71–80 of 98 posts
Meta's death (if it happened), will be a slow and a long one. Like Oracle or IBM (although IBM is not completely dead). Given the JS ecosystem cycle, React will be replaced by something better much sooner.
I belligerently hate Meta, but it's pretty wild to speculate that a company with 1.9 billion users will just up and die. A slow death on the order of 10-20 years may happen but I doubt React will still be popular by that time no matter what happens with Meta.
I would usually argue that there is no way the Facebook/Meta would die (it almost certainly wont) and so the question is redundant. However because of the way Meta share ownership is structured Zuckerberg has complete control and the board/shareholders cannot eject him. Most (every?) other public company would go through multiple leadership changes over their lifetime as shareholders exert control. Zuckerberg seems t…
> However because of the way Meta share ownership is structured Zuckerberg has complete control How is it structured at a quick brief high level? Just the common "he owns 50.1% of the company in terms of # shares?"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's nothing about Facebook that anyone needs, that no one else provides. It could go as quickly as AOL.
Connectivity to your social circles is something Facebook provides that nobody else provides. There are other ways of connecting social circles, but due to network effects, they're all worse. There's no site on the planet other than Facebook that lets me interact with my entire family all at once in a way that I know will reach them.
I would usually argue that there is no way the Facebook/Meta would die (it almost certainly wont) and so the question is redundant. However because of the way Meta share ownership is structured Zuckerberg has complete control and the board/shareholders cannot eject him. Most (every?) other public company would go through multiple leadership changes over their lifetime as shareholders exert control. Zuckerberg seems t…
because of the way Meta share ownership is structured Zuckerberg has complete control and the board/shareholders cannot eject him Tech companies are notoriously bad at succession planning. Car crash. Plane crash. Heart attack. Stroke. Slippery floor on your super-yacht. There are a million ways for a CEO's tenure to suddenly and unexpectedly end. Yet the heads of these companies still act like nothing will ever chang…
The problem is that the tech business is fundamentally innovation-based, and this means that anyone capable of running the business as #2 is probably unsuitable to be #1. There's a classic a16z essay about this:
https://a16z.com/2010/12/16/ones-and-twos/
Basically, the personality traits to be a successful functional executive and those needed to be a successful tech CEO are often diametrically opposed. So if you pull from the existing exec team, your best case is that you get a caretaker (like Ballmer, Pichai, or Cook) who runs the business, optimizes earnings, keeps people happy, but misses the next tech cycle and eventually mortgages the company's future. Your worst case is that everyone quits and the company implodes because it can't service its existing commitments.
This is why you want to be a financier. Sell the companies at the top of their growth curve and fund the up-and-comers that will eat their lunch.
I don't think "Meta" will die, but "Facebook" might... Meta being the parent company, Facebook being a sub company... As long as Meta keeps something running (I am going to guess that Facebook Infrastructure might be spun out and used as a separate entity) they may have other stuff as a post Facebook project... This whole "Metaverse" thing is one of those that might end up replacing Facebook... then again, both could…
Facebook still has billions of users. It's a very very long way from losing users for the first time or losing stock value to dying altogether.
Even if Meta died today, React is too big to fail at this point. I'm sure the React team would quickly find funding.
My bet: Microsoft would hire them wholesale. They’ve positioned themselves at the center of web development, they’ve embraced JS and React already, and yet they don’t have a front-end framework of their own because they missed the boat.
True, but they do have TypeScript though.
If Meta dies the economy will follow. Meta isnt going anywhere. If Oracle is employees massive amount of people Meta will for a long time to come. Look past one quarters earning reports.
The US economy would barely notice if Facebook vanished over the course of the next few years. It's a modest blip in the $23 trillion US economy and its economic presence would be absorbed by others relatively quickly. Other platforms would gobble up their ad dollars, other platforms would be born or step in to pick up the eyeball attention. Other marketplaces would absorb their local listings. Ten years out people w…
The second life clone is going to fail. Facebook will go right on making profit.
React is open source, and seems to have zero dependence on Facebook from my perspective.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A slow death on the order of 10-20 years may happen A sibling comment even said, > Meta's death (if it happened), will be a slow and a long one. Like Oracle or IBM (although IBM is not completely dead). I think death could happen a lot sooner. Rapidly, even. Meta is not B2B, but B2C. They won't have ten year contracts, legacy workloads that they can raise costs on, or new businesses to schmooze over a game of golfi…
Neither MySpace nor Digg were anywhere near the scale of Meta. At it’s peak MySpace was one or two orders of magnitude smaller than Meta is today. Facebook may wither and die but they also have Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus. And for what it’s worth there is almost nothing more I’d like to see than Meta vanishing. I hope you’re right.
While this may be true, what % of global internet DAUs did each of them house? I'm not sure if this relevant or not, but it seems the internet was just a much smaller place back then.