Facebook, stepping deeper into the dark side: Facebook’s business development strategy compared to Google and Microsoft
Gökhan Toka tarafından 12/05/2010 tarihinde Internet ve Bilişim konusunda yazıldı | 
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I generally believed in the positive power of Internet. I thought that Internet has the potential to lead us to a better community with informatics shared freely and widely all over the world, eliminating borders, achieving social empathy… However now I feel like this is about to change. Internet, closing down into smaller and smaller micro pieces, becoming more real-life-like bounded by the limitations of real life, and most importantly becoming heavily dominated by a single corporate will, that has the strategy to rule the net by ransoming on the personal virtual entities.
Facebook’s corporate strategy to re-organize the Web around the virtual identity may look harmless or a natural attempt based on current trends to the most. However I consider this strategy as a strategy which is almost identical to what Microsoft did (and still trying to do).
Microsoft, being the monopoly of operational systems with its Windows OS during the last two decades, always tried to rule and kill the competition in a wide range of products by exercising this unavoidable power of monopoly. People had no alternative to use, other than the Windows OS on their PCs (Personal Computers….) Bundling many different products to Windows on personal computers, Microsoft killed brands like Netscape, independent media player softwares, got the lead on IM market, achieved a great share on Email world, cooked a nice share on search engine market etc… Most of these products were not even a revenue channel for Microsoft, and they were really poor on the product quality dimension compared to the rival independent products. However people used these Microsoft products for very long years and they are still using them, just beacuse of the exercise of power of Microsoft around its core product on Personal computers.
Looking to the core value that Facebook has today, you will see something which is very similar to what Microsoft has: Personal virtual entities… Microsoft was/is ruling personal physical informatics entities, the personal computers.
Google on the other hand, as still being the dominant player on the net, has/had a totally different approach. Google didn’t take a closing down business strategy to get use of exercising powers on the personal limitations. Instead, they took an expanding business strategy. They also invested into and created many different products that compete with their rivals but doing that they were not using the monopoly power of the Google search engine. You can take the Gtalk IM, the Gmail email client, Blogger, Orkut as a social network into account for instance. (Or Buzz, recently launched by Google as a social feed product not again integrated into Google search engine). Google indeed, was trying to expand its market share into increasing the number of it’s stakeholders by employing revenue share programs like Adsense, therefore helping user generated content to flourish and spread all over the web on a win-win model. The expanding web, was/is the ultimate tool of Google’s business development strategy.
Now Facebook, considering itself as the core part on the web by holding the virtual personal entities as asset, closing more and more onto this asset. And the web as a space, is collapsing more and more into this core and the collapsing web is becoming the aim of Facebook. Once unbounded Networks are becoming to be limited by the rules of physical networking. Information is trapping into minor personalized networks and the loosening transparency is generating a harsher environment for the smooth flow of information. Networks on the web, they are imitating the real life networks, and this is killing the potential of web to change the world. Limited by their real life networks, people becoming less likely to generate Webwide appealing content and they are now becoming passive elements within their protective networks.
Web is collapsing into a personalized core, and this core, is being owned more and more by Facebook. Collapsing boundaries of the Web that would be owned mainly by a single corporate entity, is not giving us good signals related with the future of the free and strong Web.
