(2023-01-19) The Facebook Portal Died This Is How It Almost Lived

The Facebook Portal Died. This Is How It Almost Lived. In November, Meta announced it would be discontinuing the Portal, its stand-alone video-chatting device. (smart display)

This was a truly outstanding product.

the Portal did sell well

the decision to pull the plug came because executives didn’t see a path to the Portal becoming a massive business (instead of just a nice business), and with shifting priorities at Meta, it didn’t make the cut

it's just not been nearly successful as we expected.”

“We were maybe two days away from signing an agreement with Amazon,” Bosworth said. “But this is the middle of the pandemic, and so Portal sales are spiking — they're going kind of through the roof — and we don't have the resources to do both.” He added that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg “in particular felt really strongly” about not going through with the Amazon deal. “The pandemic was potentially a secular shift in how people engaged with services that would last after [the pandemic] receded,” Bosworth said. “You're seeing a behavior in the marketplace that, Hey, actually the curve is bending here. Maybe it stays bent indefinitely.”

Eventually, grandparents were able to see their grandkids again, and sales of the Portal slowed

Bosworth said that one big takeaway from the Portal experience is that it’s hard to compete at a major level on anything that is basically something you can just do on your phone.