[scottmac]

Gizmo was from the group I worked with at Facebook. This was almost entirely from a "How can we make it easier for people to collaborate". 2 is the closest reason :)

They were multi functional:

- Room Check-in devices (replacing Nexus 7s)

- Building Maps (replacing mac-minis)

- Reception Check-in (replacing iPads)

- Employee Dashboards (replacing mac-minis)

- Video conference control panels (replacing the cisco device)

The advantages they had were:

- Single SKU for IT Operations

- Pulled down a fresh image on each boot and had no state which made IT and security happier

- Could join the correct VLAN via 802.11x, the key lived on the TPM chip which made security happy

- Powered via PoE allowed remote restarts

[theshrike79]

This is something companies would pay huge amounts of money for.

Any idea why Facebook never marketed these?

[pbalau]

> This is something companies would pay huge amounts of money for.

> Any idea why Facebook never marketed these?

This was designed to fit with internal Facebook frameworks and network capabilities. The device itself does not do much, in most cases just starts a browser and points it to an internal webapp. The device is just the presentation layer of a great deal of backend work that can't be easily extracted as a product.

[theshrike79]

Still, I'd take that over some shitty "slap a $50 android tablet on a wall and point it at our weird http site" -solution.

[SiempreViernes]

Presumably it was envisioned as an internal project, so nobody though about trying to sell it: pure inertia.

[CharmingOpp]

Maybe some version of the innovator’s dilemma? The product would have to be insanely successful for it to move the needle at such a large corporation.

[pbalau]

> The advantages they had were:

- Get "misplaced", nothing of value can be stolen.

Considering the results the twitter user had, mission accomplished.