Meta’s meltdown has a lot to do with terrible decision making at the top and too many yes-people blindly agreeing because the king set up the company where nobody can disagree with his decisions.
Facebook could have pursued other social network ideas and found a way to keep things steady. Even a twitter competitor would have been interesting. More focus on competing with LinkedIn?
This. The damage is irreparable. When boomers start leaving this earth, fb will start going with them. I think their business model will change to something like acquire the hottest startups and exploiting them until they sucked them dry. At least Mark has WhatsApp and IG yet.
LinkedIn on the other hand is just pride in a bottle. I doubt they'll change their strategy. If they try to appeal to other markets, they'll die just because their core premise is cv placement. That's it. Anything else won't work.
They did almost a hundred acquisitions, mostly thanks to their high-flying stock. Their eggs weren't all in one basket (though they sure did their best to act like they were). Maybe they just couldn't make any more hits out of the field because almost no one could?
The only meltdown is the stock price. FB is still the most popular social network in the world. Insta is likely second. Quest has outsold Xbox and is on the way to outselling PlayStation.
$27 billion in revenue from three billion daily active users last quarter. Bytedance by comparison lost $7 billion last year. Meta Reels are being shared one billion times and viewed 140 billion per day. As much as the biased media wants it to be true, Meta isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Consumers couldn't care less about the stock price.
Facebook has jumped the shark with Metaverse. Have you seen those ads they are running? A bunch of people sitting around a table and instead of talking to each other they are all wearing these ridiculous goggles? Can you imagine anything like that happening in real life? It's absolutely absurd.
Meh big companies run cringe ads... Yes, I have a Quest and have had fun with friends over. Multiple Quests would be even more fun, space provided. You can talk and use the device at the same time. Much like you can play chess, PlayStation, etc and talk.
They've sold millions of units and reported $1.5 billion of sales on the Quest store so maybe it's not so absurd.
> terrible decision making at the top and too many yes-people
Remember way back when, when it was so important to keep founders in charge of their companies when they took investment, and even went public? That was the secret to success, VCs told us!
> Today, even though the five stocks still make up over 13% of the market value of the S&P 500, the FAANG narrative seems like it’s over for good.
Let me save you ten minutes. It is a zero information article. Gives no backing for this central claim, instead randomly rambles about Meta without saying anything that hasn't been said a million times before.
Agreed. If anything, I think the separate fortunes of Meta and Netflix vs Google, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft show how much "platform control" matters and why Zuckerberg is spending so much to "make the metaverse happen".
I think the best way to define "platform control" is to think about how disruptive it would be, not just to consumers, but also to an integrated web of other businesses (and governments for that matter) if a business all of a sudden disappeared. If any of Google, Amazon, Apple or Microsoft stopped existing tomorrow, it would be a major international disaster. Think of all the businesses that sell on Amazon, all of the internet companies that depend on AWS, Azure and GCP, all the phones that run Android, all the computers that run Windows, all of the apps that depend on iOS, etc. etc.
If Meta and Netflix disappeared tomorrow, would people care that much? Heck, many folks would cheer. And yes, while I'm minimizing some of the follow on effects (e.g. to all the organizations whose sole web presence is on a Facebook page, to all the users across the globe who depend on WhatsApp, to all the shows and movies that are Netflix exclusives, etc.), switching to alternatives wouldn't really be that disruptive - in many cases it's already happening. The worsening fortunes of Meta and Netflix are because the stock market has concluded that their "moats" aren't as deep and wide as envisioned a couple years ago.
Lots of bussiness use Facebook and Instagram for ads and reaching clients. I know few people who run shops selling clothing exclusively on Instagram and Facebook. They got rid of their websites and even communicate with client through IG messaging, etc. Not sure what impact disappearance of Meta would have, but I think there are many niche areas for which it wouldn’t be negligible.
Every 'era' has some set of folk who think whatever hot thing is "invincible" and all of them are wrong, every time. Even in cases like Apple (which was very vincible for a long time) and IBM (which is the only major firm to pivot multiple times over a century and still roam about as a major player) had to adapt hard, and they are outliers.
The rest are just dead, assimilated into other players, etc.
The industry has always been dynamic and most aspects, very very fungible.
