The question's been asked "can a company die without an obvious challenger?" Yes, it can.
A company, platform, or technology can "die" in the sense that it loses the initiative, and more importantly, the ability to drive an industry and/or conversation, even though it hasn't yet died.
Apple was "dead" through most of the 1990s. It simply didn't matter, outside of the graphics and design areas, and for a very small cadre of fervent fans. The turnaround shocked me.
IBM very nearly died in the early 1990s, as its place as the center of the business computing world was shaken by anti-trust actions, Microsoft, and the upsurge in Unix vendors. The company's never fully regained its former footing, though it did recover largely.
Microsoft has been in the process of dying for most of the past decade. A highly symbolic moment for me was when The Economist newspaper ran a cover showing the leaders in tech: Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Microsoft wasn't even mentioned (it reminds me of an earlier revealing moment when the CEO of Visa International named the company's biggest rivals: MasterCard, AmEx, and Microsoft -- I guess it didn't pay to Discover...).
Sun Microsystems was fingered for the walking dead as Linux became ascendant, with its acquisition by Oracle (a panic response of both companies, coming at least five years too late to do either any good) coming long after it was obvious the company had not only staggered but was mortally wounded.
One thing to realize is that a fading icon is often not replaced by a direct competitor, but by one which addresses short
Facebook has dominated Silicon Valley for the past 5 years, stealing initiative from Google (who seems to be somewhat winning it back). Part of the situation is that "traditional" social networking is becoming passe, in part because it's become too Byzantine, and too intrusive. Social networks -- real social networks, not the online instantiations of them -- work best when the groups are relatively small, Dunbar's number is respected, and there's a level of insularity around any given group. TheFacebook at Harvard had those features. Facebook, Inc., 1 billion served, doesn't, and cannot. Another secret is that one of the secret sauces of social is photo sharing (still hard if you don't have your own dedicated server), and that services are sprouting up to offer this (Imgur, Snapchat, etc.), which is essentially disrupting the former Social glue much the way Craigslist gutted classified newspaper advertising in the late 1990s.
I'd like to think that the constant drumbeat of surveillance state revelations we can thank heros and patriots Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras, and Glen Greenwald for are having an effect, though I think that may be giving the general public a bit too much credit. Not totally sure of that though.
You've forgotten one of the best and, in this situation, most appropriate examples of a company effectively dying without an obvious challenger: AOL.
When dial-up was the only option to get "on-line", AOL was dominant. Those discs (and later CDs) were everywhere. The problem was, even though providing a dial-up connection is what made AOL into the behemoth it had become, I'd argue the real value proposition of AOL in the mid-to-late 90s was the "walled garden" version of the internet that they had created.
So, instead of bolstering their offerings in the "walled garden" arena, they fretted over the death-grip they had on their dial-up subscribers long, long after it became apparent than DSL/Cable had won the battle for your connection. (No seriously, they still have that death-grip...have you tried canceling a free AOL trial account recently?)
AOL "died", as most oversized companies do, by failing to pivot toward an emerging market in favor of holding on to their "sure thing". Look at your other examples: IBM failed to pivot away from mainframes (their sure thing) to PCs (the emerging market). Microsoft has failed to pivot from OS/Office software to Cloud/distributed computing. Apple, eventually, did manage to pivot from graphics and design to mobile devices. Google...well, Google pivots so frequently I'm surprised they don't collectively vomit from dizziness (though, they do still have a worrying dependence on search advertising for "real" revenue).
The reason I think AOL is probably the most apt example for Facebook to consider, though, is that Facebook was the primary beneficiary of AOL's failure to capitalize on the "walled garden" internet. Now, Facebook dominates this realm, but the question is for how long? You're idea that they should pivot towards photo sharing is interesting...but I couldn't say for sure (or, if I could I'm making waaay less money than I should be).
It is kind of fun how the failures didn't have to be.
IBM did successfully enter and even define the PC market.
Microsoft saw the threat of the Internet, and reacted swiftly to own it with Windows 95. Internet Explorer demolished Netscape, with illegal methods, but most people at the time also recognized IE as the better browser. Microsoft also got a strong foothold on mobile with WinCE/PocketPC/Windows Mobile.
Google was an early entrance in social with Orkut, dominating some important emerging markets (Brazil, India).
