Even Apple admits the idea was a good one.
Back in 2011, in a cafeteria at the old Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, California, Mark Zuckerberg revealed that his company was building all sorts of new computing hardware that could more efficiently run its vast online empire. But that wasn't the only surprise. Facebook, Zuckerberg said, would share its new hardware designs with the rest of the world. The Facebook social networking empire had grown so large---serving hundreds of millions of people across the globe---it only made sense that the company would want to streamline the vast server farms that underpin its operation. (Not to mention that Google had already done something similar). But for many, Facebook's decision to "open source" these hardware designs seemed overly idealistic, impractical, even pointless.
The idea was that others could use Facebook's designs to build their own online operations, create a broad market for the gear, and reduce Facebook's costs even further. But the skeptics saw it as little more a PR stunt: Facebook showing the word how "open" it was. After all, how many others were the size of a Google or a Facebook? How many others would want this gear enough to change the way they've always done things? And even if they did, how could it possibly help Facebook?
Four years on, this seemingly quixotic idea has played out much as Facebook said it would. A social-networking company has changed the way internet companies consume the hardware on which they run---and the way many of the world's hardware companies build and sell it.
On Tuesday, at the annual Silicon Valley gathering of the Open Compute Project, the non-profit that oversees Facebook's effort to share hardware across the tech industry, Project chairman and ex-Facebooker Frank Frankovsky announced that Apple has joined the effort, following in the footsteps of Microsoft, cloud computing giant Rackspace, and several of the country's biggest financial companies, including Goldman Sachs, Fidelity, and Bank of America.
Like these others, Apple is a company that operates its own enormous online services---a company that needs the sort of hardware Facebook is sharing. Behind the scenes, Apple has long explored the use of Facebook's designs. And considering the intensely private nature of the company, its public involvement in the Open Compute project shows just how much it believes in this big idea.
Meanwhile, at the Open Compute Summit, two big-name American hardware companies revealed new products in direct response to Facebook's efforts---products that could help all sorts of other companies streamline their operations in much the same way Facebook has done. HP released a new line of computer servers based on Facebook's designs, and chip maker Intel unveiled a new streamlined server processor designed in tandem with Facebook. They believe in the idea too.
Intel isn't releasing the design of its new "single socket" chip to the world at large. Others can't build their own, as they can with Facebook's open source server designs. But Intel will eventually sell the chip to anyone, not just to Facebook. "The important bit here is that Facebook and Intel are doing this in the open," says Facebook vice president of infrastructure engineering Jay Parikh, who helped oversee this 18-month effort.
It's not an easy situation to wrap your head around. But perhaps more than anything else, this partnership shows how effectively Facebook's foundation has brought together the companies building the world's online services to the benefit of everyone who uses the internet.
In the past, Intel would work with a Google or a Facebook to modify its chips to better suit such enormous operations. But these modifications were small, rare, and largely secret. Intel didn't want everyone asking for their own custom chips. Its business, after all, is based on mass production. Now, with a community of companies---from Apple to Microsoft and beyond---getting behind Facebook's basic ideas, Intel has reason to change its ways.
As Frankovsky puts it, a company like Intel is no longer building a custom part for just one company. It's building for "one anchor tenant who also has a voice within a broader community." Indeed, Kushagra Vaid---who oversees the design of the hardware that drives Microsoft's online services---says that his company is building a new computer server that requires a single-socket chip. The Intel-Facebook's creation, he says, could be that chip.
In short, the hardware market isn't what it once was. And odds are, with Apple involved, the landscape will soon change even more. Open Compute Project chairman Frankovsky tells WIRED that Apple has been involved in the Open Compute project "pretty darn close to day one," meaning it has likely used Facebook's designs in its own data centers. Microsoft's Vaid says that Apple has already contributed to some of the project's open source hardware projects. And Frankovsky indicates that Apple will eventually open source some of its own designs .
"They are building stuff that would be really cool for them to contribute to the community," he says. "Membership in Open Compute is the just the first phase, and can then lead to them collaborating out in the open an then contributing design work."
In the long run, this can help anyone else building modern online services. And that includes Facebook, whose selflessness might have turned out to be a little bit selfish after all.
