The Decline and Fall of Facebook
Roger with his axe
Roger McNamee is a smart guy and a very successful investor as a co-founder of Elevation Partners. He made a breakfast presentation last month at the Paley Center for Media in Los Angeles that is well worth watching. I could probably get half a dozen columns out of this one speech, but the part I want to concentrate on here is McNamee’s claim that when it comes to social media, Facebook (in which he was an early investor) has already won. I’m not here to say Roger is wrong, just that I am not exactly sure what Facebook is winning.
The core of McNamee’s speech didn’t have to do so much with Facebook as with Microsoft, Apple, Google, and HTML5. His point was that Microsoft is going down and that is freeing-up money from a decaying enterprise software business that can go to support new businesses based on HTML5. Google won’t be the beneficiary of Microsoft’s fall, according to Roger, because they’ve lost, too: the mobile transition effectively eliminates Google’s tollbooth on the Internet because smart phone users hardly search at all. So Apple wins by providing all the devices and Facebook wins, I guess, by providing the most popular destination.
Again, I’m not saying he’s wrong, but what I took away from this speech was first an image of Microsoft as the Roman Colosseum being mined for marble after the barbarian invasion, and second a sense that while Facebook is certainly a huge social, cultural, and business phenomenon, I just don’t see it being around for very long.
Facebook is a huge success. You can’t argue with 750 million users and growing. And I don’t see Google+ making a big dent in that. What I see instead is more properly the fading of the entire social media category, the victim of an ever-shortening event horizon.
Each era of computing seems to run for about a decade of total dominance by a given platform. Mainframes (1960-1970), minicomputers (1970-1980), character-based PCs (1980-1990), graphical PCs (1990-2000), notebooks (2000-2010), smart phones and tablets (2010-2020?). We could look at this in different ways like how these devices are connected but I don’t think it would make a huge difference.
Now look at the dominant players in each succession – IBM (1960-1985), DEC (1965-1980), Microsoft (1987-2003), Google (2000-2010), Facebook (2007-?). That’s 25 years, 15 years, 15 years, 10 years, and how long will Facebook reign supreme? Not 15 years and I don’t think even 10. I give Facebook seven years or until 2014 to peak.
Does this feel wrong to you? Listen to your gut and I think you’ll agree with me even if we don’t exactly know why.
Roger may not care since he will have already made his Facebook fortune and then some. But I think this foreshortening is important because it makes Facebook the winner, yes, but the winner of what? Super-IPO of the decade? Yes. Dow-30 company of 2025? No.
My interest is in what follows Facebook, which I think must be its disintermediation by all of us reclaiming our personal data, possibly through our embracing the very HTML5 that Roger loves so much. The trend is clear from “the computer is the computer” through “the network is the computer” to what’s next, which I believe is “the data is the computer.”
You’ll notice I didn’t mention Apple. Black swan.
[...] Google keyboard shortcuts. But Roger McNamee says, “Google is done.” Bob Cringely predicts “the fading of the entire social media [...]
[...] suspect that Facebook is soon to fall but Facebook still has plenty of time to make changes and adjust to their [...]
I’m stuck on the 2010-2020 smart phones and tablets point…
What on earth could be next?!
If we knew, we’d already be trying to make it.
Implants!
[...] Google keyboard shortcuts. But Roger McNamee says, “Google is done.” Bob Cringely predicts “the fading of the entire social media [...]
Am I the only one who’s been looking forward to this since the beginning of facebook? With all the other sites (namely Google+), who needs facebook? The games which used to be free aren’t, the profiles that used to be real aren’t, and the false sense of security they used to have simply isn’t there.
Roger is a very righteous dude,
“Walmart, Amazon deliver iPad apps bypassing Apple”,
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/08/11/BU8O1KLPPD.DTL&type=printable
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It’s my opinion that tech companies fail because they become a “diseconomy of scale.”
Imagine enlarging a chicken to the size of a T-Rex; soon the chicken collapses under it’s own weight.
Facebook has 750-million users – how can they be fluid within that “tower of babel?”
essentially their poor argument can be used just as well to say that any tech company will die. you could use that by extention and correlation logic to say apple will die or google will die and that twitter will die ect ect. those dying companies were all purely machine companies and fb is not. tech is an enourmous space and analogies between why they died and why fb will die needed far better analysis for this article to be vaguely taken seriously. the article was i guess written for the headline.
I like the idea that improved firmware can help because I’ve always felt the supplied software in my Router is pretty poor.
I’m guessing movies might have less of a need
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So, explain to me why Google’s reign of dominance ended in 2010? That would be convenient to establish the pattern you’re trying to achieve in diminishing time spans, but it’s far from a given.
BobX isn’tsaying it ended, he is saying it peaked.
IBM didn’t die off, it plateaued.
Microsoft didn’t die off, it saturated the market, and is now slowly shrinking in importance, even while total sales still slowly increase.
