Apple的社交网络

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虽然俗话说“没有新闻是好消息”，但就苹果而言，“新闻中没有新闻是坏消息。”来自彭博：

苹果公司由于市场担心其强劲产品iPhone的增长正在放缓，因此股价创2014年以来最糟糕的一天在第四财季，苹果表示iPhone手机销量与去年同期相比几乎没有增长，尽管这一时期出现了新的旗舰设备与此同时，苹果表示将在2019财年停止为iPhone，iPad和Mac提供单位销售，这将成为更多服务业务的一步虽然一些权威人士称赞此举是强调新商业模式的一种方式，但许多分析师抱怨说这是为了掩盖停滞不前的智能手机市场的痛苦。

Apple has long been an exception in the smartphone space when it comes to reporting unit sales, so deciding not to is not that out of the ordinary; Apple, though, has always positioned itself as the extraordinary alternative —最好的——这方法回报多年来与销售值得吹嘘的数字。

iPhone部门和收入增长的历史

The reality, though, is that unit sales in isolation have indeed misrepresented Apple’s business for the last several years; specifically, they have underestimated it考虑iPhone过去六年的收入增长和单位增长：

iPhone部门增长和收入增长随着时间的推移

在iPhone的早期，iPhone的单位增长和收入明显高度相关，当时该行唯一的价格差异涉及旗舰设备的存储量然而，由于苹果开始在产品阵容中保留旧型号，由于平均销售价格的缓慢下降，收入增长有点慢于单位增长。

Then the iPhone 6 happened: not only was the “big-screen iPhone” stupendously popular — and, it should be noted, was the first phone sold at launch on all of China’s mobile carriers — it also, for the first time, included a configuration — the $749 iPhone 6 Plus — that had a higher base price than the iPhone’s traditional $649结果是收入增长，这是第一次大大超过单位增长。

iPhone 6S的情况恰恰相反：虽然Apple认为iPhone 6的销售数字代表新常态，但实际上Apple已经推出了大量的旗舰手机买家Ultimately the company had to take a $2 billion inventory write-off on the iPhone 6S after over-forecasting sales; meanwhile, older model phones (including the iPhone 6) were still selling well, so again unit growth outpaced revenue growth.

然而事实证明，6S是新常态：从那时起，iPhone的销量基本持平：

iPhone单位销量随着时间的推移

更改的是Apple的定价：iPhone 7 Plus比iPhone 6S Plus多花20美元Then, last year, came the big jump: both the iPhones 8 and 8 Plus cost more than their predecessors ($50 and $30 respectively); more importantly, they were no longer the flagship这个称谓属于999美元的iPhone X，而且鉴于有多少苹果粉丝只会购买最好的，平均销售价格飙升：

iPhone平均售价随着时间的推移

Still, even though unit growth had been stagnant for a full three years (not just the last year, as many reports, including the one above, incorrectly stated), reporting those numbers helped Apple tell its story: after all, you needed unit numbers to calculate the average selling price.

What the reports are right about, though, is that unit sales going forward are absolutely a story Apple would prefer to avoid: it is very unlikely that units will grow, and while Apple pushed pricing even higher with the iPhone XS Max, it probably can’t go much further, which means it is likely that the average selling price-based revenue growth story is drawing to an end as well.

今天在苹果

To this point I have focused on the iPhone, and for good reason: last quarter it made up 59% of Apple’s revenue; for the company’s holiday quarter it will likely approach 70%不过，该公司还将停止报告Mac和iPad的单位销售情况This came on the heels of a product announcement last week where Apple introduced a new MacBook Air, Mac Mini, and iPads Pro; all were priced significantly higher than their predecessors.

这并不奇怪：Mac系列的价格多年来一直在上涨，而iPad专业版则是平衡的强大的入门级产品起价329美元Mac和iPads Pro的现实是它们是利基产品，而利基客户愿意为更能满足其需求的产品支付更高的价格。1

然而，上周的活动更有趣的是，苹果公司的新增长故事比宣布的产品更加清晰，是专注于Apple零售业的中间十分钟。

这就是苹果CEO蒂姆库克介绍该细分市场的方式：

现在，Apple有一些方法可以激发用户的创造力，包括我们的商店The mission of our stores has always been to enrich the lives of our customers by educating and inspiring them to go even further我们进一步发挥其创造力的新方法之一是通过我们今天的Apple会议。

今天在苹果是宣布新闻稿2017年4月，并在此期间获得了第一次在舞台上提及iPhone X主题演讲不过，上周的演讲真的突出了如何今天在苹果is perhaps the best way to understand the way Apple thinks about its growth opportunities going forward零售高级副总裁Angela Ahrendts解释说：

我们从苹果DNA的核心事物开始，人们最常使用他们的设备并信任我们教他们的东西，如摄影，音乐，游戏和应用程序开发随着Apple继续开发像Everyone Can Code和Everyone Can Create这样的课程，我们将这些课程和技术融入到我们的课程中今天在苹果为所有客户编程，包括教育工作者和企业家我们在所有505个零售点举办了所有会议，例如几个月前在澳门开设的Apple Cotai Central在这里,顾客可以参加一个会议照片走,他们学习新的特性,如肖像照明和深度控制,而探索城市在一个真正的社会的方式……

随着我们继续推动旗舰店的设计成为更受欢迎的聚会场所，我们也在为本地人才创造全球平台摄影师，音乐家，开发者和艺术家分享他们的创意礼物......

自从今天在Apple推出以来，仅18个月前，我们每周举办超过18,000场会议，全球有数百万好奇的创意人士参加随着Apple Store应用程序的最新版本，我们让您更容易找到附近发生的事情只需点击“会话”选项卡，您就会看到您所在城市Apple会议中最新的今日聚光灯它还会根据您拥有的产品以及Music Labs，Kids Hour和Photo Walks等签名程序推荐会话。

什么是惊人的今天在苹果它的雄心壮志与其价格相结合：免费Of course that is not true in practice, because one needs an Apple device to realistically participate (and an Apple ID to even sign up), but that raises the question as to what Apple customers are paying for when they buy an Apple product? Apple’s point in highlighting今天在苹果不仅仅是客户购买iPhone或iPad或Mac,而是买进一个正在进行的与苹果的关系。

Apple的社交网络

更广泛地说，这解释了首席财务官Luca Maestri的推理在收益电话会议上不再报告销量:

第三，从12月季度开始，我们将不再提供iPhone，iPad和Mac的单位销售数据正如我们多次说过的那样，我们的目标是制作丰富人们生活的优质产品和服务，并提供无与伦比的客户体验，使我们的用户高度满意，忠诚和敬业。

“订婚”是一个有趣的词语选择，因为参与是一个通常与Facebook等社交网络相关的目标原因很明显：用户越多，他们使用社交网络的次数就越多，这意味着他们可以展示的广告越多社交网络通过聚合来自供应商和用户自己的内容来实现这一目标，并不断调整算法以试图让您轻扫和点击，然后再回扫滑动并点击更多内容。

这是一个对苹果来说一直很陌生的世界：它过去在平台上促进社交互动的尝试只是作为笑话的屁股（iTunes Ping任何人？）这并不奇怪：Apple的产品文化和方法是对立的创造和发展传统社交网络所必需的文化和方法Apple wants total control and to release as perfect a product it can; a social network requires an iterative approach that is designed to deal with constant variability and edge cases.

不过，这就是原因今天在苹果令人信服的是，特别是Ahrendts提到以“真实的社交方式”将人们聚集在一起 - 而她无法做到强调“真实”这个词更强烈Apple实际上正试图在现实世界中建立一个由Apple推动和控制的社交网络，并打赌客户将继续付费以获得访问权限。

Apple的每用户平均收入

要非常清楚，我不是在争论今天在苹果是饱和的智能手机市场或苹果达到价格上涨限制的答案The company is clearly relying on “Services” revenue, which mostly means App Store revenue, a huge portion of which comes from in-app purchases for games, as well as a growing number of subscriptions, some provided by Apple (like Apple Music), but most by 3rd parties.

然而，这个“真实世界社交网络”的框架确实提供了对苹果公司新报告不足之处的洞察力。It is all well and good that Apple will now separate Services revenue and its associated cost-of-sales starting next quarter; more insight into Apple’s growth driver is clearly appropriate.

但是，缺少的是相当于服务的单位销售额，特别是Apple拥有的活跃客户数量，以及相关的每用户收入这是确切的指标,关系到社交媒体公司,和在某种程度上,苹果的增长来源于不断地将其现有用户随着时间的推移,它是有意义的。

可以肯定的是，一个准确的数字将非常包括设备收入：我列出了Apple的中世纪该公司的增长是基于通过更高的平均销售价格从现有用户群获得更多资金，销售更多设备（即Apple Watch, AirPods, HomePod, etc.), and increased services revenue; to the extent Apple is correct that focusing on only devices misses the story, it is also correct that focusing on only Services is misleading as well.

Apple的优先事项

不幸的是库克已经宣布去年2月的另一个财报电话that this number isn’t coming:

我们没有发布用户号码，因为我们认为正确看待它的方法是查看有源设备这也是一个最准确的测量这就是我们背后的想法。

There are two problems with this: first, while an active devices number is helpful, the 1.3 billion number that Apple announced on that February earnings call was the first in two years; it has not been updated sinceSecond, the number of active devices may be easier for Apple to measure, but it simply isn’t as valuable to investors as the number of active users for reasons Cook stated himself last week:

我们的安装基数正以两位数增长，从生态系统的角度和客户忠诚度来看，这对我们来说可能是一个更为重要的指标，等等The second thing is this is a little bit like if you go to the market and you push your cart up to the cashier and she says, or he says how many units you have in there? It doesn’t matter a lot how many units there are in there in terms of the overall value of what’s in the cart.

It’s not just “overall value”, though: it’s how many customers there are total, and the ways in which their cart is changing — i.e什么是已安装的基础，库克所指的增长率是多少？

不幸的是，Apple似乎最关心的是顶线和底线在库克的评论之前，梅斯特里说：

最后，我们从财务角度做出决策，试图优化我们的收入和毛利率，我们认为这是我们投资者最关心的焦点。

任何人，尤其是苹果公司的投资者，都很难抱怨苹果公司的收入和毛利率，现在已经很多年了然而，这些年来，收入和利润均以单位销售为基础。

Now Apple is arguing that unit sales is the wrong way to understand its business, but refuses to provide the numbers that underlie the story it wants to tell是非常公平的投资者怀疑:这两个是否真的苹果可以评估独立于设备的销售,以及公司是否为所有精美的言辞和演示阶段,是真正的优先推动收入和利润,而不是自己的收入和利润I do think the answer is the former; I just wish Apple would show it with its reporting.

  1. 嗯，理论上无论如何，在MacBook Pro的情况下[↩︎]

IBM的旧剧本

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了解Red Hat是如何从开源软件构建数十亿美元业务的最好方法是从IBM开始创始人鲍勃杨解释说2014年的All Things Open会议：

它没有灵丹妙药与客户保持联系，理解和思考机会在哪里是一项艰苦的工作What are other suppliers in the market not doing for those customers that you can do better for them? One of the great examples to give you an idea of what inspired us very early on, and by very early on we’re talking Mark Ewing and I doing not enough business to pay the rent on our apartments, but yet we were paying attention to [Lou Gerstner and] IBM…

Gerstner进入IBM并在三年内扭亏为盈这真是奇迹...... Gerstner的洞察力是他到处与一大批IBM客户交谈，发现客户实际上并不喜欢他的任何产品They were ok, but whenever he would sit down with any given customer there was always someone who did that product better than IBM did…He said, “So why are you buying from IBM?” The customers were saying “IBM is the only technology company with an office everywhere that we do business,” and as a result Gerstner understood that he wasn’t selling products he was selling a service.

He talked about that publicly, and so at Red Hat we go, “OK, we don’t have a product to sell because ours is open source and everyone can use our innovations as quickly as we can, so we’re not really selling a product, but Gerstner at IBM is telling us the customers don’t buy products, they buy services, things that make themselves more successful.” And so that was one of our early insights into what we were doing was this idea that we were actually in the services business, even back when we were selling shrink-wrapped boxes of Linux, we saw that as an interim step to getting us big enough that we could sign service contracts with real customers.

昨天Young的故事在完整的时候出现了IBM收购了Red Hatfor $34 billion, a 60% premium over Red Hat’s Friday closing priceIBM希望它也可以完全循环：重新获得Gerstner的魔力，这不仅取决于他对服务的洞察力，还取决于企业计算的长期转变。

Gerstner如何改变IBM

我之前曾写过关于Gerstner的IBM转变，在Satya Nadella试图在微软做同样的事情，以及Gerstner认为虽然文化极难改变，但改变自然是不可能的。从微软的垄断宿醉：

The great thing about a monopoly is that a company can do anything, because there is no competition; the bad thing is that when the monopoly is finished the company is still capable of doing anything at a mediocre level, but nothing at a high one because it has become fat and lazy换句话说，对于以前的垄断，“大”是唯一真正有区别的资产这是Gerstner关于制定IBM未来的关键见解......在Gerstner的愿景中，只有IBM有广度来提供解决方案而不是产品。

然而，以提供解决方案为基础的战略需要一个问题，另一个使得Gerstner的转变成为可能的因素是互联网By the mid-1990s businesses were faced with a completely new set of technologies that were nominally similar to their IT projects of the last fifteen years, but in fact completely different格斯特纳描述了问题/机遇谁说大象不能跳舞：

如果战略家是正确的，并且云确实成为所有这些互动的中心，它将导致两次革命 - 一次是计算，另一次是商业它会改变计算，因为它会将工作负载从PC和其他所谓的客户端设备转移到公司内部的大型企业系统和云 - 网络本身这将扭转使PC成为创新和投资中心的趋势 - 这对于那些在PC技术上发财的IT公司具有​​明显的影响。

更重要的是，云描绘的大规模全球连接将在数百万企业，学校，政府和消费者之间的互动中创造一场革命它将改变商业，教育，医疗保健，政府服务等等自20世纪60年代引入数字数据处理以来，它将引发最大的业务转型浪潮......“信息高速公路”和“电子商务”等术语不足以描述我们所谈论的内容我们需要一个词汇表来帮助行业，我们的客户，甚至IBM员工了解我们看到的内容超越了对数字信息和在线商务的访问它将重塑企业与人之间的每一种重要关系和互动最终，我们的营销和互联网团队提出了“电子商务”一词。

那些我这个年纪或更大的人肯定记得很快就会成为IBM无处不在的'e'：

IBM的电子商务营销活动

IBM went on to spend over $5 billion marketing “e-business”, an investment Gerstner called “one of the finest jobs of brand positions I’ve seen in my career.” It worked because it was true: large enterprises, most of which had only ever interacted with customers indirectly through a long chain of wholesalers and distributors and retailers suddenly had the capability — the responsibility, even — of interacting with end users directly这可以像网站，电子商务或客户支持一样简单，更不用说能够实时利用价值链的所有其他部分技术挑战和业务可能性 - 问题集，如果你愿意 - 是巨大的，而Gerstner将IBM定位为可以解决这些新问题的公司。

It was an attractive proposition for nearly all non-tech companies: the challenge with the Internet in the 1990s was that the underlying technologies were so varied and quite immature; different problem spaces had different companies hawking products, many of them startups with no experience working with large enterprises, and even if they had better products no IT department wanted to manage and integrate a multitude of vendorsIBM, on the other hand, offered the proverbial “one throat to choke”; they promised to solveall与这种新奇的互联网相关的问题，此外，IT部门对IBM很熟悉和熟悉。

这也是一种策略，它有可能将利润从价值链中挤出：

The actual technologies underlying the Internet were open and commoditized, which meant IBM could form a point of integration and extract profits, which is exactly what happened: IBM’s revenue and growth increased steadily — often rapidly! — over the next decade, as the company managed everything from datacenters to internal networks to external websites to e-commerce operations to all the middleware that tied it together (made by IBM, naturally, which was where the company made most of its profits)IBM负责一切，慢慢锁定其客户，并再次变得肥胖和懒惰。

当IBM失去了云

在最后一段谁说大象不能跳舞？格斯特纳写道，他的继任者萨姆帕米萨诺：

我一直是个局外人但那是我的工作我知道Sam Palmisano有机会与过去建立联系，这是我永远无法做到的His challenge will be to make them without going backward; to know that the centrifugal forces that drove IBM to be inward-looking and self-absorbed still lie powerful in the company.

