facebook Not 'at War' With Amazon, Apple; More Like Friends
Is Facebook “at war” with Amazon, Google and Apple?
Founder Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t think so, calling so-called competitors like Amazon and Apple, allies and partners more than enemies.
In an excerpt of an interview with Charlie Rose on Monday, the host asked the Facebook CEO if there would be a “flat out war” among the four tech giants over the next 10 years.
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Zuckerberg shared, “I mean people like to talk about war. There are a lot of ways in which the companies actually work together. There are real competitions in there but I don’t think that this is going to be the type of situation where there’s one company that wins all the stuff.”
Though he acknowledged that Google in some ways was more competitive than the rest, creating “their own little version of Facebook,” the 27-year-old explained that companies like Amazon and Apple were “extremely aligned” with their own network.
“We have a lot of conversations with people in both companies just trying to figure out ways that we can do more together and there’s just a lot of reception there.”
“There’s no borders for us,” chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg added.
“We want everything to be social and we prefer everything to be social with Facebook,” she told Rose. “And so for us, our goal is really to work across. We want to work on every tablet.”
Facebook’s goal was not to build a platform but to be across all platforms. “Our mission is to help people connect and stay connected with people no matter what devices they’re on,” Zuckerberg revealed.
“Because there’s all this other stuff out there that means that Facebook has evolved as a partnership company which is very different from the way that Apple or Google or Amazon or Microsoft or any of these folks are.”
For example, if Apple or Google wanted to build a product, they would typically go build it whereas Facebook would build a platform for that product, on top of which people could connect, the Palo Alto resident described.
“If we want to help rethink the way that people listen to music or watch movies what do we do? We build a platform on top of which people can connect and we enable all these different companies to plug in – companies that are big companies, companies that are small companies, things that don’t even exist. It’s a really different approach than what all these other companies have.”
“We build the social technology, and they provide the music,” Sandberg clarified. “We don’t want people to use Facebook to watch movies or read newspaper articles, we want to provide the social technology so we want them to listen to music on the iPhone or through Apple or through Spotify, anything they want.”
“We just want Facebook to have a share wherever they are. And so we do this one thing which underlies this huge partnership strategy and it does make us I think pretty different than many of the other companies you’re talking about,” she told Rose.
Companies like Hulu and Netflix, two of the biggest streaming services, are partnering up with Facebook and building on top of their platform.
“People can share all kinds of videos that they’re watching, and you can see the top things your friends are watching,” Zuckerberg said. “I could go to your profile or your timeline and if you want you can have a box up there that says what are the TV shows you watch the most and I can go ahead and click on it and it will take me right to the Hulu app and I can start watching that.”
Facebook in a sense, acts as a friend to all, connecting the world through many different platforms.
For more on Charlie Rose’s interview with the Facebook founder, click here.