Google didn’t pop like a bubble, they just stopped doubling in income and reach every time you turned around.
Facebook will be facing the same kind of thing. But, Facebook is more of a social thing, or even a fad. They can disappear much more easily that IBM or DEC (which did die, or rather was absorbed by Compaq then HP and now may come back from the dead.)
I think that Bob’s point here is that the fantastic growth days may be behind them, and if they aren’t careful, they could miss the opportunity to thrive, or even survive.
Are you sure it’s a facebook era right now ?
Cause $$ wise they make shit compared to what Apple makes in a year.
You’ should rather call it an Apple era, dont you think ?
With the death of Jobs, Apple will sink in relevance since they cant buy or wont buy anything that they can ‘innovate’ and claim as their own and make cool. Without him they are not cool. Thus the ass kicking they took at Christmas. Regardless of fan boy sentiments, i see more PC than Mac at my Starbucks and in schools. And i am now seeing android powered phones far more than iPhones.
Apple is a patent company and law firm with some developers and typesetters thrown in. Their relevance will fall off the map by the end of the year and Googles’ relevance will climb. Facebook is already making the moves to follow the crowd to mobile. If they can stick the landing this year they will be fine. Google+, i am not sure where that is going to go. I am monetizing Facebook and if i can do it, anyone can. Facebook is here to stay for quite sometime. It wont die, neither will Apple. Their relevance is a whole different question beyond my limited knowledge.
I wonder what will be the future of these Social Networking Sites. In every 3 months new website is launched with new features.
Google is still struggling to make its place among these Social Networking Sites.
Perhaps the reason for the decreasing years of dominance is related to the increasing impact of software innovation over hardware advances for most consumer products.
[...] http://www.cringely.com/2011/07/the-decline-and-fall-of-facebook [...]
Alex Good Job I agree as I know a company that had use a deal through walmart and ibm to pickup walmart laptops dirt cheap if they traded in there desktop computer So I don’t think IBm toppe doff I think they are staying off the Radar
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[...]I, Cringely » Blog Archive » The Decline and Fall of Facebook – Cringely on technology[...]…
I believe Facebooks stranglehold is fading all the time.
I think Twitter will overtake them all. Personally I do not think Google+ will have any impact at all apart from a social bookmarking tool.
The Mobil Stampede represents an expansion of the market,– not a shift. Mobil endpoints though are mainly content consumers; not contributors. As the Old Sages says: a rising tide lifts all boats and so it will be with this. Content contributors will continue to prefer the heavy duty equipment that facilitates their work: an office, phone, snack room, co-workers, and a couple quad-core dual monitor work horses hooked up on fiber cable.
There is change in the wind and that is for privacy and security. Customers are already cognizant of the hazards of excessive privilege and the resulting abuse of customer data and equipment. Companies which do not move decisively to make this right will find themselves on the wrong side of the law in addition to the wrong side of customer goodwill.
[...] The Decline And Fall Of Facebook [...]
I don’t think for a second that privacy and security will drive any appreciable amount of people in any meaningful way, especially with something entrenched like Facebook. The only reason people fake a tiny amount of concern over it is because of FB’s policy to ask permission first.
I agree with the premise of this article, though. As technology improves, we won’t need a central hub to do any kind of “social networking”. We’ll be able to host pictures and stream images directly from our own equipment, without any need for special expertise or an intermediary.
Companies like Facebook that get in the way by insisting that you use their sites to communicate, post pictures, etc… which seem so easy and seamless now will begin to seem like an artificial hurdle to jump over without a meaningful advantage.
Platforms that constrain what you can do by locking you in to a vendor’s preferred method of doing things will slowly wither and die as the slow but (relatively) steady march of progress brings legally unencumbered alternatives to bear.
The reason Flash died out was only partially technical. If Flash had been, from the beginning, an open standard, it would be far better integrated with everything else as more people, wishing to take advantage of it’s strengths, improved on it. Instead, we got a highly self-contained ball of slow-loading and buggy crap that continually caused crashes and never integrated all that well with the rest of the system and imposed largely unnecessary constraints.
It’ll be slow and painful, but Flash will die. Facebook is as Flash was five years ago. Asking people to subscribe to its way of doing things. And it has and will work because it was accessible and quick and easy, and everyone else was doing it. But eventually there’s going to be a feature, a paradigm, a way of doing things that it won’t be able to support. Then another, and another. And people won’t be doing absolutely everything on it. Companies will start having to maintain a presence both on and off of it, and people will realize that those things you could do on Facebook, you could do elsewhere. And the foundations of sand will begin to crumble away.
Sorry this has been a very long and very stream-of-consciousness rant. I wasn’t expecting to have this much to say on this topic before but whatever. It’s done. Submit!