In each case the companies seemed to lose interest and refocus on their moneymaker divisions. It might be intrinsic to large companies: If you want to advance, you should work where the money is made. So the best and most ambitious people would go there, leaving the forward looking parts of the company to die of negligence.
> Microsoft saw the threat of the Internet, and reacted swiftly to own it with Windows 95.
No they didn't. The original release of Windows 95 didn't come with Internet Explorer. Microsoft were still trying to push their own Microsoft Network (MSN), similar to Compuserve and AOL. They were late to the party - which is why Netscape managed to dominate for so long - and were heavily criticised for it at the time.
Thankfully, they failed. Even though IE dominated the web for far too long, that's a lot less scary than the thought that everyone might be using the MS Network right now while the Internet remained an academic curiosity! shudder
What is reassuring is that these companies where unable to make anything become completely dominant forever. We tend to obsess over one part of the stack for a few years and forget the necessity of other parts. Another part of the stack will reassert itself and allow someone to challenge dominance. For example, html5 replacing flash is heavily driven by mobile browsers which depended on an evolution in hardware (touch) for them to become prominent. Yet Microsoft pushed silverlight.
Even without becoming perpetually dominant, many of them exercised a huge amount of control over a large area for a long time. IBM from the 1930s through the 1990s, Microsoft from the 1980s through the 2010s, AT&T from the 1910s through the 1980s, etc.
There are cases to be made for these reigns being useful: AT&T spawned Unix and (in part) TCP/IP and the Internet, IBM spawned much IC development, Microsoft proliferated cheap and standardized x86 CPUs. But each also quashed competition in the form of both other firms and competing technologies: AT&T, despite the role UNIX came to play in packet-switched networks, explicitly rejected them for its own network recognizing that this would undermine its own dedicated-circuit switching. Microsoft's treatment of competitors is legion, but it's IBM we have to thank for the term "FUD".
Agreed. I think the AOL:Facebook comparison makes the most sense.
All of those ads prompting you to visit a company's Facebook page are today's version of the "find us at AOL keyword So-and-so" that you used to see all the time in the late 90s.
I agree - AOL didn't mature in tandem with the way users engaged with the internet. I think the same is happening to Facebook. People are fickle so there will come a point where the way people engage with social media changes and Facebook are powerless to stop that. They also don't really have a particularly unique offering. Ok Google doesn't either but it does have the engineering power and infrastructure to put itself so far ahead of the competition that it is able to keep its place at the top of the industry (yes it has many faults but...)...
Yeah, well, I wasn't going to do a full industry history. AOL is pretty epic, though, particularly counting the spectacular disaster of the AOL - Time-Warner merger.
"Social networks -- real social networks, not the online instantiations of them -- work best when the groups are relatively small, Dunbar's number is respected, and there's a level of insularity around any given group."
Agreed, and to add to your point, group identity is also a strong motivator for close-knit networks.
Forums are a good example of this. It's partly why I think communities (and the software they use) centred around a specific interest or activity will, for certain kinds of community, ultimately win over what we now call social networks.
It's the tools that are lacking: at the moment it seems far easier to set up a facebook group than work out what a community needs and provide it without technical knowledge.
(I have an interest in this area because tools for communities are what I left my job to work on: http://microco.sm).
The online communities I've seen work best generally:
⚫ Are selective. Actual or de-facto barriers to casual participation exist.
⚫ Are focused around a specific interest. Usually topical, occasionally by geography.
⚫ Are based around discussion from people interested in receiving as well as transmitting. The traditional exceptions to these are trolls and spammers, but I had a brief experience on mailing list that was heavily subscribed by people in the entertainment industry some years back. It was horrible. For, several reasons: people in love with the sound of their own voice, top-post/forward style messages (3 lines on top of 3000 wasn't uncommon), and ultimately far too many participants for the forum. Even though it wasn't spam / trolling / SEO, it was about the worst and most useless forum I'd ever seen.
Having well-established formatting and quoting styles matters. That's one of the things I enjoy about reddit, especially as compared with G+: the richer markdown, and inclusion of blockquote syntax, helps hugely. One idiot on G+ (who I finally blocked, for various reasons) had the habit of using an inline quote/response format, but his marking syntax (python-style quote tagging, I think), was all but impossible to follow. Dealing with his BS and difficult-to-follow style really weren't worth it. Oh, and it'd be nice if HN had a proper blockquote markdown as well ...