帕米萨诺悲惨地失败了，没有比这更好的例子了他2010年的公告公司的2015年路线图这是以承诺到2015年实现20美元/股的利润为中心的帕米萨诺当时说：

[共识认为]产品周期将推动行业增长The industry is consolidating and at the end of the day consumer technology will obliterate all computer science over the last 20 years我是东海岸人我们的观点略有不同产品周期不会推动可持续增长未来的客户将需要可量化的投资回报他们不打算购买时尚和潮流企业将拥有自己独特的模式你无法做我们在云端做的事情。

Amazon Web Services, meanwhile, had launched a full four years and two months before Palmisano’s declaration; it was the height of folly to not simply mock the idea of the cloud, but to commit to a profit number in the face of an existential threat that was predicated on spending absolutely massive amounts of money on infrastructure.1

Gerstner确切地确定了Palmisano错误的原因：他“内向和自我吸收”，这使他无法想象企业解决方案比IBM的定制解决方案更好但是，这是错过了重点就像我写的一样每日更新回到2014年当公司正式放弃2015年的利润目标时：

The reality…is that the businesses IBM served — and the entire reason IBM had a market — didn’t buy customized technological solutions to make themselves feel good about themselves; they bought them because they helped them accomplish their business objectivesGerstner的关键洞察力是，许多公司遇到的问题只有IBM可以解决，而不是定制的解决方案是最终的全部 - 全部因此，随着普遍提供的云服务缓慢但肯定变得足够好，IBM不再垄断解决问题。

The company has spent the years since then claiming it is committed to catching up in the public cloud, but the truth is that Palmisano sealed the company’s cloud fate when he failed to invest a decade ago; indeed, one of the most important takeaways from the Red Hat acquisition is the admission that IBM’s public cloud efforts are effectively dead.

IBM的斗争

那么IBM收购Red Hat究竟是什么意思呢？如果有什么与Lou Gerstner有关的话呢？

Well first off, IBM hasn’t been doing very well for quite some time now: last year’s annual revenue was the lowest since 1997, part-way through Gerstner’s transformation; of course, as这张ZDNet文章来自这张图指出，1997年的790亿美元是今天的1200亿美元。

IBM的收入下降
从 网易科技

The company did finally return to growth earlier this year after 22 straight quarters of decline, only to decline again last quarter: IBM’s ancient mainframe business was up 2%, and its traditional services business, up 3%, but Technology Services and Cloud Platforms were flat, and Cognitive Solutions (i.eWatson）下跌了5％。

Meanwhile, the aformentioned commitment to the cloud has mostly been an accounting fiction derived from re-classifying existing businesses; the more pertinent number is the company’s capital expenditures, which in 2017 were $3.2 billion, down from 2016’s $3.6 billion.Charles Fitzgerald在Platformonomics上写道：

资本支出由云播放器支付

我们认为IBM的CAPEX正在慢慢落后，就像公司本身一样IBM一直花很多资本支出(每年高达70亿美元的更辉煌的过去),从云时代之前,所以我们不能承担花的绝对星等朝云三巨头都超过了IBM的资本支出花在2012/13In resisting the upward pull on CAPEX we see from all the other cloud vendors, IBM simply isn’t playing the hyper-scale cloud game.

红帽收购

这就是收购Red Hat的地方：虽然IBM很乐意拥有该公司的现金生成RHEL订阅业务，真正的奖项是Openshift，一个用于构建和管理Kubernetes容器的软件套件我在2016年写了关于Kubernetes的文章Google如何挑战A​​WS：

In 2014谷歌宣布Kubernetes，一个基于谷歌内部的开源容器集群管理器博格提供Google大规模基础设施的服务，使任何Google服务都可以即时访问所需的所有计算能力而无需担心细节中央规则是容器，其中我在2014年写过：工程师在标准接口的基础上构建，保持（几乎）完全的灵活性，而无需了解底层硬件或操作系统（这是虚拟机之外的进化步骤）。

Kubernetes与Borg的不同之处在于它完全可移植：它在AWS上运行，在Azure上运行，在Google Cloud Platform上运行，在内部部署基础架构上运行，甚至可以在您的房子中运行More relevantly to this article, it is the perfect antidote to AWS’ ten year head-start in infrastructure-as-a-service: while Google has made great strides in its own infrastructure offerings, the potential impact of Kubernetes specifically and container-based development broadly is to make irrelevant which infrastructure provider you use难怪它是有史以来发展最快的开源项目之一：没有锁定。

This is exactly what IBM is counting on; the company wrote in它的新闻稿宣布了这笔交易：

此次收购汇集了一流的混合云提供商，使公司能够安全地将所有业务应用程序迁移到云端今天的公司已经在使用多个云然而，研究表明，80％的业务工作负载尚未迁移到云端，受到当今云市场专有性的阻碍这可以防止数据和应用程序跨多个云的可移植性，多云环境中的数据安全性以及一致的云管理。

IBM和Red Hat将强烈将解决这个问题并加速混合动力采用多重云它们将共同帮助客户更快地创建云原生业务应用程序，跨多个公共云和私有云提高数据和应用程序的可移植性和安全性，所有这些都具有一致的云管理在这样做的过程中，他们将利用他们在关键技术方面的共同领导，例如Linux，容器，Kubernetes，多云管理以及云管理和自动化。

This is the bet: while in the 1990s the complexity of the Internet made it difficult for businesses to go online, providing an opening for IBM to sell solutions, today IBM argues the reduction of cloud computing to three centralized providers makes businesses reluctant to commit to any one of themIBM认为它可以再次提供解决方案，与Red Hat合作构建可无缝连接私有数据中心和所有公共云的产品。

IBM的毫无准备的思想

The best thing going for this strategy is its pragmatism: IBM gave up its potential to compete in the public cloud a decade ago, faked it for the last five years, and now is finally admitting its best option is to build on top of everyone else’s cloudsThat, though, gets at the strategy’s weakness: it seems more attuned to IBM’s needs than potential customersAfter all, if an enterprise is concerned about lock-in, is IBM really a better option? And if the answer is that “Red Hat is open”, at what point do increasingly sophisticated businesses build it themselves?

The problem for IBM is that they are not building solutions for clueless IT departments bewildered by a dizzying array of open technologies: instead they are building on top of three cloud providers, one of which (Microsoft) is specializing in precisely the sort of hybrid solutions that IBM is targetingThe difference is that because Microsoft has actually spent the money on infrastructure their ability to extract money from the value chain is correspondingly higher; IBM has to pay rent:

Perhaps the bigger issue, though, goes back to Gerstner: before IBM could take advantage of the Internet, the company needed an overhaul of its culture; the extent to which the company will manage to leverage its acquisition of Red Hat will depend on a similar transformationUnfortunately, that seems unlikely; current CEO Ginni Rometty, who took over the company at the beginning of 2012, not only supported Palmisano’s disastrous Roadmap 2015, she actually undertook most of the cuts and financial engineering necessary to make it happen, before finally giving up in 2014Meanwhile the company’s most prominent marketing has been around Watson, the capabilities of which have been significantly oversold; it’s not a surprise sales are shrinking after令人失望的推出。

Gerstner知道转变很难：他称自己在互联网的到来“幸运”就他在IBM的任期而言但是，正如路易斯·巴斯德所说，“财富有利于准备好的思想。”Gerstner已经确定了一种策略并开始改变IBM的文化，以便在问题到来时，公司做好了准备Today IBM claims it has found a problem; it is an open question if the problem actually exists, but unfortunately there is even less evidence that IBM is truly ready to take advantage of it if it does.

  1. 这个脚注是重复的微软的垄断宿醉; Gerstner predicted the public cloud in the first appendix of his book, which was published in 2003, four years before AWS was launched:

    把所有这一切——出现大规模计算网格,自主技术的发展,使这些系统更自我管理,并计算设备的扩散到的生活结构和行业它表明一个it行业的主要发展历史这一改变IT公司将他们的产品推向市场它将改变他们销售给谁以及客户认为其“供应商”。这种发展是一些人所谓的“效用”计算。

    基本的想法是，企业很快就能获得与水或电力相同的信息技术They don’t now own a waterworks or power plant, and soon they’ll no longer have to buy, house, and maintain any aspect of a traditional computing environment: The processing, the storage, the applications, the systems management, and the security will all be provided over the Net as a service—on demand.

    The value proposition to customers is compelling: fewer assets; converting fixed costs to variable costs; access to unlimited computing resources on an as-needed basis; and the chance to shed the headaches of technology cycles, upgrades, maintenance, integration, and management.

    Also, in a post-September 11, 2001, world in which there’s much greater urgency about the security of information and systems, on-demand computing would provide access to an ultra-secure infrastructure and the ability to draw on systems that are dispersed— creating a new level of immunity from a natural disaster or an event that could wipe out a traditional, centralized data center[↩︎]

Facebook和虚拟现实的问题

发表于

不管你信不信，Facebook实际上已经让虚拟现实变得更好，至少从一个角度来看。

My first VR device was PlayStation VR, and the calculus was straightforward: I owned a PS4 and did not own a Windows PC, which means I had a device that was compatible with the PlayStation VR and did not have one that was compatible with the Oculus Rift or the HTC Vive.

我只使用过一次。

PlayStation VR及其所有必需的配件和电线

The problem is that actually hooking up the VR headset was way too complicated with way too many wires, and given that I lived at the time in a relatively small apartment, it wasn’t viable to leave the entire thing hooked up when I wasn’t using it我终于搬到了一个新的地方，但坦率地说，我不记得我是否打开包装。

然后,今年早些时候,Facebook推出了眼睛。

Oculus Go是一款独立设备

Go运动硬件与中端智能手机相当，价格为199美元Critically, it was a completely standalone device: no console or PC necessary当然，质量并不是那么好，但便利性很重要，特别是像我这样偶尔玩电子游戏或看电视或电影的人穿上翼装或看一些NBA亮点非常有趣，而且非常容易至少只要我有“走出去”，并且被指控很难想象给别的第二个想法。

虚拟现实利基

这是虚拟现实的第一个挑战：它是一个目的地，无论是在虚拟地方，还是批判性地，在现实世界中审议行动的最终结果一个人不会偶然体验虚拟现实：它是一种选择，而且经常 - 就像我的PlayStation VR一样 - 是一个相当复杂的选择。

这不一定是个问题：去看电影是一种选择，就像在控制台或PC上玩视频游戏一样Both are very legitimate ways to make money: global box office revenue in 2017 was $40.6 billion U.S., and billions more were made on all the other distribution channels in a movie’s typical release window; video games have long since been an even bigger deal, generating $109 billion globally last year.

不过，这比智能手机等产生的收入少了一个数量级Apple, for example, sold $158 billion worth of iPhones over the last year; the entire industry was worth around $478.7 billion in 2017这种差异不应该让人感到惊讶：与电影或视频游戏不同，智能手机是您前往目的地的伴奏，而不是目的地。

That may seem counterintuitive at first: isn’t it a good thing to be the center of one’s attention? That center, though, can only ever be occupied by one thing, and the addressable market is constrained by time假设有八个小时的睡眠时间，八个小时用于工作，几个小时用于实际导航生活，最多只需要六个小时来争取这就是为什么旨在增加生命而不是取代它的设备一直更具吸引力：每一个醒着的时刻都值得解决。

In other words, the virtual reality market is fundamentally constrained by its very nature: because it is about the temporary exit from real life, not the addition to it, there simply isn’t nearly as much room for virtual reality as there is for any number of other tech products.

Facebook头疼的收购

顺便提一下，这包括Facebook：社交网络的力量是违反直觉的，就像虚拟现实是违反直觉的，但却恰恰相反No one plans to visit Facebook: who among us has “Facebook Time” set on our calendar? And yet the vast majority of people who are able — over 2 billion worldwide — visit Facebook every single day, for minutes at a time.

事实是，每个人都有意向性时刻之间的大量时间：排队，乘坐公共汽车，使用浴室That is Facebook’s domain, and it is far more valuable than it might seem at first: not only is the sheer amount of time available more than you might think, it is also a time when the human mind is, by definition, less engaged; we visit Facebook seeking stimulation, and don’t much care if that stimulation comes from friends and family, desperate media companies, or advertisers that have paid for the right他们在过去一年中获得了480亿美元的收入 - 超过全球票房收入，占视频游戏总收入的近一半。

让你大吃一惊的是Facebook偶然登陆这个金矿：在这个十年初，公司拼命想要建立一个平台，即第三方开发商可以与客户建立直接联系的地方这一直是硅谷梦想家的既定目标，但总的来说，对平台的追求有点像破坏的宣言：广泛的修辞，但实际上很少和很远。

Facebook就是这样：该公司的盈利能力和估值的大幅上涨 - 尽管有三个月 - 已经取决于该公司不作为一个平台，至少不是第三方开发者的平台毕竟，为第三方开发者提供空间是为了不为广告商提供空间，至少在移动设备上，并且移动设备已经为Facebook提供了填补空白空间的平台和，正如我在2013年所指出的那样，移动广告单元不可能更好。

This is why Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus back in 2014 was such a head-scratcher; I was immediately skeptical, writing in面对不是未来：

Setting aside implementation details for a moment, it’s difficult to think of a bigger contrast than a watch and an Occulus headset that you, in the words of [Facebook CEO Mark] Zuckerberg, “put on in your home.” What makes mobile such a big deal relative to the PC is the fact it is with you everywhere虚拟现实耳机实际上是一个回归的计算经验是整齐隔离成你故意做的事情。

然而，扎克伯格首先未能在PC上构建平台，然后用手机惨遭失败, would not be satisfied with being merely an app; he would have his platform, and virtual reality would give him the occasion.

Facebook的Oculus Drama

当Oculus收购宣布时扎克伯格写道：

我们的使命是让世界更加开放和联系在过去几年中，这主要意味着构建移动应用程序，帮助您与您关心的人分享我们还有很多关于移动设备的事情，但是在这一点上我们觉得我们可以开始关注接下来的平台，以实现更有用，更有趣和个性化的体验......

回想起来，这是一个引人入胜的声明当然有移动的快乐无忧的解雇,Facebook的估值将增加十倍,因为Facebook只有一个应用程序,而不是一个平台然而，更为引人注目的是扎克伯格的评价，Facebook现在可以把重点放在其他地方：在国家赞助的干涉揭露以及Facebook对社会影响的合理问题之后，它似乎相当误导。

Oculus的使命是让您体验不可能的事物他们的技术开辟了全新体验的可能性沉浸式游戏将是第一次，而Oculus已经在这里有一个不会改变的大计划，我们希望加速Rift受到游戏社区的高度期待，开发人员对构建此平台非常感兴趣我们将专注于帮助Oculus构建他们的产品并发展合作伙伴关系以支持更多游戏Oculus将继续在Facebook内独立运营以实现这一目标。

这与Oculus和Facebook本周新闻报道的原因有关;TechCrunch报道that Oculus co-founder Brendan Iribe left the company because of a dispute about the next-generation of computer-based VR headsets; Facebook said that computer-based VR was still a part of future plans.