To your point, I remember growing up in the mid eighties to early nineties there were a handful of "invincible" companies that we were sure weren't going ANYWHERE within our lifetimes:
* Sun Microsystems
* Silicon Graphics
* Cisco
* Hewlett Packard
* Digital
* Compaq
* Intel
* Motorola
* Atari
plus some "invincible" Japanese power houses (especially in the eighties):
* Sony
* Panasonic
* Hitachi
* Sanyo
* TDK
If anyone in the late nineties told me that there would be a pocket computer built in 2008 that would be owned or aspired to by everyone on the planet from teenagers to CEOs my investment would likely go to Palm, Handspring or Motorola. Certainly NOT Apple or Google (the latter of which wasn't even around until the late nineties).
That any of the above would be dead or shadows of their former selves within 30 years was simply unthinkable
I’m not sure this list is particularly accurate. Many American companies are still most certainly alive and kicking (HP/HPE; Intel; Cisco; Motorola), and the Japanese ones manufacture plenty of other things besides just computer hardware.
Hitachi, for instance, sold its HGST hard drive business to WD, but it also makes a lot of heavy-industry and defence equipment, including tanks, APCs, rolling-stock, lifts, and construction equipment. Sony is by far the biggest manufacturer of CMOS sensors (almost every single smartphone uses a Sony sensor), and not even including its music, film, video game, camera, and smartphone divisions. Sure, they don’t make VAIO notebooks and Walkmans any more, but they almost certainly have a massive monopoly/duopoly over many of their other divisions.
It’s just survival of the fittest. You could’ve said the same thing about aeroplane companies throughout the ‘50s to ‘90s. Almost every other American company has been subsumed into Boeing or Lockheed-Martin; the same goes for many other British companies that are now BAE Systems, and European companies that are now Airbus.
Yeah, I know that Hitachi makes industrial equipment. I'm talking consumer products divisions here.
Also yes, HP is alive. It is a shadow of its former self when it comes to the impact on the industry.
Sony is the name that fared best in the consumer space due to the outsized impact of the Playstation franchise. But again, it's a shadow of the presence it had in the households worldwide in the 80's. You had to be around then to appreciate just how ubiquitous their consumer electronics was. Sony was the Apple Inc of the eighties.
Oh, they were around in the eighties. Except at the time they made crap bought by those who could not afford a Sony. LG was called GoldStar at the time and had to rebrand as the original name was in tatters due to their poor quality.
However, they ground it out patiently into dominance, over decades.
That any of the above would be dead or shadows of their former selves within 30 years was simply unthinkable
Not all of us thought it was unthinkable at the time.
Many of these companies made strategic mistakes that resulted in them being a shadow of their former selves.
Even though Unix was born on their hardware in the 70s, DEC never embraced it, preferring their VMS operating system instead. They eventually created Ultrix, their version of BSD Unix, but by then it was too late.
Ken Olsen, DEC’s CEO basically said he didn’t see why anyone would need a computer at home [1] which obviously was incorrect. (He probably meant a minicomputer but still.)
DEC eventually came out with a line of PCs called the Rainbow but again, they missed the boat.
DEC was a chip foundry back then and an early ARM licensee; they created the StrongARM processor [2] that was used in one of Apple’s Newton MessagePads, which was quite a technological leap at the time compared to the Palm Pilot and Handspring. I owned a Palm at the time but the Newton was on another level.
Why was the StrongARM so good? Because DEC created Alpha, their own RISC processor and used what they learned to improve ARM. For the noobs, yes, their was an ARM-based mobile device made by Apple in the ‘90s that wasn’t commercially successful but it showed the way forward.
DEC sold its StrongARM IP and its chip fab to IBM to settle a lawsuit.
So DEC missed out on Unix, PCs and today’s dominant RISC processor because of some bad decisions; more likely, a lack of vision.
And let’s not forget that Intel was also an ARM licensee for a while, too. In an alternate universe, it’s Intel making ARM chips for Apple and not TSMC. It’s kinda ironic that Apple dropped Intel’s x86 processors for its own ARM-based processors, an architecture Intel once made.
HP famously passed on the Apple II, the computer that ignited the personal computer revolution, that its employee Steve Wozniak had worked on with his friend Steve Jobs.
