Could Netflix become the next Time Warner?
Could Facebook become the next Yahoo?
Could Amazon become the next Sears?
Could Apple become the next Kodak?
Google is fine: it already is the new IBM.
Poll: Which FAANG is the most likely to decline in the years ahead?
271–280 of 660 posts
Re: Poll: Which FAANG is the most likely to decline in the years ahead?
#272My guess is Netflix, I think the others have much wider moats. No actual number crunching was involved in producing this guess.
I don't understand why Netflix is in FAANG at all other than because it makes the acronym work ... they are a single-purpose service with almost no ecosystem impact. They could disappear and 99.9% of people would shrug and switch to a closely equivalent service. Every other "FAANG" is deeply integrated into complex ecosystems with huge economic impact.
Re: Poll: Which FAANG is the most likely to decline in the years ahead?
#273I have loads of friends who started to cancel their netflix subs and went back to piracy because they grew tired of searching for a way to watch something legally. Now its disney, hbo, prime, whatever. Screw all of this.
All of that is way cheaper (currently) than cable. The biggest problem is finding what you want. Need a TV Guide for streaming, so I can search for say "The Martian", and it would tell me "This is on netflix in your country", or "this isn't available on subscription, but you can rent it on amazon for x.xx or buy it on apple tv for y.yy"
Still you have to go out of your way AND spend money, vs just opening your favorite torrent tracker, searching for whatever you want, and choosing the quality/codec/language. I've honestly never understood the appeal of not pirating.
Re: Poll: Which FAANG is the most likely to decline in the years ahead?
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're showing your age. There was a time when you could ask Netflix for any number of DVDs for almost any movie and have it sent to you.
I figured that by inside your living room they were referring to streaming rather than to disc rental. I agree that disc rental services (regardless of provider, in my experience) have very good selections. ̶A̶l̶s̶o̶,̶ ̶h̶e̶r̶e̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶U̶K̶,̶ ̶N̶e̶t̶f̶l̶i̶x̶ ̶n̶e̶v̶e̶r̶ ̶o̶f̶f̶e̶r̶e̶d̶ ̶a̶ ̶d̶i̶s̶c̶ ̶r̶e̶n̶t̶a̶l̶ ̶s̶e̶r̶v̶i̶c̶e̶.̶ edit: I'm mistaken, they used to. There's just one provider left here that does…
Yes, it did.
Re: Poll: Which FAANG is the most likely to decline in the years ahead?
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does anyone use it? I am thinking that people are so accustomed to immediate online gratification that waiting a day or three for a DVD in the mail is just not something a lot of people will do anymore. That means you are going to have to think ahead about what you want to watch, and plan a time to do it, rather than just flopping down on the couch and surfing to find whatever catches your eye. And many people don't…
> Does anyone use it? I think film students and the like. It's become a niche product, not a mass-market one.
Back in the day, people had these things called "lives" with irl friends and loved ones. Back then, watching a movie was a special thing you did that brought people together, they didn't need to binge 10 hours of content every night. A few movies a week was plenty.
Re: Poll: Which FAANG is the most likely to decline in the years ahead?
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. What made netflix successful initially was their access to IP. That's going away fast as every IP producer is pushing for their own paid streaming service (which sucks, btw). With big heavyweights like Disney that own a huge percentage of content having their own services, netflix is really going to struggle being anything more than niche media providers (anime) and their own inhouse media. If they are lucky,…
That said, until other streaming services entered the scene I didn't appreciate exactly how good Netflix's engineering is. The only service comparable is YouTube, but even then, Netflix has much higher quality. HBO Max has a great content library, but barely works.
No doubt, Netflix has optimized content delivery better than pretty much anyone. They spend all the right time in all the right places to get media the plays well and looks good on pretty much every device and any bitrate. They are leaders in video codecs and encoding.
Everyone else have been learning, slowly, the lessons Netflix learned years ago.
Is anyone else even doing a program like OpenConnect? https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/
That's the sort of stuff that really sets netflix apart from the competition.