Also from G+: I noticed that without a proper "plaza", what you tended to end up with were, effectively, cocktail parties: hosts (users) who has a sufficient level of followers that they'd kick off conversations, as well as a good seed, and policing of guests to keep everything in line. Discussion nucleated around posts and specific users. Not communities, not topics, not pages.
Communities were and are effectively dead outside a very few exceptions, largely due to the inability to filter out crap. And even with the cocktail-party mode, there was a very narrow goldilocks zone: too few followers and discussions wouldn't get off the ground, too many and it rapidly got inane (effectively somewhere between a college kegger and a street brawl), and hosts who were either uninspiring or absentee would (respectively) garner similarly inane commentary and/or have largely directionless commentary.
I find the dynamics of discussions fascinating.
Hrm. I'll take a look at your project, but that website gives a horrible first impression. Try to make your text text. Not some kind of art statement.
Great that you touched on photo sharing. It's 2014 and it's still difficult to get photos from a camera to your computer to your friends. Publishing a simple web page is still deemed too difficult, discovering and managing contacts, and mass mailing them is hard.
Facebook basically stepped into the niche above. It adds instant messenging, and some automated feed organisation.
To some extent Email, IM and a little web space would suffice as well as some photo resizing tools! OSs, file managers and browsers could really help here, and if these tasks had been far easier to do in the first place Facebook wouldn't have even become what it is. Privacy and authentication for dummies is the other thing that has to be made and integrated into a solution.
With a little work Facebook could be decentralised, and having your Mum as a contact wouldn't make your social network toolset uncool.
I've been using photobucket (for a couple of years) and Imgur (past month or so) for quick shares. Imgur does offer some editing capabilities. Neither allows you to limit access best that I know, though I could be wrong on that. Most of the need I've got is for hosting images related to blog posts.
And yes, having played a bit in social space, photo is the killer app. Google knows this as well.
It's not just photo. It's as simple as people just wanting to be able to do things intuitively and easily. Hey I took a great photo at the weekend, let me share it with you, here you go, done. Or you must hear this song, or read this etc. Sharing has to be very easy.
I have an Aunt with an iPad full of photos, that she's pretty clueless as to how to backup or share. She's given up trying and just takes her iPad to her friends.
I have another Aunt who can't for the life her, get photos from her camera to her laptop. It's a trial.
So if you have a phone with a camera, that lets you seamlessly share photos, even if it's through imgur, facebook, or whatever, it's probably going to be easier than connecting up cables, trying to traverse file systems etc.
My brother wanted to sell a motorbike, and wanted to send the buyer a couple of photos. He was absolutely dumbfounded by the process because his SLR took big photos that his email provider rejected. He's not that web savvy. In the end I said it might be easier for you to just install Dropbox, and it was. How arse about face is that?
Even copying files onto some people's computers doesn't help that much, if their file management skills don't exist.
OSs (desktop) haven't functionally changed that much in the last decade on the face of it. And even the simple problems haven't been solved, which is laughable when you have an insight into the complexity of some of the work arounds.
Used to be we had email and MIME attachments. Which is to say: you simply attached whatever media you wanted to share to the email.
Mind: that could clog up systems with massive files moving around (though what was once considered massive for servers is now minuscule on handhelds).
With a website you control yourself, and URLs you can distribut to whom you choose, you can still use the email method, but distribute a link. Or RSS. Or a host of other tools. The problem isn't so much the technology as the incentives for people to create sharing platforms based on them, and the inclination for those platforms to be proprietary, silos, and highly monetized.
From the perspective of a nontechnical person looking to share things, you've got the challenge of comprehending technology (that's a longer rant), which is a challenge. But really. "Take picture, share privately to list of friends" isn't particularly difficult conceptually _or_ technically.
I'm well beyond convinced that a huge part of the reason that local filesystem management tools (for Windows, Mac, and Android) are so difficult to grasp is because the vendors prefer it that way. They can sell "enterprise server solutions" or "cloud social services" instead.
> "I'd like to think that the constant drumbeat of surveillance state revelations we can thank heros and patriots Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras, and Glen Greenwald for are having an effect, though I think that may be giving the general public a bit too much credit. Not totally sure of that though."