但这只是一个开始在游戏之后，我们将使Oculus成为许多其他体验的平台......这确实是一个新的交流平台通过感受真实存在，您可以与生活中的人分享无限的空间和体验想象一下，不仅可以在线与朋友分享，还可以分享整个体验和冒险经历这些只是一些潜在的用途通过与整个行业的开发人员和合作伙伴合作，我们可以共同构建更多有一天，我们相信这种身临其境的增强现实将成为数十亿人日常生活的一部分。

但是，这让人觉得TechCrunch正在做些什么Microsoft, to its dismay, found out with the Xbox One that serving gamers and serving consumers generally are two very different propositions, and any move perceived by the former to be in favor of the latter will hurt sales specifically and the development of a thriving ecosystem generally然而，Facebook的问题在于公司的基本性质 - 更不用说扎克伯格的平台抱负 - 依赖于尽可能多的客户。

我怀疑这不是Oculus创始人的首要任务：虚拟现实是一个难题，即使是最好的技术 - 毫无疑问，意味着连接到PC - 也不够好为此，鉴于他们的优先级首先是虚拟现实并达到第二，我怀疑Oculus的创始人宁愿花更多的时间让PC虚拟现实变得更好，也不会花更多的时间来销售温暖的智能手机内部。

Facebook和Oculus的问题

尽管如此，我不能否认Oculus Go虽然可能功能不足，但在重要方面 - 特别是便利性 - 使用技术人员连续低估正如我在开始时所指出的那样，Facebook的影响力，特别是它希望尽可能多地吸引用户和控制整个体验 - 对独立设备满意的两种愿望 - 可能确实使虚拟现实比Oculus仍然是一家独立公司更为普遍。

不可避免的是 - 从Facebook收购Oculus的那一天起，总是不可避免的是，这将是Facebook所做的一次收购，这是一个错误如果Facebook想要在虚拟现实中出现，那么最好的路线就像移动设备一样：成为一款应用程序曝光的服务，可在所有设备上使用，由广告资助我一直觉得扎克伯格感到痛苦，不仅仅是在2014年，但即使在今天，从他在主题演讲和收益电话中的评论来看，似乎无法或不愿接受Facebook在科技价值链中的地位这一基本事实。

事实上，扎克伯格围绕虚拟现实的言论背叛的不仅仅是缺乏战略意识：他的主题演讲在2016年的Oculus开发者大会上，也就是在上次大选前一个月，回想起来，该公司关于其对世界影响的天真广告：

我们将虚拟现实作为下一个主要的计算平台在Facebook，这是我们真正致力于的事情你知道，我是一名工程师，我认为工程思维的一个关键部分就是这种希望和这种信念，你可以采用任何系统，并使它比现在好得多任何东西，无论是硬件，软件，公司，开发者生态系统，你都可以采取任何措施并使其更好，更好正如我今天看到的那样，我看到很多人都有这种工程思维我们都知道我们想要改进的地方以及我们希望虚拟现实最终得到的地方......

我当时写的：

也许我低估了扎克伯格：他不想为了拥有一个平台而想要一个平台，他的重点不一定是在Facebook上的业务相反，他似乎开始创造乌托邦：一个比我们现在居住的世界更好的世界并且，获得拥有一家虚拟现实公司也许是到达那里最明显的途径......

毋庸置疑，2016年表明这种方法的结果并不是很有希望：当我们的个体现实在现实世界中相互碰撞时，结果对于将社会团结在一起的规范具有极大的破坏性Make no mistake, Zuckerberg gave an impressive demo of what can happen when Facebook controls your eyes in virtual reality; what concerns me is the real world results of Facebook controlling everyone’s attention with the sole goal of telling each of us what we want to hear.

The following years have only borne out the validity of this analysis: of all the myriad of problems faced by Facebook — some warranted, and some unfair — the most concerning is the seeming inability of the company to even countenance the possibility that it is not an obvious force for good.

Facebook的不匹配

尽管如此，除了Facebook之外，虚拟现实比您想象的更具吸引力在虚拟现实提供的完全身临其境的环境中，有一些经验确实更好，仅仅因为未来更接近游戏机（最好）而不是智能手机没有什么值得道歉的剩下的更引人注目,是增强现实技术:承诺是,像智能手机一样,它是一个伴奏你的一天,不是中心,这意味着其潜在用途更大为此，您可以确定任何Facebook高管都乐于解释为什么虚拟现实和Oculus是朝这个方向迈出的一步。

这在技术上可能是真实的，但同样，服务的基本性质和商业模式都是错误的Facebook制作的任何东西都必然偏向于每个人都可以访问，这在创建新市场时是个问题Before technology is mature integrated products advance more rapidly, and can be sold at a premium; it follows that market makers are more likely to have hardware-based business models that segment the market, not service-based ones that try and reach everyone.

为此，很难对苹果最终超越Oculus和其他所有人的机会感到乐观The best way to think about Apple has always been as a personal computer company; the only difference over time is that computers have grown ever more personal, moving from the desk to the lap to the pocket and today to the wrist (and ears)面对下一步是合乎逻辑的，没有哪家公司能够在实现这一目标所必需的硬件工程方面更好地证明自己。

至关重要的是，苹果公司也拥有合适的商业模式：它可以销售几乎没有足够好的设备，仅仅因为它们来自Apple而购买的用户群，并从那里找出一个用例而无需触及每个人我对Apple Watch的这种方法非常批评 -从发布主题演讲中可以清楚地看到that Apple had no idea what this cool piece of hardware engineering would be used for — but, as the Apple Watch has settled into its niche as a health and fitness device and slowly expanded from there, I am more appreciative of the value of simply shipping a great piece of hardware and letting the real world figure it out.

Facebook的基本问题就在于：公司开始使用一个用例 - 社交网络，或者“联系人”来使用他们喜欢的短语 - 并退出硬件和商业模式的方式,就是你期望从一个支持app的服务,相反的你期望从一个实际的平台In other words, to be a platform is not a choice; it is destiny, and Facebook’s has always run in a different direction.

家庭之战

发表于

If the first stage of competition in consumer technology was the race to be the computer users went to (won by Microsoft and the PC), and the second was to be the computer users carried with them (won by Apple in terms of profits, and Google in terms of marketshare), the outlines of the current battle came sharply into focus over the last month: what company will win the race to be the computer within which users live?

公告

该第一次公告三个星期前来自亚马逊：一个新的高端Echo Plus，Echo Dots，几个用于第三方立体声和扬声器（或其他回音）的Echo设备，以及更新的Echo Show（即带屏幕的回声）所有标准票价，然后事情变得古怪：该公司还宣布了微波炉，挂钟，智能插头，汽车设备和电视调谐器/ DVR，所有都内置Alexa。

接下来是Facebook：本周早些时候该公司启动门户，一个可以跟踪面孔的视频聊天设备，具有Alexa集成功能，以及一些第三方应用程序，如Spotify该设备是据报道延迟了去年春天，该公司正在努力应对剑桥分析公司丑闻的影响，而是在数据曝光丑闻中推出。

第三是谷歌：昨天该公司宣布谷歌家中心——谷歌与相连的一个屏幕上,洛杉矶回声显示——以及像素3电话和像素的平板电脑,随着巢家庭自动化产品之间更深层次的整合和谷歌的生态系统。

而且，当然还有Apple，它在今年早些时候推出了HomePod增加了一些新功能上个月有一个软件更新。

Each of these companies brings different strengths, weaknesses, go-to-market strategies, and business models to the fight for the home; a question that is just as important of who will win, though, is to what degree it matters.

优势

这些公司在家中的每一个优势都与其他地方的成功密切相关。

亚马逊：亚马逊应该排在第一位，这在很大程度上是因为他们是第一位的：谷歌收购了Nest在2014年，Nest本身就是以智能手机为连接家庭的中心然而，亚马逊凭借其手机故障，可以自由地想象连接家庭可能是什么样的独立实体，导致该公司在2014年底推出Echo扬声器和Alexa助手。

我曾是立即乐观，部分是因为Echo是失败的Fire手机所没有的一切：它的成功不取决于硬件和软件的整合，亚马逊等服务公司的改进从根本上不适合，而是硬件和服务的集成这也有助于亚马逊拥有一个有意义的商业模式：一方面，Alexa的投资将为AWS的服务带来回报，另一方面，亚马逊的目标是占据所有经济活动的一部分根据定义，我们的目标是捕捉在家中购买和消费的不断增加的购买份额，而Alexa可以让这更容易。

导致早期在Alexa的生态系统的发展,无论是“技能”,也包含Alexa的设备正如我在2016年所指出的，这使得Alexa亚马逊的操作系统，今天Alexa有超过30,000技能and is built into20,000台设备。

但是，这让亚马逊最近宣布更有趣：亚马逊不仅仅满足于成为第三方设备的语音助手，它还直接制造这些设备这可能是亚马逊最强大的优势：因为亚马逊是如此占主导地位，公司可以拥有自己的蛋糕，也可以吃掉它That is, just as Amazon.com is both a marketplace and a channel for Amazon to sell its own products, Alexa is both a necessary component of 3rd-party devices and also a driver of Amazon’s own devices; the company faces no strategy taxes in its drive to win.

谷歌：Google was very late to respond to Alexa; the original Google Home wasn’t announced until May 2016, and didn’t ship until November 2016, a full two years after the EchoThe company was, as I noted above — and as you would expect for a market leader — locked into the smartphone paradigm; an app plus Nest was its answer, until Alexa made it clear this was wrong.

Google, though, has started to catch up, and the reason is obvious: if a home device is about the integration of hardware and services, it follows that the company that is best at services — consumer services, anyways — would be very well-placed to succeed该公司在行动/技能方面仍然落后于Alexa（大约2,000）和第三方设备（超过5,000），但谷歌的核心功能非常强大，可以自行销售设备还有更多的回声出售,但是Google Home正在迎头赶上。

为此，一个更有趣的外卖昨天的谷歌事件谷歌在多大程度上依靠自己的服务来销售其设备：该公司不仅宣传了Google智能助理的帮助，而且还突出了YouTube的特色，特别是在谷歌家庭中心的背景下这特别值得注意，因为Google阻碍了Echo Show的YouTube功能，清楚地记住这个产品Google is also including six months of YouTube Premium with a Google Home Hub; indeed, every Google product included some sort of YouTube subscription product.

苹果：HomePod正是您对Apple的期望：最高价的最佳硬件声音非常好，如果你买两个，自然会更好HomePod也是 - 正如您对苹果的期望 - 再次锁定在Apple生态系统中;1这从一个角度来看是一个弱点,但这是实力部分,和现实是人们更致力于他们的iphone——因此苹果的生态系统——比国内扬声器,这意味着许多客户这个限制是一种力量。

Along those lines, Apple is clearly the most attractive option from a privacy perspective: the company doesn’t sell highly-targeted ads, has made privacy a public priority, and is thus the only choice for those nervous about having an Internet-connected microphone in their house.

Facebook的：也许Portal最引人注目的案例是历史性的在介绍中，我构建了争夺家庭的战斗，因为桌子之战和口袋之战尽管如此，还是进行了干预启用那些为物理空间而战的人具体来说,PC互联网创造了条件,从而使智能手机可以上网如此引人注目因此，智能手机为社交网络（包括消息传递）创造了条件，以渗透到生活的各个方面。

Might it be the case, then, that just as the Internet was the key to unlocking the potential of mobile, so might social networking be the key to unlocking the potential of the home? That appears to be Facebook’s bet: sure, the device has some neat hardware features, particularly the ability to follow you around the room or zoom out during a call, but neat hardware features can and will be copied如果Portal要成为Facebook的成功企业，那将是因为与Facebook社交网络的搭配使得该设备引人注目。

弱点

像往常一样，每家公司的弱点都与其实力相反：

亚马逊：亚马逊根本不擅长制造消费者产品。根据我的经验，它的设备比竞争对手差2既美观又兼顾硬件功能，如音质此外,亚马逊的强力技能的方法——这是在用户正确地说话,而不是在服务图起初——有助于更多的技能,但更令人沮丧的用户体验。

Amazon also has less of a view into an individual user’s life; sure, it knows what kind of toothpaste you prefer, but it doesn’t know when your first meeting is, or what appointments you have这尤其是谷歌，也是苹果更有价值的是：能够通过声音购买东西，还是被告知你最好离开那个早期的会议STAT？

谷歌：作为一款产品，谷歌的产品非常强大（还有其他弱点，我将在下面介绍）该公司是家用设备核心功能方面的佼佼者，它对您的了解足以真正增加实用性它的产品也比亚马逊更具吸引力和更好的表现（据我估计）。

谷歌确实面临隐私问题：公司痴迷地收集数据 - 正如前首席执行官埃里克施密特所说的那样令人毛骨悚然，这可能会妨碍公司渗透家庭的能力也就是说，到目前为止，谷歌已经逃脱了Facebook级别的审查，并明智地将相机从谷歌家庭中心排除Google knows its advantage is in providing information; it has sufficient other avenues to collect it, without putting a camera in your bedroom.

苹果：苹果公司，甚至超过谷歌，似乎因其智能手机的成功而蒙羞This isn’t a surprise: the ultimate point of Android was to be a conduit to Google’s services; it follows, then, that if home devices are about services, that Google would be more attuned to the opportunity (and the threat)Apple, on the other hand, is and always will be a product company; the company offers services to help sell its hardware, not the other way around, and it follows that the company is heavily incentivized to insist that the iPhone and Apple Watch, which both offer attractive hardware margins and are differentiated by the integration of hardware and software, are better home devices.

此外，这也解释了Apple最大的弱点：与Alexa或Google智能助理相比，Siri的相对表现The problem isn’t a matter of trivia, but rather speed and reliability与Alexa或Google智能助理相比，Siri一直比较缓慢且更有可能在转录中出错（而且，记录中，更有可能失败琐事问题）与往常一样，苹果公司是优势如何与弱点相悖的最有力的例子：正如像亚马逊这样的服务公司在产品方面的劣势是不可避免的，像苹果这样真正非凡的产品公司将面临服务方面的基本挑战。

Facebook的：如果Facebook门户网站的优势在很大程度上是理论上的，那么这些弱点是非常真实的：坦率地说，鉴于公司目前的公众情绪，该公司将推出Portal令人难以置信And, to be clear, that mood is largely deserved; I wrote last week about the company as a数据工厂，其中一个有说服力的例子就是Facebook如何让广告商使用为双因素身份验证提供的数字进行定位这有力地表明，从Facebook的角度来看，数据就是数据：一切都是输入，虽然公司可能会承诺Portal是私有的，但人们会想知道为什么有人会相信它们。

That noted, I actually suspect Portal data is private; this seems like more of an attempt to enhance the value of the Facebook graph, and thus the app’s stickiness, than to collect more data但问题是，Facebook不能期待细微差别，并且该产品的推出无论如何都支持该公司高管的论点确实脱节了。

唯一的

The various go-to-market possibilities for these four companies could very well have been folded into strengths-and-weaknesses, but they’re worth highlighting on their own, given how important an effective go-to-market strategy is in consumer products.

亚马逊：This is arguably Amazon’s biggest strength: not only does the company have direct access to the top e-commerce site in the world and one of the largest retailers period — and, because it is them, can skip a retailer mark-up — it also gets access to prime real estate:

亚马逊的头版以Echo Dot为特色

消费者心中不仅不怀疑购买Echo的位置，他们几乎不可能不知道它此外，亚马逊还有第二个伎俩：它没有库存 任何竞争对手' 谷歌或苹果的家用产品，让他们获得更多的麻烦。

谷歌：I highlighted this as a major Google weakness when it launched its #MadeByGoogle line两年前但是，为了公司的信誉，它一直在努力建立自己的渠道今天谷歌产品可用在大多数参与电子商务网站在百思买等零售商的目标,和沃尔玛The company has also invested in advertising to build awareness; there is still a long ways to go, to be sure, and go-to-market remains a Google weakness, but the company has impressed me with its work in this area.

苹果：对于Apple来说，这也是一个巨大的优势领域该公司显然拥有一个非常强大的渠道，无论是在线还是通过其零售店Both reflect Apple’s biggest strength, which is its brand: there is no company that has more loyal customers, and those customers are tremendously biased to buy an Apple product over a competitor’s; they are also more likely to be receptive to Apple’s privacy message, perhaps because they care, or perhaps because that is the message that plays to Apple’s strengths.

Facebook的：看起来公司从中学到了什么Facebook第一次失败The Facebook First, if you don’t recall, was Facebook’s ill-fated phone; it was manufactured by HTC and was discontinued within weeks of launch根本没有证据表明客户想要购买以Facebook整合为基础的产品，而且肯定没有有效的市场策略。

很难看出门户网站将如何与众不同：再次，定义的特征是相机跟随你，这个功能在理论上很酷，但奇怪的是与Facebook目前的市场认知脱节Is the company really going to spend the millions necessary to market this thing? And if so, where is it going to be available to purchase? I can see why this product was designed; I see little understanding of how it might be sold.

