Jimmy Fallon definitely had the best line about the Facebook phone that appears to be really happening: You can only use it to call people you barely remember from high school.
But go read Om Malik's post on what the Facebook phone actually is, and see if it doesn't look like Facebook wants to be (among other things), the "employer" of the consumer.
In other words, what enterprises are trying to do with UC and collaboration systems from the likes of Cisco, Avaya and Microsoft--consumers will do via Facebook. It'll be the first cloud-based, widely used UC platform. It will maintain your presence status, contacts and access to applications and data. If that's not the definition of a UC & collaboration platform, I can't think of a better one.
Here are a few of the key bullets from Om's post that make clear how Facebook is converging with UC:
3 A consumer’s Facebook ID becomes more important than the phone number itself. Login with Facebook ID, and your social network auto-magically syncs up with the phone. (Android users have seen their Google phones do this since day one. Stacey finds it annoying.)
4 Facebook becomes the address book or the contact list for the phone, giving Facebook users an option to call, IM, SMS, or mail their network via the data connection. Since Facebook already has our phone numbers, it can make it easy to call other cell phones or landlines. (Again, not a big deal for Android users who have this feature at their disposal.)
5 As Clearspring CEO and one of our readers, Hooman Radfar, so aptly said, "Facebook is effectively a set of applications with an underlying common messaging and authentication infrastructure. So, by definition, Facebook also is a set of disparate applications (photos, inbox, chat) that is connected by a social layer." That is why you will see Facebook apps will be separated into individual apps and subsumed into the phone experience.
6 For instance, Facebook photos will communicate directly with the camera and become the repository for photos, with almost no difference in the cloud and the local photo storage. Take a picture and save it to Facebook.
7 As Liz pointed out, Facebook can give phones presence-based intelligence based on location, scheduled events and meetings, and of course, the time of the day. You’ll see some of that in the new phone.
4 Facebook becomes the address book or the contact list for the phone, giving Facebook users an option to call, IM, SMS, or mail their network via the data connection. Since Facebook already has our phone numbers, it can make it easy to call other cell phones or landlines. (Again, not a big deal for Android users who have this feature at their disposal.)
5 As Clearspring CEO and one of our readers, Hooman Radfar, so aptly said, "Facebook is effectively a set of applications with an underlying common messaging and authentication infrastructure. So, by definition, Facebook also is a set of disparate applications (photos, inbox, chat) that is connected by a social layer." That is why you will see Facebook apps will be separated into individual apps and subsumed into the phone experience.
6 For instance, Facebook photos will communicate directly with the camera and become the repository for photos, with almost no difference in the cloud and the local photo storage. Take a picture and save it to Facebook.
7 As Liz pointed out, Facebook can give phones presence-based intelligence based on location, scheduled events and meetings, and of course, the time of the day. You’ll see some of that in the new phone.
And what is that camera application that Om mentions, if not a Communications Enabled Consumer Process?
So, in your consumer role, you essentially "work" for Facebook: They maintain all the ties to you and internal linkages among your communications modes, applications, and stored data.
Does this threaten the enterprise UC players? Yes and no, I think. It's not a threat in that I would be beyond shocked if any enterprise of any significant size chose to abandon enterprise-grade UC in favor of hosting everything on Facebook. The Facebook brand means a lot of things, some of them positive, but security sure ain't among those. Also, it's not in the enterprise's interest to promote the commingling of people's personal and business lives.
But it does represent a threat in the same way that the iPad and smartphones in general represent a threat, in that these consumer experiences have once again beaten the enterprise to the punch in terms of defining what the experience is. Cisco, Avaya, Microsoft, et al are at risk of having to play catch-up to the Facebook interface and communications model. People will expect their enterprise systems to run like the consumer system that they have become accustomed to, and the vendors will wind up either having to accommodate this, or else losing the race if people can do things on the consumer experience that they can't do within the enterprise, or can't do as well.
When I first started in this business almost 20 years ago, it was with a magazine that covered the public network, and at that time the public network carriers were serenely optimistic that sooner or later, one way or another, they were going to get to control the Internet. It had never been any other way. They always got whatever they wanted.
And one of their executives once used an interesting analogy: Technology innovation always starts in business and industry, rather than the consumer space, because businesses have the money to invest in these expensive technologies, which could only be consumerized over time. The example he gave was air conditioning: Office buildings and similar such public spaces got air conditioning long before it became economical for people to buy individual units for their homes.
At the time, it seemed like an immutable law, but today it seems ridiculous. Now, the idea that technology starts with the consumer, where there is greater agility--that's the immutable law. At least for information technology.
So the Facebook phone makes consumers an analogue of enterprise employees, for the purposes of an enterprise person's understanding. But more than likely, how the Facebook phone plays out will have a major influence on what enterprise users end up demanding from their work systems.
