Fabric of the Internet

The company so many people love to hate, Facebook, is synonymous with the Internet in some parts of the world!
“Indonesians surveyed by Galpaya told her that they didn’t use the internet. But in focus groups, they would talk enthusiastically about how much time they spent on Facebook…“It seemed that in their minds, the Internet did not exist; only Facebook,” he concluded.”
Ben Thompson states what the Facebook haters don’t like to admit:
“The reality is the company is part of the fabric of the Internet: you may not like email, but you have an email address, and you could say a similar thing about Facebook. If anything the fact some don’t like the product yet use it anyway is a testament to just how strong it is.”

Thompson then points to the usual counter-point that detractors make:
“Sure, Facebook looks unstoppable today, but then again, Google looked unstoppable ten years ago when social seemingly came out of nowhere: surely the Facebook killer is imminent!”

Sure, that could (probably will) happen at some point. The real question is whether that is likely to happen anytime in the near future? And right now, all the indicators seem to be a resounding No.

Facebook acquired the most popular alternatives in the social media universe: Instagram for photo sharing; and WhatsApp for messaging. And, unlike many other companies which run acquired companies to the ground, those acquisitions have continued to grow under Facebook.

Facebook’s other attempts at becoming the hub for online news by loading them on user’s news feeds and even becoming a blogging platform all show signs of a company that’s trying to become a one-stop point to access pretty much all the Internet content you care about. If they succeed to even some limited extent in those grand ambitions, maybe it won’t just be the Indonesians who can’t differentiate the Internet from Facebook: the rest of the world may believe the same thing! With that, the advertising money flowing into Facebook’s coffers would increase. Dramatically.

All that hardly makes Facebook a likely candidate for corporate death in the short term, does it?

Comments

  1. Ramiah KumarFebruary 24, 2016 at 4:36 PM

    Yes, there are many possibilities with organizations in the context of your blog.

    We all discuss such points more often because we are in the age of information, where the pace set by the technologies, both software and hardware, are mind-boggling in ever so many aspects. The thing is good things will last, like the transport means such as trains and cars, ships and aircrafts. Like transport, information is very fundamental, hence important enough to be stable need of mankind. By comparison with IT, it is true that the progress made by each of the transport system mentioned has been tremendous, from the time of their inception. We don't feel the need to discuss such things because the pace was nothing compared to the digital systems. Instead of giving importance to that, we need to only consider pragmatism and purpose.

    It is my conviction that the growth of the digital technologies will also slow down after some time, though I cannot put a time frame for that. The gut feeling tells me that exponential growth would actually ensure that saturation cannot be avoided. Good or bad, everything has to change - even the way of the "explosion" that we see in the digital arena. My point is that the Western idea of "expansion forever" is true in astronomy but not in business. Ups and downs are always there and, decay in some cases and even occasional deaths of organizations we have seen. Tougher to predict the future of specific business houses in our time of compulsive consumerism!

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