Facebook’s biggest mistake

Back in 2010, Mark Zuckerberg was roundly criticized for saying, in response to a question about why there was no Facebook app for iPad, that the iPad wasn’t mobile. “iPad’s not mobile, next question,” the Facebook CEO responded. “It’s a computer, that’s a different thing.”

Two years later, Facebook does have an iPad app, and Zuckerberg has changed his tune when it comes to the importance of mobile and the ability to access Facebook on handheld computing devices we carry around with us. Speaking to Michael Arrington at TechCrunch Disrupt on Tuesday, Zuckerberg admitted that Facebook’s biggest mistake was that “we burned two years not working on mobile.” (Not Timeline. Sorry, haters.)

He expressed regret that Facebook had been betting on the Web and html coding “completely,” but says Facebook has made a complete turnabout.




“Now we are a mobile company and all the code is being written in mobile,” he said.

Zuck’s revelation regarding the importance of mobile is personal as well.

“You know the founder’s letter in the S-1 [filing],” he said to Arrington. “I wrote that on my phone. I do everything on my phone as a lot of people do.”

That’s impressive because the founder’s letter was loooooong.

The CEO, who seems a lot more comfortable on a stage than he used to, said the company expects ad revenue from mobile to surpass that from desktops in the future. Arrington asked Zuckerberg repeatedly whether that mobile revenue might also come from a “Facebook phone.” And Zuck repeatedly denied that was in the works.