I don't think that it's that. How many people do you know who have really changed their online behaviour as a response to those revelations? How many people have started consistently using GPG for e-mail and OTR for chats, have stopped using cloud services like G-Mail, Dropbox etc.? I don't think it's that many even among the tech-savvy crowd let alone the general public.
What I do think about FB is that younger people always have a tendency of trying to distinguish themselves from their elder siblings and more importantly their parents. Both of those groups are on FB which makes it less attractive for them due to the aforementioned point and the fact that they're no longer among themselves when their parents are watching their timeline.
But I have the impression that there may be second change underway in that existing users are starting to experience sharing fatigue. Unfortunately, there are no numbers yet to back this up, it's based on anecdotal evidence and my own experience. What I mean by that is that people are getting tired of constantly putting thought into what to publicly share on their profile and try to maintain the image they're trying to project.
I personally rarely if ever share anything anymore. The two things I still do use FB for are messaging and reading about news and events from local venues like bars and clubs. The messaging component could be easily replaced by another solution like WhatsApp and I think FB knows that. This is probably why the released the standalone messenger app to be able to better compete on that front, but Snapchat is still eating FB's lunch with certain demographics. In fact, I think Zuckerberg is aware of this whole problem. He went on record yesterday saying that they plan to release more mobile standalone apps in the future thereby unbundling FB's different functionalities. In my opinion this is a move to adapt to a changing market where there is a diminished interest in having one unified platform like FB.
How many people do you know who have really changed their online behaviour as a response to those revelations?
I'm really not even keeping tabs on that. What I do know is that I'm constantly hearing Snowden discussions in places I wouldn't ordinarily expect to, particularly in mainstream news and business coverage. More than the stories themselves, there's the incidental commentary, that that's definitely slanting toward the "ewww ... creepy" direction rather than "oh! That's so cool!" Look at the response to the Nest acquisition by Google -- a lot of that was negative, based on privacy.
Sharing fatigue (and feed fatigue) is another matter. I never really did the former -- what I post is stuff of intellectual interest (or occasionally things that tickle my funny bone). I've largely rejected social feeds as significant, and have been turning increasingly to RSS, having found some really useful tools: newsbeuter, rsstail, and multitail, all console/terminal utilities, along with Slick RSS (a Chrome extension):
A company, platform, or technology can "die" in the sense that it loses the initiative, and more importantly, the ability to drive an industry and/or conversation, even though it hasn't yet died.
Apple was "dead" through most of the 1990s. It simply didn't matter, outside of the graphics and design areas, and for a very small cadre of fervent fans. The turnaround shocked me.
IBM very nearly died in the early 1990s, as its place as the center of the business computing world was shaken by anti-trust actions, Microsoft, and the upsurge in Unix vendors. The company's never fully regained its former footing, though it did recover largely.
Microsoft has been in the process of dying for most of the past decade. A highly symbolic moment for me was when The Economist newspaper ran a cover showing the leaders in tech: Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Microsoft wasn't even mentioned (it reminds me of an earlier revealing moment when the CEO of Visa International named the company's biggest rivals: MasterCard, AmEx, and Microsoft -- I guess it didn't pay to Discover...).
Sun Microsystems was fingered for the walking dead as Linux became ascendant, with its acquisition by Oracle (a panic response of both companies, coming at least five years too late to do either any good) coming long after it was obvious the company had not only staggered but was mortally wounded.
One thing to realize is that a fading icon is often not replaced by a direct competitor, but by one which addresses short
Facebook has dominated Silicon Valley for the past 5 years, stealing initiative from Google (who seems to be somewhat winning it back). Part of the situation is that "traditional" social networking is becoming passe, in part because it's become too Byzantine, and too intrusive. Social networks -- real social networks, not the online instantiations of them -- work best when the groups are relatively small, Dunbar's number is respected, and there's a level of insularity around any given group. TheFacebook at Harvard had those features. Facebook, Inc., 1 billion served, doesn't, and cannot. Another secret is that one of the secret sauces of social is photo sharing (still hard if you don't have your own dedicated server), and that services are sprouting up to offer this (Imgur, Snapchat, etc.), which is essentially disrupting the former Social glue much the way Craigslist gutted classified newspaper advertising in the late 1990s.
I'd like to think that the constant drumbeat of surveillance state revelations we can thank heros and patriots Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras, and Glen Greenwald for are having an effect, though I think that may be giving the general public a bit too much credit. Not totally sure of that though.