Apps Win And Facebook Gets Chatty — Will Apple Talk Back?

This week, Facebook managed to shake — if not break — the Internet with its announcement that bots are coming to Messenger.

Or, at least, they will be if developers choose to build them. The official announcement out of the F8 conference about the world’s most successful social media platform’s latest foray into the wide world of eCommerce is that Facebook has opened up Messenger with a set of tools for any developer that wants to build itself a chatbot.

“You never have to call 1-800-FLOWERS again,” Facebook CEO Marc Zuckerberg noted as he explained how chatbots — like one designed to help users order flowers — will change how we shop.

One might wonder if anyone actually has to call 1-800-FLOWERS right now or if those who aren’t already ordering their flowers online were really holding out for chatbots, but the notion of the “coming” obsolescence of dialing for flowers aside, the announcement certainly hit the digital commerce ecosystem hard.

This was perhaps aided by the somewhat more cogent explanation of the platforms power by Messenger Head David Marcus.

“I think our definition of a bot is really wider than how the industry has defined it,” Marcus told Wired in an interview shortly after the news dropped. “Everybody wanted websites when the Web was launched. And then, everybody wanted apps. This is the start of a new era.”

The bot that chats era.

Marcus further noted that while apps were “kind of crappy” at first, the ecosystem evolved the scope of the app and opportunity became apparent as smartphones became a dominant consumer technology. Facebook’s toolset, combined with its massive stage to perform on — Facebook Messenger has 800 million active users — is a similar opportunity waiting to be more fully explored.

And it is a view that Marcus shares with the majority of the tech and commerce press — or, at least, they see it as an idea they find highly persuasive, since the headlines of the week reflect some big enthusiasm for the coming chatbot revolution. And there is some concern, particularly for Apple and Google — the gatekeepers of the big app stores that are about to be disrupted by the bots. The Washington Post didn’t write the most colorful version of the headline, but it did write the most direct and the best summation of the various editorial responses to the announced news: “Why Apple and Google should be worried about Facebook’s new bots store.”

Far be it for us to throw cold water on conventional wisdom, because the Facebook chatbot commerce play is a big deal and could be truly disruptive if it actually works, but we might quietly interject that the suggested sackcloth, ashes and teeth gnashing being proposed as the most rational response out of Team Apple this week might just be a little bit overblown.

And also, it is at least worth bearing in mind that, even with Facebook Messenger’s big success this week, there are still some big hills to climb.

The Rising Mobile And Digital Tide That Lifts All Boats (But Maybe Facebook’s A Little Higher)

While the desktop computer is not quite a historical relic destined for immediate residence on the same scrapheap that contains the typewriter, fax machine or VCR, it is more than fair to say it also isn’t what it used to be. And that’s defining “what it used to be” by the standards of the ancient history of 2010.

The numbers — no matter which ones you want to use — stack up pretty impressively.

Almost everyone on Earth has a mobile phone, and today, about a quarter of them are smartphones. By some estimates, 80 percent of the adult population globally will own a smartphone by 2020, over half the world’s emails are opened on a mobile device and 80 percent of smartphone owners report having eyes on that device within 15 minutes of waking up in the morning. Commerce is increasingly moving to mobile, and though the desktop Web still has an edge in making large commerce purchases, that edge is eroding quickly, as the friction from checking out on a mobile device is removed.

And the market for those desktop PCs shows the evidence of the drift. According to both Gartner and IDC, 2016 is not looking good. PC shipments worldwide have fallen 9.6 percent to 64.8 million units in the first quarter of the year, meaning it is something of a milestone but in reverse. It is the first time since 2007 that fewer than 65 million PCs have shipped globally.

And that is the sunny estimate from Gartner. The darker outlook over at IDC indicated declines of 11.5 percent to 60.6 million units during Q1. It also showed declines among all the top desktop makers, including Apple (Gartner’s figures showed Apple with essentially flat growth).

However, as commentators have been observing all week, the world has moved on some, and while customers were once downloading apps at a rapid clip, the reality is that consumers are trying fewer new things and spending a lot more time in their favorite apps instead. A lot of time. The average user spends about 80 percent of their mobile time looking at the same five apps. And those apps are very often social media, and Facebook and its offshoots (Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram) are particularly favored time traps for consumers.

Which as the new conventional wisdom proffers: The best and brightest developers are increasingly going to want to get away from developing apps that no one will look at and swing for the fences with bots, since bots can interact more organically with consumers (and better meet their commerce needs) through conversation. So is said.

As MPD CEO Karen Webster noted a week or so before the chatbot reveal, the hope is that Messenger has found a way to give consumers that extra special experience that makes it that much better than the old in-app (or Web-based) purchases.

“Messenger’s hope is that getting commerce enablers on board will, in turn, pull more consumers inside the ecosystem and keep them there because they can get valuable services not available inside their existing apps or smartphone texting platforms. And if they do that, they will, in fact, ignite commerce inside of the app.”

That’s still a very big if.

And while the bots might be a helping hand, Apple may not need to lose all that much sleep just yet.

Those Other Hills

Learning AI — recent headlines have taught us that it can go bad in a way that regular applications just usually don’t. Take Tay, for example, Microsoft’s attempt at creating an AI teenage girl to interact on social media — Twitter to be specific. Within a day, Tay had tragically learned to become terribly racist. The second attempted launch went a little bit better in that Hitler was lauded zero times, but Tay still had rather significant R-rated issues with what she learned from humanity.

She has since been sent to her room indefinitely.

In order to work, chatbots have to do a good job of imitating pleasant customer service interactions for human beings on social media. That creates the seamless and useful opening for their existence. However, given the horrible actual track record of actual human behavior in customer service or social media contexts, one has to wonder if this is the best place to inject commerce.

Sure, the 1-800-FLOWERS chatbot can set up your order, but if the flowers show up the wrong color or with the name spelled wrong on the card, is the chatbot prepared to deal with human rage or at least know how to go find a human to deal with the other angry human?

David Marcus notes that this functionality is in its early days, and like apps, there are going to be misses.

The difference here, however, is that chatbots are trying to create a personalized interaction by “talking to you.” If an app goes wrong, is slow or is friction-filled, a user just won’t use it again. If a chatbot goes wrong while “talking to someone,” it runs even odds of actually personally offending them. And actively offending someone while they are sitting on a social media platform — wired into everyone they know and easily able to send out a message or, even better, a copy of whatever offensive thing an AI just said — is perhaps a lot higher risk than having an app in an app store.

So, Facebook made a big step this week. It is now all about execution and chatbots playing nicely with real people. But even if they do, Apple still wins. Remember where Messenger lives? In Apple’s App Store. And it gets to set the rules any way it wants to.

“Apple controls something like 65 percent of all of the apps traffic on mobile devices. And they control everything that happens on their platform — from who gets access, to how much that access costs, to the standards that are used,” Karen Webster noted in a recent commentary.

“That makes Facebook and everyone else who relies on the iOS ecosystem to enable app functionality vulnerable to the whims of Apple. Facebook, in particular, faces an interesting dilemma in reconciling its own gatekeeper aspirations with those of its host, Apple … Could Apple decide one day that all apps on its platform pay up or get out?” she remarked.

After all, it did it with the launch of Apple Pay.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. First, of course, there is the small matter of seeing whether or not consumers actually like chatbots.

We wouldn’t write off Apple just yet.