Microsoft trashes Facebook phone

So who put ‘people first’?

Microsoft says the recently launched Facebook Home Skin for Android looks a lot similar to its own Windows phone.

Microsoft’s Frank X. Shaw in a recent post on the company’s official blog writes that the recent presentation by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was aimed at positioning the smartphone experience "away from tasks and apps and toward people” and the content of the presentation was “remarkably similar to the launch event we did for Windows phone two years ago.”

Here is a youtube video of Zukerberg’s presentation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1z60kZR_-U

and here is the one about the Windows phone that lays its emphasis on ‘people first.’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6Chc8ODv8Q

According to Shaw, when the Microsoft team sat down to design the Windows phone the emphasis was clearly to “put people first.”

“Those three words were chosen around a pretty powerful but simple insight: People are more important than apps, so phones should be designed around you and the people you care about, not the apps you might use to reach them,” he notes.

He adds that what facebook is trying to do is taking the Windows phone experience to users of Android - a platform that lacks such a feature.

“But as Android owners know, that platform is complicated enough without adding another skin built around another metaphor, on top of what is already a custom variant of the OS. So, while we applaud Facebook for working to give some Android owners a taste of what a ‘people-centric’ phone can be like, we’d humbly like to suggest that you get the real thing, and simply upgrade to a Windows phone,” he adds.

Experts are already terming the facebook phone as something that will further destroy privacy. Copycat or not, with almost 940 million users, all that facebook needs is a fraction of those likes to create some serious competition in an already overcrowded market.