Sure, and the—unstated, admittedly—presumption was that FB was targeting consumer not enterprise use. I understand why enterprise videoconferencing systems exist.

> I'm okay with Facebook trying out a cheaper version for the average consumer.

I'm okay with them pursuing it. I'm just asking what the need is it serves.

Facebook views its mission as connecting people.

Other tech companies are heavily investing into hardware for the home including communications, along with various in-house services relating to AI, including Microsoft, Google, Sony, Amazon and Apple. That category will continue to rapidly expand, the products and services will get more and more powerful/capable. That hardware, such as the Echo, is a direct threat to Facebook's social monopoly, specifically because these devices will keep getting more powerful and keep reaching for nearby functions to assimilate. Those nearby functions will include numerous social & media aspects (two of Facebook's foundations now are images and video).

Why did Facebook aggressively target chat apps (WhatsApp, FB messenger) & photo apps (Instagram)? Because they were nearby functions to their core social product. It was very, very well understood that Instagram had the potential to expand into Facebook's territory, using images as the beachhead. Facebook is guaranteed to be concerned about the same concept at play with the devices being deployed into people's homes that are basically AI footholds. Today? No, today does not matter in that sense; this is all about the next 5, 10, 20 years and what these in-home devices will be capable of and what people will use them for.

No, Facebooks mission is to collect demographic data in as much detail as possible and to use that to sell ads.

Connecting people is a sideshow to all of this.

I never said it was their business model. You're confusing two separate aspects of what they do. They're directly related, they're not the same thing.

Facebook's mission is to connect people. That's what enables their business model. The former came before the latter, by necessity. They had a lot of connected users before they had a business model. But hey, try building a $500 billion social network business, before you start connecting up the users, see how it works out.

Guess what, I did. We reached about a million monthly active users at some point which was quite the high point, but still that's a drop in the bucket compared to where the web is today. Still, back then 100K active users per day put us well in the top 500 of all websites.

Needless to say I fell a bit short of the mark of making a $500B company but we really were trying to connect people and video chat was exactly the medium that we used. And no, we did not build up user profiles to track their behavior, not because we could not but because we felt that was not right.

So instead, we charged for the service and eventually it went under.

Personally I will not use any of these services unless I pay for them and my data is not retained or mined. Zuckerberg is the last person on the planet I would trust with my data.

That's also why I use plain old SMS rather than whatsapp and email or IRC rather than Gmail or Google hangouts or similar.