商业模式

这也与优势和劣势联系在一起，但与上市战略一样，值得一提的是：

亚马逊：我在上面解释了公司的商业模式：亚马逊想要拥有房屋，因为它出售了大量用于家庭的物品这就是为什么公司愿意在Alexa设备上将其作为平台和零售商的优势发挥作用：获胜与公司的最终优势有着非常直接的联系。

谷歌：这里的商业模式有点模糊：谷歌通过拍卖中出售的广告来赚钱，其中赢家是由用户选择的That is a model that doesn’t work for voice in particular; affiliate fees are less profitable given that they foreclose the possibility of an advertiser forming a direct relationship with the end user注意到，视觉界面的引入也提供了广告的可能性。

更值得注意的是YouTube的合并：YouTube已经看到越来越多的订阅服务，包括YouTube Premium，YouTube TV和YouTube音乐所有这些都与谷歌的家居设计相结合。

The most compelling business case for Google, though, is the same as it ever was: maintaining a dominant presence in all aspects of a user’s life, not just on the go (in the case of Android) but also in the home provides the data for more effective advertising in the places where it makes sense不，Google可能不会销售那么多的语音广告，但语音互动会影响搜索中显示的广告，这非常值得。

苹果：Apple的商业模式是最直接的：HomePod显然是以盈利的方式出售，这是Apple的战略的一部分增加当前的用户群的货币化这也是一个限制：如上所述，HomePod比任何竞争对手都要贵得多。

Facebook的：The social network company has the weakest business model story of all: there are no add-on services to sell, and the company has promised not to use the Portal for advertising, for now anyway最好的论点与谷歌类似：更多数据和更多参与意味着有更多机会在公司的其他产品上展示针对性更强的广告。

赢家和输家

四家公司中至少有三家公司有令人信服的案例：

亚马逊：亚马逊的先声夺人是有意义的，它与其他产品的广泛整合意味着更多人可能拥有与Alexa集成的设备而不是该公司也非常积极地赢得胜利，并拥有商业模式来证明这一点。

谷歌：我发现谷歌的案例最引人注目Product is不是唯一重要的事情，但这非常重要，谷歌是提供最佳产品的最佳人选它的服务非常出色，对用户的了解最为全面，其整体产品大幅度提升是的，它的上市比亚马逊更差，并且起步较晚，但现在还为时尚早。

苹果：Apple用户群的忠诚度不容小觑，特别是当您记得公司的用户群是所有用户群中最富裕的客户时即使他们的产品迟到并且与最糟糕的服务联系在一起，这也很难让苹果公司望出去。

Facebook的：很难想象Portal如何不会成为失败者：公司没有自然的用户群，隐私声誉很差，没有明显的商业模式或市场战略。

有关系吗？

There is one final question that overshadows all-of-this: while the home may be the current battleground in consumer technology, is it actually a distinct product area — a new epoch, if you will? When it came to mobile, it didn’t matter who had won in PCs; Microsoft ended up同时也是一个人。

特别是Apple的命运取决于是否属于这种情况如果它是一个真正的新范例，那么很难看到苹果成功它有一个非常好的扬声器，但其产品的其他一切都更糟糕另一方面，HomePod与iPhone和Apple整体生态系统的紧密联系可能是它的优点：也许智能手机仍然是最重要的。

更广泛地说，情况可能是我们正在进入一个新的战争时代，其规模更接近小冲突而不是全面的战争智能手机是什么让智能手机比PC更重要的是他们一直和你在一起的事实Sure, we spend a lot of time at home, but we also spend time outside (AR?), entertaining ourselves (TV and VR), or on the go (self-driving cars); the one constant is the smartphone, and we may never see anything the scale of the smartphone wars again.

  1. 你可以将HomePod用作AirPlay扬声器，用于像Spotify这样的服务，但是你只是为一个愚蠢的扬声器付出了过多的代价[↩︎]
  2. 我还没试过Facebook的门户网站[↩︎]

数据工厂

发表于

我一般都对陈词滥调感到恼火，“如果你不付钱就是产品”;Derek Powazek解释说为什么这种说法的含义通常是误导性的，往往是错误的，这在某种情况下尤其成问题聚合器After all, if a company’s market power flows from controlling demand — that is, users — that means said company is incentivized to keep those users satisfied; it is suppliers that have to “take it or leave it”.

This explains why the idea of an Aggregator being a monopoly is hard to get one’s head around; in the physical world where market power comes from controlling distribution — think AT&T, or your local cable company, or a utility company — there is no incentive to treat end users well, because users have no choice in the matterOn the Internet, though, where distribution is effectively free, alternatives are only a click away; Aggregators are extremely motivated to make sure that click doesn’t happen, which means giving the users what they want (the technical term is “increasing engagement”)用户是优先事项，而不是产品。

然而，就像往常一样，陈词滥调仍然存在，因为他们有一些道理Facebook和谷歌 - 两者超级聚合器- 通过广告赚钱，广告客户来到Facebook和Google，因为他们希望吸引消费者从广告客户的角度来看，用户 - 或更准确地说，获得用户的关注 - 是他们绝对付出的产品。

Views on Facebook

这种看似二分法 - 一方面优先考虑用户，另一方面销售他们的注意力 - 如果您首先将Super Aggregators视为两个截然不同的业务：聚合器和广告卖家，则更有意义To use Facebook as an example (as I will for the rest of the article, although nearly everything applies to Google as well), it is both an Aggregator that content providers clamor to reach, as well as the gatekeeper for consumers advertisers wish to sell to:

关于Facebook业务的两种观点

Still, this isn’t quite right, because Facebook the company is not simply the so-called “Blue App” but also several other businesses, most notably Instagram and WhatsApp (there is also Messenger, but given its user-facing network is the same as the Blue App I don’t really consider it to be distinct)一旦你将这些添加到混合Facebook，公司看起来像这样：

Facebook的集团

You’ll note that I’ve taken to using the term “Blue App” to distinguish Facebook the network from Facebook the company; the question, though, is what exactly is the company anyways?

数据工厂

At a superficial level, Facebook is a sort of holding company for social networks; back in 2014 I called it社会集团That, though, is very much a user-centric perspective; to that end, if you consider the advertising perspective, you could argue that Facebook the company is an advertising dashboard and sales force.

不过，我认为，卖掉Facebook公司的功能具体而言，Facebook是一家数据工厂。维基百科因此定义了一个工厂：

工厂或制造厂是工业场所，通常由建筑物和机器组成，或者更常见地是具有多个建筑物的复合体，其中工人制造商品或操作将一种产品加工成另一种产品的机器。

Facebook quite clearly isn’t an industrial site (although it operates multiple data centers with lots of buildings and machinery), but it most certainly processes data from its raw form to something uniquely valuable both to Facebook’s products (and by extension its users and content suppliers) and also advertisers (and again, all of this analysis applies to Google as well):

  • 借助Facebook的数据，用户能够更好地与他人联系，查找他们感兴趣的内容，组建团队和管理活动等。
  • Content providers are able to reach far more readers than they would on their own, most of whom would not even be aware those content providers exist, much less visit of their own volition.
  • 广告商能够最大化回报广告美元只倾向于将广告展示给个人,他们相信像他们的产品,使它比以往任何时候都更可行的目标利基市场(顾客)的好处。

然后，为了换取这些来自数据的好处，Facebook吸收了来自所有三个实体的数据：

  • 用户通过他们上传的信息和媒体直接向Facebook提供数据，也可以通过他们在Facebook属性上的操作直接为Facebook提供数据。
  • 内容本身不仅仅是数据，也是生成用户动作数据的催化剂。
  • Advertisers, like content providers, not only provide data in its own right, which acts as a catalyst for generating user action data, but also upload huge amounts of data directly in order to better target prospective customers.

Those aren’t the only avenues through which Facebook collects data: the company has deals with multiple third-party data collection companies, gathering everything from web traffic to offline store receipts, and also has incentivized an untold number of websites — particularly content providers — to include Facebook links on their sites that collect data from those sites.

That results in a much fuller picture of Facebook’s business:

Facebook的数据工厂

数据来自任何地方，价值 - 也以数据的形式 - 流出，由数据工厂转换。

规范互联网

两周前，在欧盟与互联网, I argued that effective regulation of tech companies, particularly Super Aggregators like Facebook and Google, had to work with the fundamental principles of the Internet, not against them; otherwise, the likely outcome would be to entrench these Internet giants with little gain to consumers.

首先，监管机构需要了解集合商的力量来自控制需求而非供应具体地说,消费者自愿使用谷歌和Facebook,“供应商”内容提供商、广告商和用户自己,别无选择,只能去消费者的地方为实现这一目标:

Facebook的终极威胁永远不会来自出版商或广告商，而是需求 - 即用户The real danger, though, is not from users also using competing social networks (although Facebook has always been paranoid about exactly that); that is not enough to break the virtuous cycle相反，唯一能够取消Facebook权力的是用户主动拒绝该应用程序并且，我怀疑，用户会这样做的唯一方式是，如果Facebook成为公认的事实，Facebook对你有积极的影响 - 在线等同于吸烟。

对于Facebook来说，剑桥Analytica丑闻类似于外科医生关于吸烟的报告：威胁不是监管机构会采取行动，而是用户会这样做，没有什么可能更致命这是因为聚合理论的监管推论是最终的监管形式是用户生成的。

If regulators, EU or otherwise, truly want to constrain Facebook and Google — or, for that matter, all of the other ad networks and companies that in reality are far more of a threat to user privacy — then the ultimate force is user demand, and the lever is demanding transparency on exactly what these companies are doing.

What, though, does transparency mean in the context of enabling “user generated regulation”, and what might meaningful regulation look like that achieves the goal of forcing said transparency in a way that fosters competition instead of inhibiting it? The answer goes back to data factories.

原始数据与处理数据

内部数据工厂的第一个挑战是无法进入内部都Facebook的和谷歌为客户提供查看数据的方法，但不仅是展示压倒性，数据正是您给予他们的这是原始投入。

广告商,有趣的是,无法下载自定义受众群体once uploaded, but given that data is (also) their business, it is extremely likely that they retain the list of email addresses they uploaded in the first place; the same thing applies to 3rd party data providers与此同时，网站完全处于黑暗中：Facebook徽章或类似按钮可能提供一两页的页面视图，但它不会提供任何数据作为回报。

没有人得到的是最终产品：来自所有这些来源的所有数据的融合，以构建比他们自己提供的每个Facebook用户更详细的个人资料。不过，毫无疑问，它正在发生上个星期Gizmodo有一个很好的写作的“隐私增强技术论文集”上的一篇论文详细说明Facebook用户如何成为具有用户从未提供的大量信息的广告的目标，包括固定电话号码，未发布的电子邮件地址和为双因素身份验证提供的电话号码：

他们发现，当用户向Facebook提供双因素身份验证的电话号码或者为了接收有关用户帐户的新登录的提醒时，该电话号码可在几周内由广告客户定位因此，希望其帐户更安全的用户被迫进行隐私权交易，并允许广告客户更轻松地在社交网络上找到他们When asked about this, a Facebook spokesperson said that “we use the information people provide to offer a more personalized experience, including showing more relevant ads.” She said users bothered by this can set up two-factor authentication without using their phone numbers; Facebook stopped making a phone number mandatory for two-factor authentication四个月前。

发言人的这句话是对数据工厂的一种认可：Facebook并不关心数据获取的位置，它只是输出服务的输入 - 可定位的配置文件。

这种缺乏关心,正是进入Facebook的成品几乎不是唯一的其中一个最着名的例子是耐克：

一个男孩缝制耐克足球
根据互联网，这是生活杂志的照片我无法找到副本。

这张照片出自1986年6月的“生活杂志”，其中详细介绍了巴基斯坦儿童每天制作足球的方式。Nike executives, in a refrain that is vaguely familiar, were initially aggrieved; after all, soccer balls were not inflated until after they were shipped, which meant the photo was staged.

这当然是正确的，然而这样的抱怨完全忽略了这一点：耐克并不关心它的足球，鞋子或衣服或其他任何东西它只是向工厂主付了钱并洗了问题那张照片，以及随后几十年的抗议和抵制，迫使公司做得更好。

隐私障碍

不幸的是，虽然耐克无法阻止摄影师前往巴基斯坦（事实上，有人说，拍摄一张照片），普通大众无法看到Facebook或谷歌的工厂内部 - 而这正是监管机构进入的地方。

监管机构可以做最重要的事情就是力量Facebook和谷歌——和所有数据收集器——公开他们的工厂产出让用户能够不仅仅看到他们放入了什么 - 谷歌和Facebook做了什么（以及GDPR要求），以及所有输入混合和匹配后出现的内容。

Make no mistake, no company will do this on its own, and not simply for business reasons请注意Facebook发言人在被问及使用上传的联系信息时对Gizmodo的回应：

“人们拥有他们的地址簿，”Facebook发言人通过电子邮件说“我们理解，在某些情况下，这可能意味着另一个人可能无法控制其他人上传的关于他们的联系信息。”

这就解决了隐私法规特别出错的问题：在试图制定保护没有代理人的规则的规则时，那些希望接受该代理商的人甚至无法知道Facebook究竟对他们的了解，因为，隐私与此同时，网站抛出没有人阅读或禁止整个大陆的弹出窗口和覆盖，不是因为他们的用户关心，而是因为监管机构这么说。

Privacy Realities

以下是监管机构需要解决的其他现实问题：大多数用户并不关心隐私，特别是如果它能节省资金我收到了这条推文，回应了蒂姆库克谈论隐私的采访片段，而且相当简洁地说明了这一点：

来自某人的推文会牺牲更便宜的iPhone的隐私

坦率地说，我不会责怪大多数用户的冷漠：Facebook和谷歌以及互联网上所有其他广告支持的服务和网站都提供了非常宝贵的价值Moreover, I’m the first (and often only!) to defend personalized ads: I think they are a critical component of building a future where anyone can build a niche business thanks to the Internet making the entire world an addressable market — if only they can find their customers.

与此同时，大多数用户真的不知道这些公司掌握了哪些数据Might they change their minds if they actually saw the processed data, not simply the raw inputs? I don’t know, but I do think it is their decision to make.

Moreover, establishing clear requirements that users be able to view not only the data they uploaded but their entire processed profile — the output of the data factory — would be far less burdensome to new and smaller companies that seek to challenge these behemoths数据出口控制可以从一开始就建立起来，即使他们可以自由地建造像他们所挑战的大公司一样复杂的工厂 - 或者作为潜在的卖点，他们表明他们根本没有工厂这比试图遵守适用于每个用户的规则要容易得多 - 无论他们是否想要保护 - 以及设计时考虑到Facebook和Google，而不是人手不足的初创公司。

事实上，这就是问题的关键：监管机构需要信任用户来照顾他们自己的隐私，并使他们能够这样做 - 并且，通过扩展，为用户创造条件，让他们真正知道他们的数据是怎么回事并且，如果他们决定不关心，那就这样吧市场会说,一个结果,应该是监管机构的目标放在第一位。

Instagram的CEO

发表于

In the hours after纽约时报打破了这个故事that Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger had resigned from Instagram, the question quickly turned to why; the immediate culprit was everyone’s favorite punching bag, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg:

  • 彭博：Instagram的创始人正在离开Facebook公司据知情人士透露，在与首席执行官马克扎克伯格就照片共享应用程序的方向发展紧张关系之后。
  • TechCrunch的：根据TechCrunch的消息来源，今年Instagram与Facebook在Instagram自治方面的领导地位之间存在紧张关系Facebook同意让它作为收购交易的一部分独立运作但在5月份，Instagram挚爱的产品副总裁Kevin Weil搬到了Facebook的新区块链团队，并被Facebook新闻Feed前任副总裁Adam Mosseri所取代，后者是扎克伯格的核心圈子成员。
  • 重新编码：据消息人士透露，Instagram联合创始人Kevin Systrom和Mike Krieger正在与Facebook首席执行官马克·扎克伯格（Mark Zuckerberg）加强对Instagram的干预和控制感到沮丧和激动，从他们建立的公司辞职。

All of these stories are interesting, and undoubtedly more details will come out over the next few days与此同时，通过观察过去几周或几个月甚至几年发生的事件，他们都从根本上忽略了这一点。理解这些辞职的重要日期是2012年4月9日，最负责的人是Kevin Systrom和Mike Krieger。

非凡的产品领导者

Zuckerberg’s statement关于Systrom和Krieger的辞职是相当简洁的，也许是因为这个原因，相当暴露：

“凯文和迈克是非凡的产品领导者，Instagram反映了他们的综合创造才能我学到了很多工作与他们在过去的六年,非常喜欢它我祝愿他们一切顺利，我很期待看到他们下一步的建设。“

将Systrom和Krieger称为“非凡的产品领导者”是一种高度赞扬，而且非常值得轻描淡写。

Instagram最初是一个名为Foursquare的es-check登录应用程序Burbn但是，当Systrom和Krieger意识到Brbn的用户没有办理登机手续但是像疯了一样分享照片时，他们迅速建立了一个名为Instagram的新应用程序。MG Siegler当时写道，在一个非常有先见之明的概要中：

与Burbn不同，Instagram既不是基于位置的应用程序（虽然这是一个组件），也不是基于HTML5的应用程序但它确实春天的创始人凯文Systrom和迈克Krieger看到人们使用Burbn那就是：快速，社交分享 - 以及从地方分享照片的愿望这是Instagram的基础。

More specifically, Instagram is a iPhone photo-sharing application that allows you to apply interesting filters to your photos to make them really pop…Once you take a picture and apply a filter (there’s also an option not to), the photo is shared into your Instagram Feed从这里，您网站上的朋友可以“喜欢”或评论它但Instagram的另一个关键是将这些照片分享给其他社交网络也很容易 - 比如188足球比分直播网，Facebook和Flickr。

几乎所有关键部分都是从一开始就存在的：

  • Instagram有理由下载：酷炫的过滤器，与竞争对手不同，是免费的。
  • Instagram拥有出色的用户体验：即时共享社交网络，无需跳过“保存到相机滚动”圈。
  • Instagram had the seeds of something much greater than a photo editing app: it was, from the beginning, a social network in its own right; asChris Dixon描述了这一点, “Come for the tool, stay for the network.”