All that said, IMO, the average consumer doesn't really care about technical quality of the content, they care about the catalog.
Re: Poll: Which FAANG is the most likely to decline in the years ahead?
#277I have loads of friends who started to cancel their netflix subs and went back to piracy because they grew tired of searching for a way to watch something legally. Now its disney, hbo, prime, whatever. Screw all of this.
Yeah and have you noticed how the industry doesn't really want you to watch old stuff? Obviously they want to keep peddling new movies and series, so it does make sense, but I think it should be easier to find old classic movies. I often have to resort to torrents for this reason alone.
That's why I still believe in owning physical media (applies to both music and movies). It's the highest quality available at the time (at least until a higher-res version comes out), and can never be updated/censored/"remastered" or otherwise removed from my library.
Re: Poll: Which FAANG is the most likely to decline in the years ahead?
#278LOL, Netflix is a FAANG? They're small potatoes in the big picture; by market cap: (1) Apple 2.98T (2) Microsoft 2.51T (3) Alphabet (Google) 1.92T (5) Amazon 1.72T (7) Meta (Facebook) 941B ... (35) Netflix 264B Source: https://companiesmarketcap.com/
> LOL, Netflix is a FAANG?
Don't use this stupid acronym then.
Re: Poll: Which FAANG is the most likely to decline in the years ahead?
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
FWIW, I joined HN 14 years ago (wow) and there's never been a time in those 14 years that HN wasn't convinced that facebook's demise was just around the corner.
This is true, but the main reason was that people have been predicting this was that young people don’t want to be on a social network with their parents. This social dynamic prediction has played out, and Facebook did the 100% predictable thing that all rich entrenched players do — they bought the smaller competitors, most famously Instagram. I fully expect them to continue to be able to monetize their user base, an…
As an ex-employee, Facebook is many things, but ossified it is not. The internal impact/metric-oriented culture means that new bets are encouraged and rewarded, whereas product teams that are keeping it safe will eventually get disbanded.
Re: Poll: Which FAANG is the most likely to decline in the years ahead?
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google to me seems to be the one with the worst execution at the moment. For all of their spend in various areas when is the last time they’ve had a win? Their core business is still strong but they seem to have lost their ability to innovate. That alone makes their decline seem inevitable to me even without considering external forces
You can't think of any times they've had a win? They saw the largest growth of any FAANG in the past year. What about cloud and devices (pixel, nest, stadia, Chromecast, etc.)? They made 22 billion just on "other" bets in 2020. With some of their big bets in custom SoCs, waymo, verily, and all of the research that comes out of it (especially in ML) are certainly interesting, I don't think any other companies are inno…
For starters just looking at growth in the past year is very favorable for them, but look at the past 5 and they’re the weakest aside from Facebook and by a relatively small margin. Almost all of their growth has been post-COVID, so it’s hard to say whether that trend will hold. Personally I expect them to return to the slower growth they had pre-pandemic as to me it doesn’t seem like anything core to their business has changed or is going to change within the decade.
Pixel has always lived in the shadow of Samsung and probably always will. Android hardware profit margins are slim. Chromebooks are doing well in education at the moment but they can’t break out of the low end of the market and each of their attempts to do so have failed. Devices overall are a mixed bag in my opinion.
Stadia isn’t very good, costs too much, has a mediocre game library, and given the massive development cost definitely hasn’t paid off and probably never will.
Nest is a business they acquired that’s continued to grow. This is definitely a win, but it’s a small one, and it definitely doesn’t pay for all the unsuccessful products they’ve built.
Custom SoCs are potentially promising, but it’s a specific niche and others are doing the same so that’s kind of a “wait and see” for me.
Their paid services don’t seem popular at all with the exception of gsuite & YouTube premium (which people mainly buy to get around annoyances like not being able to listen to audio from a video with your phone locked or switch apps on mobile while leaving a video running)
I expect a large chunk of that “other” revenue you mentioned is also Google Cloud which despite how hard they’ve tried is far behind it’s competitors and hasn’t seen nearly the growth that Azure in particular has had.