Could Facebooks openness be its own undoing?

Business is a bit like poker, you have your hand and you play it well. You bluff or fold depending
on your hand, but you never show your competitors your hand, you bluff them to up the stakes or increase the pot size.
The bigger the pot the bigger the return. Well Facebook have decided that poker is not really a game for them.



Today Facebook will share even more data with us, but this time aimed at its infrastructure. This is
like having a Royal Flush and telling all your competitors what you have before you have the chance to
build up a huge pot to win.



Facebook is expected to release a server design that minimizes power consumption and cost while
delivering the right computer workload for a variety of tasks that Facebook does. Unlike Google,
which is famous for building its own hardware and keeping its infrastructure advantage close to
its vest, Facebook is sharing its server design with the world. Much of the approach mirrors the
scaled-down ethos of massive hardware buyers that requires stripped down boxes without redundant
power supplies that have hot swappable drives to make repairs and upgrades easier.



Facebook couldn’t just unleash its server plans to the market. The social networking site has also
shared its data center designs to help other startups working at webscale build out their infrastructure
in a manner that consumes as little power as possible. Yahoo has also shared its data center plans, with
special attention going to its environmentally friendly chicken coop designs and Microsoft has built out
a modular data center concept that allows it to build a data center anywhere in very little time.



Facebook has already openly shared its software, which is easily downloadable from the developer console
on the Facebook website. When will this ethos of sharing everything stop? Facebook has had multiple
mine fields with privacy issues in the past, yet this has not stopped them innovating and moving forward.



But when is to much information enough? Will the day to day movements of Zuckerberg himself be shared
with us next? I have not checked Foursquare yet, but this may already be the case. I do understand that
without opennessof software and other products, we would not be in this state of technlogical advancements.
Curning out new innovative ways to share information across a network or code full dynamic websites.



Facebook are taking the openness of sharing to a whole new level, sharing its infrastructure to the world of hackers.
Can this sharing of too much information with the public cause a backlash down the line? Could a potential
competitior sitting in the wings waiting for the right moment to release a application or product, be waiting
for Facebook to show their hand?



Okay so this is not going to end Facebook, with more than 25% of the entire worlds online population using the service,
not many people could even predict a product that would serve as a better more advanced, alternative to Facebook,
but I just feel that Facebook should hold back a card or two, jUst to make sure they dont get stung by a better
hand and lose the whole pot and be out of the game.







You can read more on the Open Source Servers here:
http://gigaom.com/cloud/facebook-open-sources-its-servers-and-data-centers/

Author: / Posted: 07-04-2011