It’s also ironic Apple, declared dead so many times during the 80’s and 90’s, ended up where it is today.
This has nothing to do with tech. It's the ad business that's struggling, because of the economic situation and because more players want to have a piece of the cake (e.g. Apple, TikTok).
This. Instead of a Meta/Google/Twitter world advertisers can now create deals with Amazon, Disney[1], Apple [2] Netflix [3], Mercado Libre, etc directly without the social media middlemen, without the political outrage, and without running the risk of offending a highly polarized group.
What we have to realize is that
(a) the era of social networks is over. There is no need to create content for social networks, because that's not where your audience is anymore.
(b) EigenSocial sites like Lunchclub and Youtube will change the way we connect, learn, engage online.
(c) Monetization is deeply embedded in these products which makes it much more interesting/safer/profitable to be on those sites.
Seems like it's big internet tech that's foundering. Here are some tech companies that are holding up quite well relative to S&P overall: Oracle, Cisco, Texas Instruments, IBM. None of these have "daily average users" as a primary growth metric. Nuts-and-bolts tech is still doing OK. It's more like 2000 than I think most people (especially here) would like to admit.
39 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 89.4 ms ] threadFacebook could have pursued other social network ideas and found a way to keep things steady. Even a twitter competitor would have been interesting. More focus on competing with LinkedIn?
LinkedIn would be an interesting competitor to go after, Microsoft bought it and has no idea what to do with it
https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2021/02/11/microsoft_azure_u...
LinkedIn on the other hand is just pride in a bottle. I doubt they'll change their strategy. If they try to appeal to other markets, they'll die just because their core premise is cv placement. That's it. Anything else won't work.
$27 billion in revenue from three billion daily active users last quarter. Bytedance by comparison lost $7 billion last year. Meta Reels are being shared one billion times and viewed 140 billion per day. As much as the biased media wants it to be true, Meta isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Consumers couldn't care less about the stock price.
They've sold millions of units and reported $1.5 billion of sales on the Quest store so maybe it's not so absurd.
Remember way back when, when it was so important to keep founders in charge of their companies when they took investment, and even went public? That was the secret to success, VCs told us!
Youtube is useless and its audience is highly fragmented.
Twitter is with Elon now, so who knows.
Facebook is doomed. Its a cesspool of endless ads.
Instagram perhaps.
Pinterest and Snap are not that mainstream as Twitter was.
Mastodon is a bunch of blumbs with some nerps that kerfufle with munk.
Let me save you ten minutes. It is a zero information article. Gives no backing for this central claim, instead randomly rambles about Meta without saying anything that hasn't been said a million times before.
I think the best way to define "platform control" is to think about how disruptive it would be, not just to consumers, but also to an integrated web of other businesses (and governments for that matter) if a business all of a sudden disappeared. If any of Google, Amazon, Apple or Microsoft stopped existing tomorrow, it would be a major international disaster. Think of all the businesses that sell on Amazon, all of the internet companies that depend on AWS, Azure and GCP, all the phones that run Android, all the computers that run Windows, all of the apps that depend on iOS, etc. etc.
If Meta and Netflix disappeared tomorrow, would people care that much? Heck, many folks would cheer. And yes, while I'm minimizing some of the follow on effects (e.g. to all the organizations whose sole web presence is on a Facebook page, to all the users across the globe who depend on WhatsApp, to all the shows and movies that are Netflix exclusives, etc.), switching to alternatives wouldn't really be that disruptive - in many cases it's already happening. The worsening fortunes of Meta and Netflix are because the stock market has concluded that their "moats" aren't as deep and wide as envisioned a couple years ago.
Your analysis seems pretty good to me though.
The rest are just dead, assimilated into other players, etc.
The industry has always been dynamic and most aspects, very very fungible.
* Sun Microsystems
* Silicon Graphics
* Cisco
* Hewlett Packard
* Digital
* Compaq
* Intel
* Motorola
* Atari
plus some "invincible" Japanese power houses (especially in the eighties):
* Sony
* Panasonic
* Hitachi
* Sanyo
* TDK
If anyone in the late nineties told me that there would be a pocket computer built in 2008 that would be owned or aspired to by everyone on the planet from teenagers to CEOs my investment would likely go to Palm, Handspring or Motorola. Certainly NOT Apple or Google (the latter of which wasn't even around until the late nineties).
