Speaking publicly for the first time since Facebook's IPO listing in May, CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg said the biggest mistake the social network has made as a company is betting too big on HTML5.
Zuckerberg was interviewed by Michael Arrington, at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, in San Francisco, on Tuesday. While mobile is often cited as a major stumbling block or Achilles' heel for Facebook, Zuckerberg said many people underestimate how fundamentally good mobile is for Facebook as a company.
“That's one of the main things that's really misunderstood right now, how fundamentally good it is on a bunch of different levels. First, there are more users. Second, obviously per person using Facebook on mobile there's more engagement and they're spending more time. The third is that per amount of time that people spend on mobile we think that we're going to make a lot more money than we do on desktops.”
Zuckerberg acknowledged that, over the next three to five years, the biggest question on everyone's minds, and the key factor that will determine the company's performance over that period, is going to be how well Facebook will do on mobile.
According to Zuckerberg, many commentators also tend not to realise how much progress Facebook has made in mobile over the last six months. Over that period, the social network introduced mobile ads for the first time, released new mobile apps and worked on integration with iOS 6.
Not good enough
"The biggest mistake we made as a company was betting too much on HTML5, instead of native... We burnt two years,” said Zuckerberg. “We'll look back on that and say that it was probably the biggest strategic mistake we've made. But we're coming out of that.”
Adding to that, Zuckerberg said Facebook realised that “good enough is not good enough” when it came to the Facebook mobile experience, hence the decision to start from scratch and develop native applications. The native Facebook application for iOS was released last month, and Zuckerberg says the company will use the same approach for Android.
“On iOS and Android you can just do so much better by doing native work, so we need to just do that,” said Zuckerberg, adding that mobile Web users still out-number iOS and Android Facebook users combined. Zuckerberg also stated he believes Facebook is now a mobile company, and all new coding is being done for mobile first.
According to Zuckerberg, the monetisation opportunities offered by mobile are also far greater than desktop, and Facebook is already seeing mobile ads perform better than the right-hand column ads on the Web site.
On the IPO
When asked about his feelings on the performance of Facebook's IPO, Zuckerberg said: “The performance of the stock has obviously been disappointing, and we care about our shareholders. The commitment that we made is that we're going to execute this mission of making the world more open and connected, and we're going to do the things that build value over the long-term.”
Zuckerberg said that while the performance of the IPO isn't helping morale at Facebook, the company “has not been an uncontroversial company in the past. It's not like this is the first up and down we've ever had.”
Zuckerberg's comments appeared to please investors as Facebook shares went up more than 4% in after-hours trading, to over $20 per share. Facebook was the first US company in history to go public with a value of more than $100 billion. Since listing though, the shares have plummeted from the $38 debut price.
No Facebook phone
When asked about the constant rumours of a “Facebook phone”, Zuckerberg laughed it off, saying: “It's so clearly the wrong strategy for us. We're building this network where we'll have 950 million users soon; it's growing quickly.
“Let's say we built a phone theoretically (we're not), maybe we could get 10 million or 20 million people to use it - it doesn't move the needle for us. The strategy that we have that's different to every other technology company that is building their own hardware and operating system like Apple, Google, Samsung, Amazon, Microsoft, everyone. We're going in the opposite direction. We want to build a system which is as deeply as possible integrated into every major device and things that people want to use.”
Zuckerberg says search is an interesting space for Facebook, with over a billion queries being served a day “and we're basically not even trying. I think that there's a big opportunity there at some point and we just need to go do that.
“I think that search engines are really evolving to give you a set of answers; it's not just about here I'm typing something show me some relevant stuff. It's 'I have a specific question, answer that question for me'. And if you think about it from that perspective, Facebook is pretty uniquely positioned to answer a lot of the questions that people have... At some point we'll do it.”
The full interview with Zuckerberg can be viewed on TechCrunch.
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