Instagram took off like a rocket, and had 10 million users in a year; that number would triple within the next six months, and was set to grow even faster when the startup finally launched an Android version, which racked up 1 million downloads in 24 hours那是Facebook提出收购Systrom并且公司无法拒绝：10亿美元的现金和股票，以及为什么？

从技术上讲，Instagram是一家公司然而，在实践中，Instagram是一种产品，其商业模式是风险投资资金可以肯定的是，情况永远不会如此，但在2012年4月9日，从流行产品到可行公司的道路漫长而艰巨。Instagram would not only need to continue growing its user base, it would also have to scale its infrastructure, figure out a business model (ok fine, advertising), build up tools to support that business model (first a sales team, then a self-serve model, plus tracking and targeting capabilities), all while fighting off larger and more established companies — particularly Facebook — that were waking up to the threat Instagram posed to their hold on user attention.

Or Systrom and Instagram could offload all of those responsibilities to Facebook and continue being “extraordinary product leaders”, and pocket $1 billion to boot (and, to be fair to Systrom and team, that understates their gains; that $1 billion included $700 million in Facebook stock, which today is worth nearly $4 billion)这是一个可辩护的选择（对于Instagram无论如何;不是为了批准该交易的监管机构), but the implication is that, title notwithstanding, Systrom was never the CEO of Instagram; to be a CEO is to have a company that can stand on its own.

与Zuckerberg的区别 - Instagram的真实CEO - 很明显2004年2月,Facebook推出,并出售它的第一个广告两个月后诚然，“Facebook Flyers”与今天为公司提供动力的News Feed广告几乎没有相似之处，但扎克伯格不仅仅是建立产品而且建立公司的直接本能也是值得注意的事实上，它为傲慢的首席执行官（in）着名的名片带来了新的亮点：

Mark Zuckerberg的名片的虚构版本
从电影中重新演绎马克扎克伯格臭名昭着的名片 社交网络实际卡看起来像 这个，左下角有标题他们也不是扎克伯格的主要名片。

他确实是在头衔和实践中要成为首席执行官 - 拥有控制权 - 至少从长远来看，不仅仅是建立一个伟大的产品它是关于寻找和开发一种商业模式，让您决定自己的命运。

Snapchat威胁是如何征服

可能是Systrom和扎克伯格合作的巅峰 - 非凡的产品领导者和无情的首席执行官 - 是Instagram故事Systrom自由承认that the concept was copied from Snapchat; as I指出当时鉴于Instagram的大型网络，这肯定会足够好：

Instagram和Facebook足够聪明，知道Instagram故事不会取代Snapchat在其用户生活中占有一席之地然而，Instagram故事可以做的是消除Instagram上数亿用户的动机甚至给Snapchat一个机会。

Getting consumer adoption of new products is hard; when that adoption requires a network, it’s harder still, at least if most of your network is not using said product; on the flipside, those same difficulties become massive accelerants once the product passes a certain threshold of your friendsSnapchat已经超过了美国青少年和越来越多的年轻人的门槛，并且每天都与其他人口统计和地理位置更加接近。

不过，Instagram已经存在，但是有一款产品可以让Facebook发挥你最好的自我让这一举动变得如此大胆的原因是扎克伯格和西斯特罗姆打赌他们可以将Instagram重新塑造成一种自己的产品，至少足以阻止Snapchat不断吸引注意力。

That article was mostly spot-on; my primary error was underestimating just how good Instagram’s product would beInstagram Stories from day one were a better experience than Snapchat Stories, particularly in terms of speed; the product differences only grew from thereUltimately, Instagram Stories didn’t simply stem Snapchat’s growth; it actually accelerated Instagram’s:

Instagram的每月活跃用户数

与此同时，正如我所解释的那样，扎克伯格和Facebook的广告团队正在切断Snapchat的货币化氧气Facebook的镜头：

Facebook花费数年时间制作新闻Feed广告 - 不仅仅是显示和定位技术，还包括广告客户的整个后端设备，与非Facebook数据源的连接和销售点，与广告买家的关系等- 然后简单地将Instagram插入该基础设施。

这种综合方法的回报不容小觑尽管最初的产品团队可以自由地专注于用户体验，但Instagram在货币化方面的规模要比他们自己更快。Facebook应用程序中受益,因为Instagram都增加了表面积Facebook广告即使它增加了Facebook的定位功能。

但最大的影响是潜在的竞争很有可能专注于“投资回报率”中的“R” - 投资回报 - 正如我刚才注意到的Instagram + Facebook使其更具吸引力Just as important, though, is the “I”; there is tremendous benefit to being a one-stop shop for advertisers, who can save time and money by focusing their spend on Facebook这些工具很熟悉，购买是跨平台进行的，正如扎克伯格和桑德伯格提到的关于Stories一样，广告本身只需要制作一次即可在多个平台上使用为什么甚至在其他地方做广告呢？

This dynamic, by the way, was very much apparent when Snap IPO’d a year-and-a-half ago; indeed, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, often cast as the anti-Systrom — the CEO that said “No” to Facebook — arguably had the same flawSystrom offloaded the building of a business to Zuckerberg; Spiegel didn’t bother until it was much too late.

Instagram的挑战

尽管如此，与Instagram Stories产品一样出色，很难夸大来自Instagram更大网络的内置优势，并且不可能夸大与Facebook共享广告后端的重要性换句话说，Instagram相对于Snapchat或可能出现的任何其他竞争对手的两个最大优势与产品--Systrom的专业 - 根本没有多大关系。

没有比IGTV更好的例子了三个月前，Systrom宣布了Instagram新的长篇视频产品，其演示文稿散发出产品的敏感性一世当时惊叹不已：

在短短几分钟内，Systrom出色地，在我看来，准确地解释了视频消费对于青少年尤其如何变化，突出了当前的解决方案（即YouTube）不足，并制定了应该指导创建更好服务的原则（移动优先，简单和高质量的视频）当然，更好的服务是IGTV。

它似乎没有丝毫重要Josh Constine撰写了一篇关于IGTV挣扎的精彩文章上个月在TechCrunch上：

确实太早期的科学分析,和Instagram的饲料已经存在自2010年以来,这明显不是一个公平的比较,但是我们看了看IGTV视图项的一些功能的推出伙伴创造者在其中六位创作者中，他们最近的观看视频的观看次数大约是其IGTV帖子的6.8倍如果受益于早期访问和指导的IGTV发布合作伙伴没有这么热，那就意味着其他创作者或普通用户可能没有免费的观看点数他们和IGTV将不得不为他们的听众工作这对于独立的IGTV应用来说已经证明是困难的根据传感器大厦的数据，虽然它在美国iPhone应用程序排名第25位，并且已经在iOS和Android上下载了250万次，但它已经下降到＃1497，并且上周每周安装量减少了94％，仅为70,000。

发布会的一大惊喜是IGTV的存在Instagram宣布它将在一个独立的IGTV应用程序中生活，但也可以作为主应用程序中的一个功能，可以通过主屏幕顶部的橙色按钮访问，偶尔会在内部调出新内容它本来可以有像Stories一样的旋转木马，或者已经融入探索，直到它准备好迎接黄金时段相反,它是可忽略的IGTV没有像Instagram Stories那样获得主屏幕聚光灯的好处吹过那个橙色按钮，避免下载单独的应用程序，用户可以直接点击并滚动浏览Instagram，而不会遇到IGTV较长的视频发布合作伙伴的查看计数反映了这一点。

我并不认为产品无关紧要确实如此，令人难以置信但它并不是唯一重要的事情，随着时间的推移，它的相对重要性会随着网络效应和商业模式等因素而降低为此，Instagram面临的最重要的一个问题 - 即，或者更确切地说是Facebook的公司 - 是故事货币化我上个月在写道Facebook的故事问题 - 和机遇：

然而，这就是关于Stories的事情：虽然更多的人可能会因故事而使用Instagram，但是有相当多的人会使用Instagram而不是Instagram新闻Feed，或者两者都取代Facebook新闻Feed从长远来看，Facebook很好 - 让用户在你的房产上更好 - 但是同样没有查看新闻Feed的用户，特别是Facebook新闻Feed，可能根本就没那么有价值，至少目前如此。

这是因为Systrom和Krieger的辞职引起的任何争议的背景：他们不仅没有真正控制自己的公司（因为他们不控制货币化），他们对于解决他们产品面临的最大问题也不是必不可少的。Instagram故事货币化最终是Facebook的问题，如果以前不清楚，现在很明显Facebook将提供解决方案。

我没有写任何这一点来丝毫诋毁Systrom和Krieger如果有的话，我对他们令人难以置信的产品意识的欣赏只会在过去几年里有所增长两者都是非凡的，他们的创作也是如此。

然而，控制自己的命运需要的不仅仅是产品或受欢迎程度它需要钱，也就是说它需要建立一个公司，工作的商业模式和所有这就是为什么我标记2012年4月9日，因为昨天变得不可避免让Facebook建立业务可能让Systrom和Krieger变得富有，并让他们专注于产品，但它让扎克伯格成为真正的首席执行官，并且总是不可避免地让首席执行官做出决定。

我写了一篇关于这篇文章的后续文章这个每日更新。

欧盟与互联网

发表于

Earlier this summer the Internet breathed a sigh of relief: the European Parliament voted down a new Copyright Directive that would have required Internet sites to proactively filter uploaded content for copyright violations (the so-called “meme ban”), as well as obtain a license to include any text from linked sites (the “link tax”).

唉,胜利是短暂的从EUbusiness：

根据欧盟议会批准的版权指令草案的修订，包括谷歌和Facebook在内的互联网技术巨头可以监控，过滤和阻止互联网上传在全体会议上，欧洲议会议员通过了委员会欧盟版权指令草案的修正案，其中包括以前的拒绝，增加了保护小企业和言论自由的保障措施......

议会的立场强化了委员会提出的使在线平台和集合商对侵犯版权负责的计划这也适用于片段，其中仅显示新闻发布者文本的一小部分在实践中，这种责任要求这些当事人向权利持有人支付他们提供的受版权保护的材料。

同时，为了鼓励初创企业和创新，该文本现在免除了小型和微型平台的指令。

我之所以选择这个相当模糊的来源是有原因的：如果Stratechery有超过50名员工或1000万欧元的收入，根据这项法规，我可能需要补偿欧盟业务的摘录Fortunately (well, unfortunately!), this won’t be the case anytime soon; I appreciate the European Parliament giving me a chance to start-up and innovate.

此异常，以及删除显式调用过滤（在实践中仍然需要），足以让版权指令通过This doesn’t mean it is law: the final form of the Directive needs to be negotiated by the EU Parliament, European Commission, and the Council of the Europe Union (which represents national governments), and then implemented via national laws in each EU country (that’s why it is a指示）。

尽管如此，这并不是欧盟政策制定者尚未掌握互联网性质的唯一证据：还有通用数据保护条例（GDPR），该条例于今年年初生效就像版权指令,GDPR针对谷歌和Facebook,但总是这样当你从根本上误解了你战斗,净效应是事实上加强他们的护城河毕竟，谁比其他大公司更能应对复杂的监管，谁比那些收集最多的公司需要更少的外部数据呢？

In fact, examining where it is that the EU’s new Copyright Directive goes wrong — not just in terms of policy, but also for the industries it seeks to protect — hints at a new way to regulate, one that works with the fundamental forces unleashed by the Internet, instead of against them.

第13条和版权

原谅（字面）法律术语，但这是版权指令的相关部分（原始指令是这里上周和amendements传递这里）与互联网平台的版权责任有关：

在线内容共享服务提供商进行沟通的行为,因此对公众负责的内容和应总结与rightholders公平和适当的许可协议在签订许可协议的情况下，它们还应在相同的程度和范围内涵盖用户以非商业身份行事时的责任......

成员国应规定，在权利人不希望签订许可协议的情况下，在线内容共享服务提供商和权利持有人应本着诚意合作，以确保未提供未经授权的受保护作品或其他主题的服务。在线内容服务提供商与权利人之间的合作不应导致阻止非侵权作品或其他受保护主题的可用性，包括版权例外或限制所涵盖的内容......

This is legislative fantasizing at its finest: Internet platforms should get a license from all copyright holders, but if they don’t want to (or, more realistically, are unable to), then they should keep all copyrighted material off of their platforms, even as they allow all non-infringing work and exceptionsThis last bit is a direct response to the “meme ban” framing: memes are OK, but the exception “should only be applied in certain special cases which do not conflict with normal exploitation of the work or other subject-matter concerned and do not unreasonably prejudice the legitimate interests of the rightholder.”1That’s nearly impossible for a human to parse; expecting a scalable solution — which yes, inevitably means content filtering — is absurd在没有大量错误的情况下，没有办法，特别是在规模上，先发制人地消除侵犯版权的行为。

那么，问题是这些错误应该朝哪个方向发展通过回想起来，通过什么幸运的历史事故，2互联网公司大多不受责任限制，只需在合理的时间内回复删除通知换句话说，系统偏向于否定否定：如果出现错误，那就是不应上传的内容是然而，版权指令会将偏见转向误报：它会犯错误，因为担心责任会阻止允许的内容。

这是个错误首先，版权的概念是政府授予对特定词语排列的垄断我当然不反对这一点 - 我显然是一个恩人 - 但在一个自由社会中，怀疑的利益应该与那些拥有剥夺自由的合法权利的人相反。另一方面，版权指令要求互联网平台作为政府垄断的事实上的执行机制，唯一合乎逻辑的反应是走得太远。

此外，版权所有者侵犯版权的成本实际上已大幅下降Here I am referring to cost in a literal sense: to “steal” a copyrighted work in the analog age required the production of a physical product with its associated marginal costs; anyone that paid that cost was spending real money that was not going to the copyright holderDigital goods, on the other hand, cost nothing to copy; pirated songs or movies or yes,战略每日更新，对于版权所有者来说，收益最低的指标是非常微弱的换句话说,伤害是真实的但伤害的程度是不可知的,介于两者之间的天文数字版权所有者和零边际成本的工作本身。

更大的挑战是整个版权制度都以这些物理媒介为基础：实物商品更容易追踪，更容易禁止，而且批判性更容易定价通过扩展，任何针对此问题的监管 - 或商业模式 - 以在互联网时代之前引导版权的相同假设开始，今天根本没有意义更有意义构建新的商业模式建立在互联网上。

音乐产业就是一个很好的例子：RIAA仍抱怨由于盗版数以十亿美元计的损失但很多人都没有意识到这个行业恢复增长，包括去年16.5％的收入增长The driver is streaming, which — just look at the name! — depends on the Internet: subscribers get access to basically all of the songs they could ever want, while the recording industry earns somewhere around $65 per individual subscriber per year with no marginal costs.3It’s a fantastic value for customers and an equally fantastic revenue model for recording companies; that alignment stems from swimming with the Internet, not against it.

