Anyone who has attended my ‘State of the ICT Nation’ speeches over the last 10 years will have been subjected to MyTop and the oft-repeated prediction that the company (or companies) that can ‘own’ the portal to the Cloud will be the winner(s). I have predicted that the ‘fight’ will be between Apple and Facebook – as this rather old ‘slide’ illustrates. The also-rans (or maybe non-runners?) will be Microsoft and Google.
This week the saga took another interesting step forward as Facebook launched its iPad App. See FT Facebook engages Apple with new App. Of the 350m who access Facebook each month via their mobiles, around half do it via a web browser and the other half do it via a dedicated app (eg via the Blackberry app and now, via the Apple Store, for iOS devices)
Facebook is the ‘stickiest’ portal to the cloud around – and, as new features like email, Spotify, Skype, games etc get bundled in, it gets ‘stickier’ still. For many, why would you ever need to leave Facebook?
Apple, of course, wants you to use Facebook via their Apps Store because that way they take 30% of everything, like games, you then go on to download. But Facebook obviously wants to keep that revenue source itself. So, alongside the iPad app available via Apple, you can also use an HTML5 version. Not a lot of difference to the user. But Facebook then retains the 30%. We’ve seen this already with the highly successful HTML5 version of FT.com.
This contest will be very interesting as (see above) the dominance of the mobile web will decided as a result. My own view is that both Apple AND Facebook will do very well. But note, neither I nor Facebook has mentioned Google or Microsoft..