dig6x

Think there’s more nuance to this. Article actually talks about the concept of form and function as appealing to different subsets of mobile consumers. Motivation for surface duo is productivity - the design revolves around this I.e. form derivative of function

Samsung fold on the other hand revolves around the convenience of streaming and gaming, basically having a larger screen for a better experience. A convenience driven design appeals to a broader more general consumer base

Yeh 100%. The entire premise is that the social offering of FB is free (for the most part, of course users pay in data). I read an interesting article yday on why the 'free' offering of tech companies like FB allows them to thrive versus say an Uber-like tech company that has an explicit cost associated to it even though that is the delivery of a more tangible product i.e. getting from point a to b.

I believe this was a response to people interacting less with the feed and posting less about their own life.. its almost morphed into a reddit cross social feed now. And they're only expanding the bounds more and more, Facebook news if it takes off will also change this significantly once people start sharing more of that content.

It does seem very convenient timing, the article talks about Starbucks spending less than half of its ad spend compared to same time last year. When push comes to shove they are bound to return to one of the biggest advertising platforms.

Facebook in that sense similar to Google as an ad platform. Google has been threatening European publications that are refusing to allow it access to reader data that it will cut them off from the advertising avenues given it already gets permissions through its google accounts.

Seems like privacy laws and social pressure almost morphing into anti-competition sentiment for the big ad platforms.

Yeh the CLoud market was at a stage where the niche with some convenience add could thrive. Now we're seeing all these multi cloud platforms emerge because enterprises are managing multiple server providers at once etc. so you can imagine all the opportunities for horizontal scaling beyond big tech in the industry.