This, you’ll note, is not a statement that copyright is inherently bad, but rather an argument that copyright regulation and business models predicated on scarcity are unworkable and ultimately unprofitable; what makes far more sense for everyone from customers to creators is an approach that presumes abundance监管应采用类似的观点：将版权所有者的负担不仅放在监管他们的工作上，而且还要创新实际上与世界一致的商业模式，而不是现实。

第11条和集合者

这种从稀缺到丰富的转变也对出版物的价值链产生了深远的影响，我已经描述过了聚合理论（“价值已从控制稀缺资源分配的公司转移到控制稀缺资源需求的公司“）Unfortunately the authors of the Copyright Directive are quite explicit in their lack of understanding of this dynamic; from Article 11 of the Directive:

强大的平台和新闻出版商（也可能是新闻机构）之间日益加剧的不平衡已导致媒体格局在区域层面上显着退步In the transition from print to digital, publishers and news agencies of press publications are facing problems in licensing the online use of their publications and recouping their investmentsIn the absence of recognition of publishers of press publications as rightholders, licensing and enforcement in the digital environment is often complex and inefficient.

In this reading the problem facing publishers is a bureaucratic one: capturing what is rightfully theirs is “complex and inefficient”, so the Directive provides for “the exclusive right to authorise or prohibit direct or indirect, temporary or permanent reproduction by any means and in any form, in whole or in part” of their publications “so that they may obtain fair and proportionate remuneration for the digital use of their press publications by information society service providers.”4

然而，问题在于出版商面临的问题不是官僚主义问题，而是他们在一个以丰富为特征的世界中的相对地位我写的富足时代的经济权力：

对于典型的报纸而言，竞争环境与他们习以为常的完全相反：不是有大量的出版材料，而是有丰富的资源。更重要的是，竞争环境的这种转变从根本上改变了谁拥有经济实力。

在由稀缺性定义的世界中，控制稀缺资源的人有权设定获取这些资源的价格In the case of newspapers, the scarce resource was reader’s attention, and the purchasers were advertisers…The Internet, though, is a world of abundance, and there is a new power that matters: the ability to make sense of that abundance, to index it, to find needles in the proverbial haystack这种力量由谷歌掌握因此,虽然观众广告主现在无望在骨折有效无限数量的出版商,读者他们试图达到的必要性开始在同一个地方-谷歌,因此,这是广告的钱到哪里去了。

这是我用来显示出版特别转变的插图（这次使用Facebook）：

的聚合理论——Facebook和报纸

这就是所谓的“链接税”注定要失败的原因 - 事实上，它每次尝试都已经失败了谷歌，谷歌新闻没有直接收入，五将停止向欧盟提供谷歌新闻，或大幅削减其显示的内容，除了欧盟消费者之外，唯一受到伤害的实体是从谷歌新闻获取流量的出版物再说一遍到底发生了什么。

还有另一种方法可以理解这个提案在多大程度上是针对自然市场力量的裸体尝试：谷歌的搜索引擎尊重一个网站的robot.txt的文件，其中发布者可以从公司的索引中排除他们的网站如果谷歌真的从出版商的硬言论中获利不公平，那么出版商就有了一个易于获取的工具来让他们停下来然而他们却没有，因为现实情况是，虽然出版商需要谷歌（和Facebook），但这种需求并没有得到回报为此，描述可能从谷歌和Facebook（或1000万美元的创收战略）流向出版商的资金的唯一方式是作为再分配税，由持有枪支的人强制执行。

在这里，解决方案应该以相反的方向流动，以利用互联网的方式，而不是与之抗争An increasing number of publishers, from large newspapers to sites like Stratechery, are taking advantage of the massive addressable market unlocked by the Internet, leveraging the marketing possibilities of free social media and search engine results, and connecting directly with readers that care — and charging them for it.

我确实认识到这是一个需要时间的过程：对于建立垄断假设的出版商来说，改变其商业模式不仅仅是他们的商业模式特别困难。整个编辑策略对于一个质量比数量更重要的世界为此，如果欧盟希望，正如他们在版权指令中所说的那样，“保证可靠信息的可用性”，那么制定他们有效提出的税收和补贴计划是明确的至少那时每个人都清楚发生了什么。

GDPR和聚合的监管推论

这给我带来一块我一直的立法非常批评很长一段时间：GDPR立法的目的当然是令人钦佩的,保护消费者隐私尽管(这可能是美国对我来说)我也许有点怀疑到底有多少大多数消费者保健相对于精英在媒体上无论如何，意图比影响更重要，后者是巩固谷歌和Facebook我写的开放，封闭和隐私：

While GDPR advocates have pointed to the lobbying Google and Facebook have done against the law as evidence that it will be effective, that is to completely miss the point: of course neither company wants to incur the costs entailed in such significant regulation, which will absolutely restrict the amount of information they can collect遗漏的是，数字广告的增长是一个长期趋势，首先是眼球：在手机上花费的时间越来越多，广告收入将不可避免地随之而来The calculation that matters, then, is not how much Google or Facebook are hurt in isolation, but how much they are hurt relatively to their competitors, and the obvious answer is “a lot less”, which, in the context of that secular increase, means growth.

This is the conundrum that faces all major Internet regulation, including the Copyright Directive; after all, Google and Facebook can afford — or have already built — content filtering systems, and they already have users’ attention such that they can afford to cut off content suppliers为此，问题不在于什么样的监管是必要的，更多的是关于什么监管甚至是可能的（当然，假设谷歌和Facebook的目标不是目标）。

这是考虑版权指令问题的有用之处：

  • 首先，正如应该构建利用互联网而不是对抗互联网的商业模式一样，监管也应如此。
  • 其次，监管应首先要了解互联网上的电力来自控制需求而非供应。

要了解这种规则可能是什么样子，向后工作可能会有所帮助Specifically, over the last six months Facebook has made massive strides when it comes to protecting user privacyThe company has shut down third-party access to sensitive data, conducted multiple audits of app developers that accessed that data, added new privacy controls, and more此外，该公司已经做到了这一点all其用户，而不仅仅是欧盟的用户，表明其行动不是由GDPR推动的。

事实上，原因很明显：剑桥分析公司的丑闻，以及与之相关的所有负面关注换句话说，糟糕的公关在用户隐私方面推动了更多的Facebook行动，而不是GDPR或者FTC同意法令This shouldn’t be a surprise; I wrote inFacebook的动机：

也许还有第三个动机：称之为“开明的自我利益。”请记住Facebook的权力流动：控制需求Facebook是一个超级聚合这意味着它利用与用户的直接关系，为这些用户提供零边际成本，以及网络效应，稳步降低购置成本，并在良性循环中无限扩展，使公司能够同时为供应商（出版商）和广告商提供支持。

因此，Facebook的终极威胁永远不会来自出版商或广告商，而是需求 - 即用户The real danger, though, is not from users also using competing social networks (although Facebook has always been paranoid about exactly that); that is not enough to break the virtuous cycle相反，唯一能够取消Facebook权力的是用户主动拒绝该应用程序并且，我怀疑，用户会这样做的唯一方式是，如果Facebook成为公认的事实，Facebook对你有积极的影响 - 在线等同于吸烟。

对于Facebook来说，剑桥分析公司的丑闻与此类似外科医生将关于吸烟的报告: the threat was not that regulators would act, but that users would, and nothing could be more fatal那是因为：

聚合理论的监管推论是，最终的监管形式是用户生成的。

If regulators, EU or otherwise, truly want to constrain Facebook and Google — or, for that matter, all of the other ad networks and companies that in reality are far more of a threat to user privacy — then the ultimate force is user demand, and the lever is demanding transparency on exactly what these companies are doing.

为此，我是一个关注用户隐私的监管机构，我的出发点不是执行机制，而是透明机制I would establish clear metrics to measure user privacy — types of data retained, types of data inferred, mechanisms to delete user-generated data, mechanisms to delete inferred data, what data is shared, and with whom — and then measure the companies under my purview — with subpoena power if necessary — and publish the results for the users to see.

这是真正让市场对这些巨头产生影响的方式：不是监管法令，而是用户情绪这是因为它是一种理解世界的方法，而不是现实，并且欣赏不良公关 - 因为它影响需求 - 是一种更有效的变革煽动者，而不是垄断利润所带来的罚款。

我写了一篇关于这篇文章的后续文章这个每日更新。

  1. “模因异常”的全文：

    Despite some overlap with existing exceptions or limitations, such as the ones for quotation and parody, not all content that is uploaded or made available by a user that reasonably includes extracts of protected works or other subject-matter is covered by Article 5 of Directive 2001/29/EC这种情况会给用户和权利人带来法律上的不确定性因此，有必要提供一个新的特定例外，以允许在用户上传或提供的内容中合法使用预先存在的受保护作品或其他主题的摘录。Where content generated or made available by a user involves the short and proportionate use of a quotation or of an extract of a protected work or other subject-matter for a legitimate purpose, such use should be protected by the exception provided for in this Directive该例外仅适用于某些特殊情况，这些特殊情况与正常利用的工作或其他相关主题不相冲突，并且不会无理损害权利人的合法利益。For the purpose of assessing such prejudice, it is essential that the degree of originality of the content concerned, the length/extent of the quotation or extract used, the professional nature of the content concerned or the degree of economic harm be examined, where relevant, while not precluding the legitimate enjoyment of the exception此例外不应影响作者或其他主题的作者的精神权利。[↩︎]

  2. 这个链接是关于第230条，这是一个美国法律保护互联网平台免受其用户上传的责任，但广义上讲同样的原则适用于E.U.目前[↩︎]
  3. That $65 figure is an estimate of the amount paid out by streaming services like Spotify; the total number per listener is lower, thanks to family plans and shared accounts [↩︎]
  4. 第一个报价是欧盟指令2001/29 / EC这是在新的版权指令中明确引起的，从第二次引用开始[↩︎]
  5. 当然，该公司会收集用于其他地方广告的数据[↩︎]

iPhone特许经营权

发表于

苹果昨日发布了iPhone XS的新旗舰iPhone这不是一个突破性的新闻：这正是该公司十一年来所做的事情（顺便说一下，对于11年的非iOS iPod，1）为此，我一直对我感兴趣的是新推出的非旗舰车型：2013年的iPhone 5C，去年的iPhone 8（或iPhone X？），以及昨天的iPhone XR我认为，每一个都突出了关键的交汇点，不仅包括苹果公司如何从战略角度思考iPhone，还关注苹果如何看待自己。

iPhone 5C

现在很难记住,但占主导地位的苹果叙述2013年,经过5年的iPhone运行,公司的股票价格上涨700%左右,该公司是低端破坏的风险从Android和高端饱和现在智能手机技术是“足够好”。

iPhone时代的苹果股价

对我而言，这是相当幸运的：战略中心在中间发起Apple-needs-a-cheap-iPhone时代，不仅为保护苹果公司竞争地位的文章提供大量饲料，2but also multiple articles speculating on what the iPhone 5C would cost and how it would be positioned.

为了记录，我猜错了，我知道我错了两分钟，五十六秒进入主题演讲。

It was at two minutes, fifty-six seconds that Tim Cook said there would be a video – a video! – about theiTunes Festival。

它太棒了。

如果你没有观看整个视频（你真的应该 - 它只需要几分钟;由于版权声明我必须嵌入Apple的全长主题演讲），结尾的这个片段捕捉了它重要的原因：

消息：Apple很酷。
消息：Apple很酷。

对于要求低价iPhone的每个人来说，这是苹果，站起来向所有专家，所有分析师说：

没有！

不，我们不会在价格上竞争，我们会提供竞争对手无法比拟的东西。

不，我们不卖手机，我们正在销售体验。

不，我们不会便宜，但我们会很酷。

不，你在科技媒体和华尔街都不了解苹果，但我们相信普通人爱我们，喜欢我们的产品，并会继续购买，开始购买或渴望购买。

哦，而且三星? Damn straight people line up for us2000万美元的音乐会“就像产品发布一样。”

苹果公司左侧的iTunes Festival视频，三星的Galaxy SIII商业广告嘲笑那些排在右侧的人
苹果公司左侧的iTunes Festival视频，三星的Galaxy SIII商业广告嘲笑那些排在右侧的人

这种态度和强调高阶微分经验使用iPhone - 主导整个主题演讲和功能的呈现，特别强调软件和硬件之间的相互作用。

事实上，这低估了苹果在市场中的地位：正如我去年所讨论的那样iPhone 5 c——现在回想起来,真的只是一个iPhone 5替换在苹果的涓滴客户对价格更敏感的方法,有点失败:苹果iPhone客户只想要最好的,那些买不起当前旗舰首选前任的旗舰，而不是“无懈可击的塑料”。

因此，第一个教训是：苹果公司不会进入市场，也不会让客户想要它。

iPhone X.

与此同时，去年，iPhone 5S和5C的发布在许多方面都是相反的，至少从框架的角度来看The iPhone 8 was the next in line after the iPhone 7 and all of the iPhones before it; it was the iPhone X that was presented as being out-of-band — “one more thing”, to use the company’s famous phraseiPhone X是“智能手机的未来”，价格为999美元。

一年过去了，很明显未来就在这里首席执行官蒂姆·库克在昨天的主题演讲中吹嘘说iPhone X是世界上最畅销的手机，这在苹果公司的财务业绩中很明显iPhone的收入再次上升，不是因为苹果公司销售更多的iPhone - 单位增长持平 - 但是因为iPhone X大幅增长了ASP：

基于TTM的iPhone收入，单位和ASP

这是第二个教训：对于Apple最好的客户来说，价格并不是对象。

The iPhone XR

To be clear, the overall strategy and pricing of the iPhones XS and XR were planned out two to three years ago; that’s how long product cycles take when it comes to high-end smartphones也许这就是为什么iPhone 5C的教训在iPhone XR中尤为明显。

First off, while the XR does not have stainless steel edges like the iPhones X or XS, it is a far cry from plastic: the back is glass, like the high end phones, and the aluminum sides not only look premium but will be hidden when the phone is in a case, as most will be真正重要的是前面看起来一样，有着这样的缺口：这看起来像一个高端的iPhone，具有所有的状态。

其次，iPhone XR很大 - 比XS大（并且比XS Max小，是的，这就是它的真名）This matters less for 2018 and more for 2020 and beyond: presuming Apple follows its trickle-down strategy for serving more price-sensitive markets, that means in two years its lowest-end offering will not be a small phone that the vast majority of the market rejected years ago, particularly customers for whom their phone is their only computing device, but one that is far more attractive and useful for far more people.

第三，2020 iPhone XR将会非常精彩事实上，这些公告可能是最大的惊喜（除了名称“XS Max”之外），XR的智能手机有多好。

  • XR拥有Apple业界领先的A12芯片，该芯片在业界遥遥领先，两年内仍将与最好的Android智能手机竞争，并且比低端手机更强大。
  • XR具有与XS相同的广角相机，以及相同的面部ID迭代两者都是行业领先的，两年后将比竞争对手更具竞争力。
  • 与XS最大的区别在于前面提到的外壳材料，液晶显示屏以及缺少3D TouchAgain, though, aluminum is still a premium material, Apple’s LCD screens are — and yes there is a theme here — the best in the industry, and 3D Touch is a feature that is so fiddly and undiscoverable that one could make the case XR owners are actually better off.