That any of the above would be dead or shadows of their former selves within 30 years was simply unthinkable
Hitachi, for instance, sold its HGST hard drive business to WD, but it also makes a lot of heavy-industry and defence equipment, including tanks, APCs, rolling-stock, lifts, and construction equipment. Sony is by far the biggest manufacturer of CMOS sensors (almost every single smartphone uses a Sony sensor), and not even including its music, film, video game, camera, and smartphone divisions. Sure, they don’t make VAIO notebooks and Walkmans any more, but they almost certainly have a massive monopoly/duopoly over many of their other divisions.
It’s just survival of the fittest. You could’ve said the same thing about aeroplane companies throughout the ‘50s to ‘90s. Almost every other American company has been subsumed into Boeing or Lockheed-Martin; the same goes for many other British companies that are now BAE Systems, and European companies that are now Airbus.
Also yes, HP is alive. It is a shadow of its former self when it comes to the impact on the industry.
Sony is the name that fared best in the consumer space due to the outsized impact of the Playstation franchise. But again, it's a shadow of the presence it had in the households worldwide in the 80's. You had to be around then to appreciate just how ubiquitous their consumer electronics was. Sony was the Apple Inc of the eighties.
The tagline was true at the time.
Good point. Smartphones have obviated most of Sony’s past dominance (cassette/VCR players, portable radios, Walkmans, etc).
However, I still don’t think it’s fair to call it a ‘shadow’ of its former self—Sony has just divested into different areas of consumer electronics.
Not all of us thought it was unthinkable at the time.
Many of these companies made strategic mistakes that resulted in them being a shadow of their former selves.
Even though Unix was born on their hardware in the 70s, DEC never embraced it, preferring their VMS operating system instead. They eventually created Ultrix, their version of BSD Unix, but by then it was too late.
Ken Olsen, DEC’s CEO basically said he didn’t see why anyone would need a computer at home [1] which obviously was incorrect. (He probably meant a minicomputer but still.)
DEC eventually came out with a line of PCs called the Rainbow but again, they missed the boat.
DEC was a chip foundry back then and an early ARM licensee; they created the StrongARM processor [2] that was used in one of Apple’s Newton MessagePads, which was quite a technological leap at the time compared to the Palm Pilot and Handspring. I owned a Palm at the time but the Newton was on another level.
Why was the StrongARM so good? Because DEC created Alpha, their own RISC processor and used what they learned to improve ARM. For the noobs, yes, their was an ARM-based mobile device made by Apple in the ‘90s that wasn’t commercially successful but it showed the way forward.
DEC sold its StrongARM IP and its chip fab to IBM to settle a lawsuit.
So DEC missed out on Unix, PCs and today’s dominant RISC processor because of some bad decisions; more likely, a lack of vision.
And let’s not forget that Intel was also an ARM licensee for a while, too. In an alternate universe, it’s Intel making ARM chips for Apple and not TSMC. It’s kinda ironic that Apple dropped Intel’s x86 processors for its own ARM-based processors, an architecture Intel once made.
HP famously passed on the Apple II, the computer that ignited the personal computer revolution, that its employee Steve Wozniak had worked on with his friend Steve Jobs.
It’s also ironic Apple, declared dead so many times during the 80’s and 90’s, ended up where it is today.
[1]: http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/868.html
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StrongARM
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30177741
What we have to realize is that (a) the era of social networks is over. There is no need to create content for social networks, because that's not where your audience is anymore.
(b) EigenSocial sites like Lunchclub and Youtube will change the way we connect, learn, engage online.
(c) Monetization is deeply embedded in these products which makes it much more interesting/safer/profitable to be on those sites.
[1] https://deadline.com/2022/07/disney-record-9-billion-upfront... [2] https://www.reuters.com/technology/apple-expand-live-tv-adve... [3] https://app.finclout.io/t/nvqDbev
No?
I think this is just rhetoric for clicks
or does it show Meta lost touch with userbase realities?
Such things happen many times before with large companies on free market, some survive, others not.