Facebook, welcome to B2B, seriously!
Yesterday, Facebook finally unveiled Workplace, their « enterprise » Facebook offer. By making this move Facebook is entering in a very new and different market, B2B SaaS and it is no small thing even for them!
Do you know a company that is successful on B2B and B2C altogether at a major scale? Chances are that not and this is for a very good reason, it’s damn hard!
Most companies that play in both fields are usually in a transition period, they start as a B2C offer and shift to B2B, but try to keep the B2C revenue along the way. Eventually they kill their B2C offer because they find out that even if the product looks the same, the rest is so dramatically different; from Sales to Marketing, Branding and even Technology (security, deployment, support etc.).
With Workplace Facebook is betting against the odds!
I’m confident that Facebook is not going to reinvent itself and neither loose the consumer model or change its technology or its core principles like the famous « Move Fast and Break Things » (even if they sort of did) and this is exactly why we are about to witness a very interesting journey in the B2B & SaaS landscape.
How does Facebook DNA, deeply linked to B2C, is going to play in the Enterprise?
Take a few topics like data privacy and security? Currently, Workplace doesn’t offer true data isolation between customers and neither offers regional datacenter of your choosing (more info here). All those things are what Enterprise customers tend to ask more and more lately, is Facebook simply going to be able to tell them to forget about it? Even the pricing model is pretty bold for SaaS, MAA (Monthly Active User) is not the norm at all and this is only a few examples.
As of today Workplace is mostly a thin layer on top of the “normal” Facebook.
Facebook Workplace is a bold move, not because the product is a revolution, it’s not, but if Facebook succeed it’s going to affect the whole B2B SaaS ecosystem.
I’m thrilled.
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