真的没有别的方法可以说：XR是一款出色的手机，如果它是旗舰产品，它将足以维持苹果在行业顶端的地位然而，在Apple的战略背景下，最好将其视为完全超前于时代。

iPhone XS

当然还有同类相食的问题：如果XR如此之大，为什么要花费250美元购买XS，或者为巨型XS Max花费350美元？

这就是iPhone X课程的重要性去年的iPhone 8也是一款出色的手机，拥有与iPhone X相同的A11处理器，高品质的液晶显示屏，如iPhone XR，以及优质的铝合金外壳（和3D Touch！）它还具有Touch ID和更熟悉的界面，两者都有其自身的优势，以及许多人喜欢的Plus尺寸。

It didn’t matter: Apple’s best customers, not just those who buy an iPhone every year, but also those whose only two alternatives are “my current once-flagship iPhone” or “the new flagship iPhone” are motivated first-and-foremost by having最好的; price is a secondary concern这就是为什么iPhone X是最畅销的智能手机，以及在iPhone X前两个月推出的iPhone 8 - 脚注。

可以肯定的是，iPhone X具有成为真正新功能的优势，不仅仅是硬件，还有随附的软件这是苹果粉丝可能比他们计划的更早购买一年的手机，或者更多价格敏感的人可能选择更便宜的选择The XS will face headwinds in both regards: it is faster than the iPhone X, has a better camera, comes in gold — it’s an S-model, in other words — but it’s hard to see it pulling forward upgrades; it’s more likely natural XS buyers were pulled forward by the XAnd, as noted above, the XR is a much more attractive alternative to the X than the 8 was to the X; most Apple fans may want the best, but some just want a deal, and the XR is a great one.

苹果应该没问题：整体销量可能略有下降，但1099美元的XS Max将推动平均销售价格更高Note, too, that the XR is only available starting at $749; the longstanding $650 iPhone price point was bumped up to $699 last year, and is now a distant memory.3

Apple's Fall 2018 iPhone Lineup

To put it another way, to the extent the XR cannibalizes the XS, it cannibalizes them with an average selling price equal to Apple’s top-of-the-line iPhone from two years ago; the iPhone 8 is $50 higher than the former $550 price point as well.

不可能的任务iPhone

这就是我说Apple的时候的意思第二iPhone模型捕捉到公司如何改变其战略，以及公司如何看待自己：

  • 2013 was a time of uncertainty, with a sliding stock price and a steadily building clamor heralding Apple doom via low-end disruption; the company, though, found its voice with the 5C and declared its intentions to be unapologetically high-end; the 5C’s failure, such that it was, only cemented the rightness of that decision.
  • 2017年，该公司十年来首次开始真正测试iPhone需求的价格弹性：鉴于其致力于成为最佳产品，Apple可以为iPhone X收取多少费用？
  • 今年,是十足的iPhone力量:一个更昂贵的手机,可以说是一个较弱的特性驱动买进,但事实是苹果的最新和最好的,iPhone而在此之下，更便宜的iPhone XR几乎同样出色，但整齐地分割主要是因为它不是最好的，但又足够接近市场的力量。

我敢说，这种策略接近于过度自信苹果正在提高其最佳产品的价格，尽管该产品与该公司的下一代最佳型号的相对差异是迄今为止最小的。

在这里,我想主题演讲的“使命：不可能” - 主题开场确实达到了标准：特许经营权统治好莱坞的原因是他们的可靠性当然，他们花了很多钱来制造和推向市场，但他们已知全球销售的数量 - 迄今为止最新的汤姆克鲁斯惊悚片的7.35亿美元 - 以一个相关的例子。

这就是iPhone：它是一个特许经营，是最接近硬件年金流技术的人所见过的Some people buy an iPhone every year; some are on a two-year cycle; others wait for screens to crack, batteries to die, or apps to slow然而，几乎所有人都购买另一部iPhone，使得昨天的主题演讲的目的不再是销售设备的一个练习，更多的是告知自己选择的部分他们最终会购买哪种设备，以及价格是多少。

我写了一篇关于这篇文章的后续文章这个每日更新。

  1. Specifically, the original iPod was released in October, 2001, and the 7th generation iPod Nano in September, 2012; the last iPod Touch was released in July, 2015 [↩︎]
  2. 即两只熊和Clayton Christensen错了什么[↩︎]
  3. 令人捧笑的是，全球营销高级副总裁菲尔席勒参考749美元的价格点，“这比iPhone 8 Plus低I’m really proud of the work the team has done on that”; Apple shareholders are surely proud that the price is $50 higher than the iPhone 8! [↩︎]

优步的捆绑

发表于

有了优步，没有什么比这更容易了。

从盈利能力开始，或缺乏盈利能力：两周前该公司报告其季度“收入”，1损失是巨大的：8.91亿美元，收入28亿美元显然业务失败了，不是吗？

好吧，就像我说的那样，并不容易：不像公司像MoviePass优步拥有积极的单位经济学 - 也就是说，公司在每次旅行中赚钱这是清晰的直觉:超级介于20% - -30%的费用,2它支付保险费用,信用卡费用,等等,并保持休息。3根据上一季度的数据，“其余”总计15亿美元，毛利率为55％（优步总预订量的13％）Moreover, margin is improving — it was 47% a year ago — mostly because Uber is managing to both take a higher percentage of fares even as it has reduced its spending on promotions and driver incentives (Cost of Revenue, meanwhile, appears to correspond very closely to gross bookings).

优步的问题很简单：首先，该公司继续花费大量资金支付“线下”成本：22亿美元用于运营和支持，销售和营销，4研发，一般和行政，折旧和摊销其次，该公司改善利润率的很大一部分似乎源于退出更加困难的市场，如俄国和东南亚而不是美国，欧洲和大洋洲核心市场的改善最关心的是，Lyft似乎已经超过Uber了。

超级Lyft问题

对于优步与车手，投资者和司机来说，Lyft是一个问题。

From a rider perspective, Lyft has, unsurprisingly, benefited from the自我造成的灾难是2017年（虽然公平地说，2017年是已经出现问题的一年多年）优步和Lyft等服务的消费者利益一直很明显，当服务成为大部分市场的默认选择时，优步的积极扩张得到了回报，这对于具有双边网络效应的商品来说至关重要问题是,超级给乘客很多理由质疑他们的默认选择不仅性骚扰的丑闻,而不仅仅是一个指控谷歌侵犯知识产权,而不仅仅是厚颜无耻地绕过当地监管机构的指控,但这三个(老实说,这低估了)。

This was particularly problematic because that two-sided network effect wasn’t that strong: sure, Uber was more likely to monopolize driver time given its larger user base, but as long as drivers are independent contractors Uber can’t do anything to prevent them from multihoming, that is, being available on both Uber and Lyft’s networks at the same timeLyft已经准备好吸收不满意的Uber车手，因为他们实际上正在使用Uber的司机来容纳他们。

时机不可能更糟糕：仅仅几个月之前Lyft似乎是出售和无法找到买家; it seemed that former-CEO Travis Kalanick was going to win one of his biggest gambles, turning down an offer to acquire Lyft in 2014 in exchange for 18% of Uber.

事实证明这是卡兰尼克犯下的最大错误，至少从商业角度来看：在优步丑闻爆发后的几个星期里筹集了6亿美元，一个月后formed a partnership with Waymo，谷歌的自动驾驶汽车公司Suddenly the best way to invest in the most promising self-driving technology was Lyft; unsurprisingly Lyft has since raised an additional $2.3 billion, including an investment from Google Capital.

优步的竞争环境

这个背景很重要的原因是，对优步的业务的正确分析今天与两年前根本不同 - 或者四年前我写的时候为什么优步打架That is when I made the argument that even though Uber’s two-sided network effects were relatively weak thanks to the lack of driver lock-in, the fact that ride-sharing was a commodity market meant its head start and brand would lead to slow-but-steady growth in marketshare, eventually starving Lyft due to an inability to raise funds based on increasingly inferior financial results.

我站的分析:这是究竟发生了什么,超级非常接近敲门Lyft出来与此同时,它也不再适用,因为Lyft不再有任何问题筹集资金,而超级似乎很难抓住它的市场份额(作为一个超级的减弱力量与消费者的间接指标,注意乳房的最近无力打败纽约的乘车共享上限做完之后三年前）为此，Lyft在可预见的未来出现在市场中的前景意味着Uber需要一种新策略，而不仅仅是简单地挤压Lyft干燥。

欢迎来到捆绑，优步风格。

优步的消费者套餐：交通即服务

优步首席执行官Dara Khosrowshahi为Uber应用程序提出了新的愿景采访Kara Swisher今年早些时候在代码会议上：

DK：我们正在考虑其他交通方式如果你看看Jump，Uber收购了无船坞自行车公司今年早些时候，Jump的平均行程长度为2.6英里也就是说，我们在旧金山旅行的30％到40％是2.6英里或更少跳转比购买UberX便宜得多To some extent it’s like, “Hey, let’s cannibalize ourselves.” Let’s create a cheaper form of transportation from A to B, and for you to come to Uber, and Uber not just being about cars, and Uber not being about what the best solution for us is, but really being about the best solution for here.

KS：所以自行车，滑板车？

DK：自行车，也许是滑板车我想打开公交网络我想让巴特,或地铁,等等,到乳房所以，任何方式让你从A点到B点。

KS：Wait, you wanna start your own BART? No.

DK：不不不我们不会垂直的就像亚马逊销售第三方商品一样，我们也将提供第三方运输服务所以，我们想要成为亚马逊的交通工具，我们希望提供BART作为替代方案有一个公司叫Masabi连接地铁,等,支付系统So we want you to be able to say, “Should I take the BART? Should I take a bike? Should I take an Uber?” All of it to be real-time information, all of it to be optimized for you, and all of it to be done with the push of a button.

KS：那么，任何运输？

DK：任何运输，完全无摩擦，实时。

如果你对Khosrowshahi对这个概念的严重程度有任何疑问，他告诉了金融时报在接受采访时说昨天：

在高峰时间,是非常没有效率的一吨金属绿巨人一人十块…我们可以塑造行为的方式赢得用户这是城市的胜利短期的财务状况，也许这对我们来说不是一场胜利，但从战略上看，我们认为这正是我们想要领导的地方......

我们愿意牺牲短期经济单位长期高……我发现在我的职业生涯中,参与长期赢得战争,有时它是值得失去战斗为了赢得战争。

这是一个包,像任何捆绑,使经济在长期工作是获得更大的总花费在任何特定的消费者即使他们花更少的项目To that end, as Khosrowshahi notes, the real enemy is the car in the garage; to the extent Uber can replace那它的机会越大。

优步的消费者捆绑

此外，优步可以通过构建此类服务所固有的复杂性来处理所有最终用户的运输需求，更加贴切的优步成为消费者当然，Lyft承诺建立同样的东西，但优步领先一步，仍然拥有更大的战争胸膛，这可能证明在土地抢夺方面更有帮助，而不是目前的消耗战此外，优步仍然比Lyft具有显着的地理优势刚开始在国际上扩展，使其成为旅行者的更好选择。

优步的驱动程序包：优步吃

Uber Eats, meanwhile, has the potential to be a very attractive business in its own right: Khosrowshahi在Code Conference上说that the business has “a $6 billion bookings run rate, growing over 200 percent.” Uber takes 30% of that ($1.6 billion), as well as a $5 delivery fee from customers, out of which it pays drivers a pickup fee, drop-off fee, and per-mile rate (of which it keeps 25%);根据The Information，该服务尚未赚钱，但它比优步的乘车共享业务规模更大，更有利可图。

暂且不谈司机，这是一个经典之作聚合在拥有消费者需求的过程中，优步有能力吸引供应商，在良性循环中增加消费者需求优步副总裁兼UberEverything负责人Jason Droege，在一次采访中告诉食客今年夏天：

I think that we’re all here to service the consumer, right? And the eater而且我认为今天的食客需要方便，他们想要价值，他们需要灵活性，他们想要选择交付提供所有这些东西餐厅选择参加送货因此，如果他们不相信它作为连接消费者或新消费者的渠道有价值，或者用他们的品牌吸引新的人，那就没关系我们在这里提供两者之间的渠道不要告诉他们如何经营他们的业务。

It certainly is an open question as to whether services like Uber Eats help or hurt established restaurants; this纽约客文章回顾一些关于餐馆老板的轶事，他们对Uber Eats花费多少钱有点模糊，就像优步司机忘记考虑他们的汽车磨损一样与此同时，优步正在为专注于交付的餐厅创造全新的机会，就像那些只想有时工作，或者根本找不到任何其他工作的司机一样，以及为他们提供服务的公司HyreCar。

Moreover, Uber Eats has a leg-up in the space because of Uber itself: the latter can acquire customers from the former (both because of owned-and-operated advertising as well as reducing drop-off because Uber already has payment details), and all of those huge marketing and G&A expenses from building out teams in every city Uber operates is easily leveraged for Uber Eats这当然也适用于驾驶员购置成本。

然而，最大的收益来自于有效地为司机捆绑机会任何独立的餐厅送餐应用程序的问题是绝大多数订单来自午餐和晚餐，但司机可能希望在一天中的其他时间工作优步很容易：只需搭便车（优步司机可以开车去Uber，只有Uber Eats，或两者兼而有之）换句话说，优步拥有越来越多的方式来垄断司机的时间，个人驾驶员的利益以及优步的竞争优势。

优步的驱动程序包

当然GrubHub司机举个超级吃随机竞争对手,也可以推动Lyft(或乳房,),但这就是为一定数量的游乐设施奖励驾驶员in a given time period is particularly effective: because drivers can complete their “Quests” with Uber ride-sharing trips or Uber Eats trips, it often makes more sense to simply stick with Uber.

更广泛地说，Uber面临的挑战来自于同样的可替代性，这使得服务首先成为可能为此，接近驱动程序市场的最佳方式不是与这个现实竞争，而是接受它，并且拥有使用相同驱动程序池的多个服务可以完全实现。

自动驾驶汽车：捆绑作为前进之路

与此同时，自动驾驶汽车仍然是优步的白鲸该公司收到了一份昨天丰田投资5亿美元，并将努力将其技术融入丰田Sienna小型货车。

这绝对不是单位的剥离信息说已被提出; the unit has apparently cost Uber $2 billion over the last two years当然，正如我上面提到的那样，与失去谷歌作为Lyft潜在合作伙伴的战略影响相比，这一成本相形见绌。

不过,它不嫌晚考虑做正确的事情:我继续相信优步对自动驾驶汽车的投资是一个战略错误是的，其最大的成本是司机，理论上的谷歌乘坐共享服务可能会大规模地完全削弱优步，但这是分析这个市场可能发挥作用的最简单方法。

请记住我刚刚提到的关于司机的观点：确定将您最昂贵的供应输入（必须在边际基础上支付并且您无法控制）转换为固定成本（您拥有专有权）That, though, means massively more capital expenditures for a business that is currently losing around a billion dollars a25美分硬币更糟糕的是，它意味着在一个领域 - 机器学习 - 与谷歌竞争 - 这个搜索巨头拥有巨大的优势。

Moreover, in the long run it seems unlikely that Google would want to build up a vertical Uber competitor: it remains far more logical, both financially and in terms of Google’s historical margin profile, to license out their technology可以肯定的是，如果Waymo的技术优越，它们将具有批发转让定价能力Tren Griffin描述道如：

向A公司提供独特产品XYZ的A公司的讨价还价能力，可以使A公司通过提高XYZ的批发价格来获取B公司的利润

不过就是这样的事情：Uber比其他任何人都更好地应对Waymo潜在的提取优势自驱动技术利润的能力毕竟，该公司已经为驱动技术付出了代价 - 技术恰好是人类！

当然，这并不意味着优步应该满足于支付Waymo而不是司机：乘车共享服务仍然是每个从事自动驾驶技术工作的人的最佳上市方式To that end Uber should be willing to partner with anyone and everyone — and to share its technology with whoever wants it从长远来看，凭借其网络，优步拥有市场力量，并且它将最大程度地利用这种能力，以至于它可以在自动驾驶汽车领域引起供应商之间的竞争。

优步的自动驾驶捆绑

而且，每当自动驾驶汽车出现时，似乎可以肯定甚至Waymo也遇到了麻烦），它们不适合优步经营的所有环境这使得优步非常适合将自驾车服务与传统的优步汽车服务捆绑在一起，以及计划为消费者提供的所有其他运输服务这种“捆绑”将允许自动驾驶技术在有意义的时间和地点逐步推向市场，同时仍然让乘客有信心从任何地方到任何地方。

To be fair, Khosrowshahi has signaled the desire to partner with multiple self-driving partners, including Google但我怀疑，只要优步追求自己独有的技术，这将很难实现To that end Khosrowshahi should cut the cord with Uber’s self-driving program sooner rather than later, or perhaps even open-source it; the money savings are in fact the second most important potential benefit.