I will say, though, that one good thing FB has done (is doing) for the web is bring metadata to it. OG tags are really nice; they let you specify things about a site for machines to interpret. It may be very good for future searches (e.g. you could subscribe to a feed of what local restaurants are offering without any need for an intermediary aggregator. The result you get will be based it’s own identifying characteristics and on others’ preferences, and those businesses will not have had to pay any marketing agency or publishing company for the privilege of showing up in such a definitive guide.)
I am sorry, I dont quiet follow the logic here.
How did you get to facebook will fail and post fail analysis from Facebook is hugely successful with 750mill+ users ?
The era analogy makes sense in a ex post facto analysis. I am sure you can put Apple in there somewhere along with Lotus, Adobe and others.
Does this feel wrong to you? Listen to your gut and I think you’ll agree with me even if we don’t exactly know why.
>> I usually listen to my head. Gut usually gives me wrong answers all the time.
Is this the core of your argument ?
Or am I missing something here ?
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[...]I, Cringely » Blog Archive » The Decline and Fall of Facebook – Cringely on technology[...]…
Fantastic post. Great perspective. I find your data interesting and spot on, in fact, my blogs reflect the same attitude. I’m looking forward to reading more posts!
Thanks,
Joseph
tend to be more intuitive than men….
unfortunately, most women don’t use this power for betterment of their relationships.most women tend to direct their intuitions in wrong directions like fueling suspicions. this only creates a roadblock in the healthy development of their relationship…
Agree the basic theme.
There could be several reasons for fading away of this pure play social media ( that is social media for the sigular purpose of being social). When web 1.0 happened (getting information access over the net ), Yahoo was the pioneer and goto destination for all the users expereincing the net. But once the platform got standardized, users started going to more purposeful sites (Amazon, Ebay …) than going to Yahoo just for getting some news.. etc.
I think the same thing is going to happen to facebook. You can already feel the tiredness of being on it for all the time even though it is addictive — just as internet itself was in early 90s. It is matter of time – perhaps 3-5 years – before the novalty of social connection online fades and the users will start moving the sites that serve more purpose using the same user inter connectivity.
My gut instinct said Facebook was wrong from day one and I never signed up. I prefer my social life to take place “for real” as it were. I don’t have 212 friends and I don’t want 212 friends, thankyouverymuch.
I skipped Facebook, but signed up for Twitter, which I believe has the potential to be a tremendously more powerful medium, with purpose, as you put it so well. The usefulness of Twitter during the Eygptian crises last year convinced me that “social” networking of the Twitter variety was a good thing.
facebook can embody and implement the semantic web for real. every device, every car, every tv, can stand as a facebook endpoint on the open graph. zuck implies as much, and as such, this is just the very beginning.
You kind of seem to imply that Facebook will decline and fall like the other previously dominant companies. The thing is out of you 4 previously dominant companies 3 are still around are among or nearly among the top 5 biggest technology companies there are.
Vivekananda…
[...]I, Cringely » Blog Archive » The Decline and Fall of Facebook – Cringely on technology[...]…
This article presents very fascinating insights on technology trends along with resulting human behavior and preferences and finally an impact of all this on service providers. I feel the big thing already happening is ubiquity of data availability and access. We are all aware of cloud and its impact, though its being offered largely to enterprise it has started for public at large through services such as iCloud. Like someone has mentioned earlier in their posting it should not matter how and what one posts as long as one is not tied into a specific medium such as FB. I am wondering how cool would it be to have your own data on cloud and be able to do postings across social sites as and when you like and be able to view in your preferred manner. I am not that great a fan of FB look and feel which is too cluttered for me.
–Deccan Rock
You miss one critical point. Social media is the first of the above decade long trends built on a foundation that will not change – human narcissism. Whether FB remains #1 is debatable, but as each generation becomes increasingly “me centric”, social media will become more important, not less.
…”but as each generation becomes increasingly “me centric”….
I think generational attitudes are actually cyclic rather than trends that we could extrapolate in a straight line. There is some research that lead to the hypothesis that there are four distinct types of generations (like seasons in a year) that follow a 80-100 years cycle, with all people born within the same 20-25 year period belonging to the same “generation”.
This means there is one “me-me-me” generation every century (those born between 62 and 82) and of course there is a corresponding antagonist generation coming afterwards that will strengthen civic life at the expense of individualism. This means that social media will evolve away from the indiscriminate online profile hosting towards fulfilling a more specific communication purpose and audience e.g. Twitter
You can read about the underlying research in the book “The 4th Turning”
Deleteded my FB and do not miss it at all. Good riddance! They should have named it Frackbook instead
Frakbook
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[...]I, Cringely » Blog Archive » The Decline and Fall of Facebook – Cringely on technology[...]…
I know that interest on student loans can be claimed. But what about personal bank loans, bank loans for cars and the like? I get documents stating the interest paid that say it can be used for income tax purposes. My guess for the car loan at least, that if I owned a business and the car was a company car, in that case I could claim it..
[...] his blog, Rober X. Cringely speculates that, “My interest is in what follows Facebook, which I think must [...]