What Facebook Should Steal From Microsoft?s Playbook

Editor's note: This guest post was written by Raj Lalwani, the co-founder and CEO of Hallmark Social Calendar (formerly Social Calendar), a birthday reminder app on Facebook. In 2007, when Facebook opened its platform to developers, it seemed Facebook was using Microsoft's playbook - let developers create apps using their platform and see what apps succeed (Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect, Harvard Graphics). Then acquire or clone the successful ones (Microsoft Excel, Word, PowerPoint) as the cash cow and leave the crumbs (relatively speaking) for others. Something seems to have gone wrong - the third-party app ecosystem is not exactly thriving and Facebook still has no cash cows like Microsoft has (Office and Windows). Facebook is increasingly looking like Yahoo! - it does everything from Photos, Chat, Email to Places. It provides just enough features to be functional but leaves much to be desired, and increasingly depends on advertising as the revenue model. Here is what Facebook should steal from Microsoft's playbook which until recently had the largest market cap in technology (it's Apple now).

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/WyNVakJqs3U/

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