优步在卡兰尼克领导下的原始战略的残酷性有一定的令人满意的简单性：尽可能积极地建立早期领先优势，然后利用优步看似无限的筹集资金以使其竞争对手投入提交的能力In the end, though, that same brutality did Kalanick in, and his strategy along with it.

这使得Khosrowshahi面临一个更为复杂的局面：他不仅需要在内部修复Uber，还需要创建一个全新的战略，以便在由于Uber危机而从根本上改变的市场中获胜为用户提供服务，为驾驶员提供机会，以及理想的自驾车技术，作为替代方案是有意义的。

然而,这一战略是适合的性质情况下,更为复杂,相称的成功的机会,并最终盈利能力——低了不少换句话说，优步的董事会戏剧可能已经结束，但该公司仍然可能是最引人注目的技术。

我写了一篇关于这篇文章的后续文章这个每日更新。

  1. 优步自愿与媒体分享高水平的数据（“华尔街日报”收集了它们这里），但这些数字是选择性的，未经审计，并且没有财务文件[↩︎]
  2. The company now deducts the amount spent on driver incentives and promotions, in addition to driver earnings on a percentage basis, from its overall bookings; this is a very welcome improvement to the company’s reporting先前目前还不清楚这笔支出是否正确计算[↩︎]
  3. 您可以从2015年泄露的文档中看到旧的细分这里[↩︎]
  4. 正如之前的脚注中所述，优步似乎确实扣除了适用于预订的特定游乐设施的促销费用，因此这些都是非单位营销费用[↩︎]

Facebook的故事问题 - 和机遇

发表于

这不是关于Facebook的第一篇关于Facebook的文章从Snapchat开始“相机公司”娘家姓的社交网络报道收益正如他们所说，那是混合的Revenue beat expectations by 5%, but user growth, after slowing considerably for two years, went in the opposite direction: Snap’s Daily Active Users were still up 9% year-over-year, but for the first time declined sequentially (by 2%):

Snapchat的每日活跃用户

所以发生了什么事？

Snap的成长借口

Snap公司宣布其增长放缓的理由已经在这两年内发生了变化：

  • 在其中S-1该公司于2017年2月提交，指责“技术问题”：

    在2016年中期，我们推出了多个产品并发布了多个更新，这导致了许多技术问题，这些问题降低了我们的应用程序的性能我们认为这些业绩问题导致截至2016年9月30日的季度后期每日活跃用户增长减少。

  • 在首次公开募股前的路演中，首席执行官埃文·斯皮格尔指责Snapchat在Android上的表现：

    我认为，如果你把世界其他地区的增长视为Android的代理，我们可以开始了解我们在过去两个季度中在Android上遇到的性能问题。

  • 在公司的第一次收益电话，斯皮格尔指出公司的克制：

    我想谈谈DAU问题，因为这是我们一直都会得到的问题And I think one of the reasons why it’s such a popular question is because there’s a lot of this thing in our industry called growth hacking, where you send a lot of push notifications to users or you try to get them to do things that might be unnatural or something like that而且我认为虽然这是快速增长日常活动的简单方法，但我们并不认为这些技术在长期内是非常可持续的我认为这最终会影响我们与客户的关系。

  • 一年前，在公司的第三次电话会议，Spiegel指责衡量标准的转变：

    本季度，我们的每日活跃用户数增长率低于我们的预期，增加了450万新用户这可以部分归因于我们决定将每日活跃用户报告为整个季度的平均值，其强劲的9月被7月和8月较为温和的月份所抵消。但最终，我们希望在2018年推动更多的用户增长。

  • 三月责任归咎于Snapchat的重新设计，以及旧的bugaboo Android：

    正如我们在过去的两次收益电话会议中提到的那样，这种对现有行为的重大改变伴随着一些中断，特别是考虑到我们社区日常参与的频率很高虽然我们在第一季度的平均每日活跃用户数为1.91亿，但我们的3月份平均值较低，但仍高于我们的第4季度平均值我们已经开始看到稳定的早期迹象在iOS用户随着人们习惯的变化,但仍有许多工作要做优化的新设计,特别是对我们的Android用户。

  • 上个季度重新设计再次成为焦点：

    虽然我们的每月活跃用户在本季度继续增长，但我们的每日活跃用户数下降了2％这主要是由于我们的重新设计造成的中断，我们的用户群使用频率略低自从我们广泛推出应用程序的重新设计以来已经过去了大约六个月，我们一直在努力根据社区的反馈来迭代和改进Snapchat。

请注意，最后一个解释与其他解释略有不同：Snap承认其核心用户使用的产品较少问题在于，虽然社交网络在用户体验中犯了大错并不是一个新现象，但Snapchat和Facebook之间的区别在于缺乏增长 - 现在持续两年 - 来弥补它。

当然，Snap的高管们无法让自己承认增长放缓的原因是：Instagram故事。

复制Audacity Redux

2016年8月，当Instagram推出什么自己的高管承认我写道，这是对Snapchat的故事特征的剽窃复制的无懈可击that the effect would not be to steal Snapchat’s users, at least not yet; rather, Instagram Stories looked poised to kill Snapchat’s growth:

Facebook正在利用其最有价值的资产之一：Instagram的5亿用户结果,至少据坊间传言,为自己辩护:我看过Instagram的故事在过去24小时内超过我Snapchat的当然，其中很大一部分是新颖的方面，它会消失，我在Instagram上关注的人数比在Snapchat上的人数要多不过，最后一点是，重点是：我和我的朋友们今天并不完全是Snapchat的目标人群，但为了使服务达到其潜力，我们最终将会当然，除非Instagram故事最终足够好......

Instagram和Facebook足够聪明，知道Instagram故事不会取代Snapchat在其用户生活中占有一席之地然而，Instagram故事可以做的是消除Instagram上数亿用户的动机甚至给Snapchat一个机会。

不幸的是，对于Snap来说，Instagram故事已经足够好了：它们很快就会好起来，特别是考虑到性能之后（不仅仅是在Android上，而是在iOS上）事实上，尽管从超过5亿用户的基础开始，Instagram的用户增长实际上已经加速了，但它们非常好。1

Instagram的每月活跃用户数

简而言之，Instagram故事不仅阻止用户叛逃到Snapchat，它还占据了Snapchat的所有增长，而现在，在Snapchat重新设计后，可能会让用户离开。

长期和短期

两周前，Facebook经历了美国单日最大的市值下跌企业历史我争辩说,如果你看了公司通过任何镜头但金融公司比以往任何时候都强。

For all of the company’s travails and controversies over the past few years, its moats are deeper than ever, its money-making potential not only huge but growing both internally and secularly; to that end, what is perhaps most distressing of all to would-be competitors is in fact this quarter’s results: at the end of the day Facebook took a massive hit by choice; the company is not maximizing the short-term, it is spending the money and suppressing its revenue potential in favor of becoming more impenetrable than ever.

That reference to “taking a hit by choice” was primarily about the reduced margins Facebook is projecting thanks to its dramatically increased spending on security; it certainly hurts in the short-term, but keeping people on the platform and regulators away has massive long-term value.

应该注意,特别是Instagram的故事(连同故事在Facebook的应用程序)是同样:他们的战略影响,尤其是相对于Snapchat Facebook的竞争地位,将延续数年但是，在短期到中期内会产生财务影响，而且可能很重要。

新闻Feed广告单元

Facebook广告业务的基础是我所描述的新闻Feed广告五年前作为有史以来最好的展示广告单位：

广告业务最好不要成为一个平台平台必须承担与用户体验相关的某些角色和职责，其中许多都是针对有效广告的这就是为什么，例如，你没有在Android上看到任何广告，尽管它是由世界顶级广告公司制作的。

所以Facebook应用程序拥有整个屏幕，并且可以使用所有屏幕来获得Facebook和Facebook的好处。

像这样的东西：

新闻Feed的广告

你不能不看到广告，这使得它对广告商特别有吸引力品牌广告，特别是关于视觉和视频（很快推出！），但没有人能够像在电视或打印上那样在网络上制作品牌广告。在任何特定时间，屏幕上都有太多东西要看。

这与移动应用完全相反Facebook的应用程序上的品牌广告与任何人共享屏幕由于移动设备的限制，Facebook可能会破解显示器和品牌广告，这让网络广告商多年来感到沮丧。

To be sure, the fact that News Feed ads take over the screen isn’t the only reason Facebook’s stock is, even with the recent drop, up 148% since that article: in the intervening years the company has doubled its userbase, increased ad load in the News Feed, and managed to increase its price-per-ad thanks to Facebook’s superior targeting capabilities.

不过，广告单元本身很重要：

Facebook广告增长指标

That huge anomaly between 2014 and 2016 marked the dramatic reduction in Facebook’s side-bar ads, which had been the company’s chief money-maker for years; that reduced the number of impressions, but the resultant shift in ad inventory mix to News Feed ads led to an even more dramatic increase in Facebook’s reported price-per-ad.2

The years after the mix shift have only reinforced just how good the News Feed ad unit is: by 2016 the shift was complete and Facebook just grew and grew, quarter after quarter (remember, that chart is growth rates; a chart of absolute numbers would be up-and-to-the-right3）2017年更加有趣：该公司表示将停止增加新闻Feed的广告负载，这就是为什么展示次数下降，但每次广告的价格增加这种定价能力的证明清楚地表明，Facebook的新闻Feed广告具有高度差异性。

故事挑战

然而，这就是关于Stories的事情：虽然更多的人可能会因故事而使用Instagram，但是有相当多的人会使用Instagram而不是Instagram新闻Feed，或者两者都取代Facebook新闻Feed从长远来看，Facebook很好 - 让用户在你的房产上更好 - 但是同样没有查看新闻Feed的用户，特别是Facebook新闻Feed，可能根本就没那么有价值，至少目前如此。

Facebook首席财务官David Wehner多次表示Facebook最近的财报电话会议（都强调我的）：

  • 在他准备的评论中：

    导致[收入增长]减速的因素有很多例如，我们预计下半年货币将是一个轻微的逆风，而不是过去几个季度我们所经历的逆风。我们计划发展并推广某些具有吸引力的体验，例如目前货币化程度较低的故事，我们还为使用我们服务的人提供了更多关于数据隐私的选择，这可能会对我们的收入增长产生影响。

  • 关于货币化Instagram在回答一个问题:

    Instagram对Stories的使用率更高，因此这是一个持续增长机会的领域故事中有效的货币化水平较低。在需求方面，我们看到两个平台都有良好的吸引力，我们正在推广更多广告客户利用更多格式等在故事中利用广告的能力因此，再一次，增长的重要机会就是继续在Stories的需求方面构建更多产品。

  • 针对收入增长下降的问题：

    我们将专注于发展像Stories这样引人入胜的新体验并推广这些体验和这将对收入增长产生负面影响。

首席运营官Sheryl Sandberg总结了关于故事的基本问题：

我们已经看到Stories作为一种格式供人们在我们的平台上分享的巨大进步我们有4亿人与Instagram Stories共享，4.5亿人使用WhatsApp StatusFacebook更新，但我们在那里看到了良好的进展。The question is will this monetize at the same rate as News Feed? And we honestly don’t know.

投资者也不是。

故事的下行

事实上，悲观有两个很好的理由：一个来自用户的角度，一个来自广告商的角度。

从用户的角度来看故事广告更容易跳过:简单地点击屏幕,就像用户可能已经做了最后几分钟狂热地试图赶上他们的故事积压Part of what makes Stories such fantastic drivers of engagement is the combination of their disappearing nature — better check frequently to not miss anything! — combined with the simple mechanic of viewing them: tap tap tap然而，在货币化方面，没有摩擦总是一个挑战。

Moreover, effective Story ads are more difficult to make: still photos can be used, but the most engaging ads will be video, which increases the production difficulty significantly — particularly when you remember the importance of grabbing the user’s attention immediately! This is a particular problem for Facebook because so much of its advertising comes from small- and medium-sized businesses谢丽尔桑德伯格说在收益电话会议上一年半前：

We’re really excited to announce today that 65 million businesses are using our free Pages product and 5 million are using Instagram Business profilesMore and more of these businesses are becoming advertisers with over 4 million advertising on Facebook and over 500,000 on Instagram因此，我们的收入基础变得更加多样化在第四季度，我们的前100名广告客户占广告收入的比例不到四分之一，这是去年第四季度的下降。

这是一种巨大的多样化，特别是与传统广告相比，MoffettNathanson的这张图表显示：

http://www.icoolist.com/2013/mobile-makes-facebook-just-an-app-thats-great-news/

This is another reason why News Feed ads are so effective: advertising is measured on ROI — return on investment — and the “I” is just as important as the “R”; the investment necessary to achieve a favorable return is so much lower for News Feed ads than nearly any other medium, and experimentation is cheap-and-easy难怪小型和中型企业纷纷涌向Facebook（并提醒Facebook的广告平台是关键的一块of building the economy of the future); to that end, though, it is fair to wonder just how much of Facebook’s advertiser base will flock to Instagram Stories, even as its users do exactly that.

Stories’ Potential Upside

值得注意的是，Stories可能具有超越战略定位的Facebook的重要价值首先，用户发现Stories比新闻Feed更具吸引力的事实表明，至少有可能创建更具吸引力的广告。

That is particularly compelling because attentive readers may have realized my 2013 excerpt above about the effectiveness of News Feed ads got one thing wrong: I was convinced that taking over the screen would be valuable because of the potential for brand advertising; in fact, most of Facebook’s business is in direct response ads, where the goal is driving user action (app install, product purchase, newsletter signup, etc.) as opposed to simply building brand affinity后者仍非常television-centric即使年轻人沙漠中,和每一个科技公司正在积极捕捉的电视的钱,将数字现在任何一天!

Might Stories be an ad unit that works for brand advertising? Sandberg tried to make the case:

平台上有10亿活跃人士，我认为Instagram绝对是一个直接反应机会和发现机会部分原因是格式这种格式在视觉上很吸引人，人们用图片讲述故事，所以我们在传闻和数据中都看到，这是人们首先了解产品的好地方。

This is in fact another way to look at that chart about the top 200 advertisers: the biggest spenders are brand advertisers, and while it is to Facebook’s credit that they serve the long tail, there remains a significant opportunity the company has mostly not tapped into, and oh-by-the-way, those are the advertisers best equipped to spend the money to make an effective Stories ad; after all, they’re already spending the money on TV.

值得注意的是，科技公司追逐的品牌广告黄金可能最终成为众所周知的彩虹的终结，始终追求并永远不会获得Do big brands stick with TV because the medium is that much better for advertising, or because they were built for a mass market that on the Internet increasingly doesn’t exist? Indeed, one can make the case —就像我一样— that the fortunes of traditional television and its advertisers are completely intertwined; unsurprisingly,后者的颠覆者使用Facebook。

在此分析中，Snap有一小部分好消息：公司面临的一个重大挑战是事实上要求广告商将大量资源用于平台，从而消除任何长期投资回报率的提议问题是格式:Snapchat广告是垂直的,理想的视频,所以更容易简单地买一个新闻广告在Facebook和Instagram上运行它但是，现在，广告客户对垂直视频广告的投资至少在理论上可用于Instagram和Snapchat（以及Facebook试图将Stories放在各处之后的所有其他属性）。

这是一个小小的安慰，可以肯定：Instagram拥有更多的受众 - 包括大部分的Snapchat - 背后的整个Facebook广告设备，所有的趋势都有利于它That is the sort of long-term gain for which Facebook is rightfully willing to bear the short-term pain; the question now is just how substantial that long-term gain may be, and relatedly, how long the short-term pain will persist.

  1. Facebook has only ever released Instagram MAUs at certain milestones; the growth rate was calculated based on the time in months between those milestonesAlso note that Snap, to their credit, releases daily active users, which depresses their numbers relative to Instagram’s monthly active users [↩︎]
  2. 2014年第四季度广告价格同比增长率同比增长335％[↩︎]
  3. 此外，这样的图表是不可能的：Facebook实际上并未公布绝对数量的展示次数或每次广告的价格[↩︎]