All of these companies are too big to fail at this point. They all have at least a decade of reserves to power through anything that gets thrown their way.
However, I do predict that they will change in significant ways in the next decade.
* Apple is one Supreme Court ruling away from ending their App Store monopoly that could disrupt the entire world, since it would also affect all other digital marketplaces.
* Amazon is about to enter a decade of unionization all over the world.
* Google and Facebook both lost a key ability to micro-target on their ad platforms so they are both reinventing themselves to drive revenue from other sources, hardware being the biggest moats they can invest in.
* Netflix has some of the worlds brightest minds in data science and they've built up a war-chest of understanding viewing habits. They've also gobbled up a lot of key Hollywood players in the last few years, so I expect some huge cultural changes ahead as these creatives start to take more leadership roles in the company.
I see very little evidence that Netflix' data science has been a unique differentiator. For what they've developed, they have some hits and quite a few duds. Their licensed catalog is not exceptional--and even less exceptional when it comes to film.
They'll likely mostly turn into another studio with a streaming platform.
To add to this, given the resources spent on it their UX is pretty bad and I don't think their data scientists are giving them much if any edge over the competition at this point.
Features such as only using company generated ratings, aggressively cancelling shows, and the lack of ability to browse/sort/filter the catalog, in favor of Netflix pushing the recommendations they choose on users, is probably great for quarterly KPIs but bad for long term customer satisfaction.
Netflix is of course already a behemoth and not going anywhere but I expect their future to be much more of a generic media company than an elite tech company.
You are judging them based on perceived quality. There is the potential mistake. Have you considered that maybe quality isn't the most important factor at all times? Or maybe that what you perceive as quality is not what most people are looking for?
This. For a firm with all these supposed high-performers trying to discover and cater to my viewing habits, they sure had a hard time figuring out that I never chose their "original content" that they were shoving in my face all the time.
Yes, for the last few years, every time I logged into Netflix I was stunned at poorly they seemed to understand me. Heist movies, murder mysteries, drug cartels fighting, stuff I never watch, and this was the majority of the stuff they showed. Recently I spent 20 minutes looking for something to watch, but I couldn't find anything at all that looked interesting. I thought that was so shocking, I decided it was time to cancel Netflix. So I finally gave up my account. There is an abundance of good material I can watch elsewhere.
But the main question is, why can't Netflix write a recommendation engine that actually shows me something I want to watch?
Netflix is facing the rise of competing streaming platforms. They're forced into creating their own content because other producers would rather release content on their own platforms and keep all the streaming revenue, rather than license it to Netflix. Streaming video on demand isn't a technical moat that is stopping anyone.
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, they'll be an HBO style platform. However, the quality of their in-house content has left a lot to be desired. Some is good, but a lot is garbage.
That netflix has technical chops isn't going to be a saving grace. Rather, it will mean engineers from netflix will likely be able to secure jobs at other streaming providers.
True, but Netflix has gotten really good at this over the past 10 years. They create/fund some great content (and a lot of mediocre/bad content) - kind of similar to a VC fund now that I'm writing this out. They're an integral component of the entertainment industry now.
There’s too many now though. The producers are getting greedy. I don’t think people will put up with having multiple subscriptions and eventually it’ll all come back down to a few key players.
My money is on Netflix, Prime (because we want the free shipping) and Disney.
Netflix is just another television network at this point, pivoting from being primarily a tech company. There's a bunch of content which jumps around between different streaming services, but Netflix produced shows and movies are on solid ground at this point (eg, Stranger Things is over 5 years old). It's weird that it's included in the same list as these others.
If they came out with a phone, office suite, cloud service, social network, or something of that ilk, then yeah they'd be more in "tech company" territory again. Until then their engineering is going to assist their content production, not the other way around.
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 innovating at that level. Whether or not they will profit is another matter, of course.
I know someone who just lost access to their Facebook account, and more because resetting their Google password lead to account lockout, and their phone number too, and that means everything that used that email and phone number as well. A cautionary tale and a terrifying reality to depend on a place famous for no human help available.
Totally agree that the pace of innovation in their core business seems to have stalled. However, I'd argue that Waymo (Google subsidiary) is leading the pack, by far, in terms of self-driving capability.
Not only do they have publicly-usable self-driving vehicles on the road today, they are also testing autonomous trucks for freight. Both of these industries are worth multiple 10's of billions/year in the U.S. alone.
I agree somewhat. About 80% or more of their business is still ads. It only takes some major advertising segment to have a downturn or otherwise decide that digital ads are useless and they'll see a hue dip in revenue. Although I'd see FaceBook as more precarious for similar reasons which is what I voted for.
> Apple is one Supreme Court ruling away from ending their App Store monopoly
However, if the app store were to open up, it could create a more vibrant ecosystem underneath and even create even more network effects within ios. Less direct money for apple but more vibrant developer economy.
"Monopoly" is an interesting term in this situation. Obviously they are the sole provider of the iOS platform access, but iOS itself is not the largest smartphone platform.
TBTF is a term usually applying to companies like banks and Beoing, that have to be rescued due to some kind of economic importance.
These companies will not fail, but could face existential headwinds that no amount of money will 'fix'.
...
"Netflix has some of the worlds brightest minds in data science"
Their data science is a 3rd tier issue. #1 is their incumbency, #2 is the content they produce.
-> Netflix 'problem' is increasing competition from HBO, Disney and others.
...
"Apple is one Supreme Court ruling away from ending their App Store monopoly that could disrupt the entire world"
No, their App Store will do just fine. They will reduce their 30% cut to something lower and companies will stay there because of the distribution opportunity: being in App Store will mean considerably more downloads.
-> Apples 'problem' is that their iPhone is slowly becoming a commodity - there's only so many ways to 'improve' upon it and those margins will probably come down.
...
"Google and Facebook both lost a key ability to micro-target on their ad platforms"
No, they have not, they have enough data.
-> Facebook's problem is that FB usage is going down, Insta is a bit stagnating and they have little to replace it with.
-> Google's problem is that they have no obvious new products on the horizon to grow and that it's possible DDG and others may actually start to eat away at them (probably not, but possible).
...
"Amazon is about to enter a decade of unionization all over the world."
Probably not so much, and, rules are entirely different around the world.
Amazon's problem is that it's never been profitable and there's only so many ways to make that business work.
As fast delivery and one-click purchase work out in regular retail, AMZN advantage is limited.
AWS however, the profit base doesn't show any signs of slowing down.
Netflix seems to simply become the next entertainment giant, like e.g. Disney or major film studios.
Apple will still have their hardware business.
Amazon's AWS business is unaffected by their online shopping platform business.
Facebook is facing a reputation crisis that is also causing regulators to come down on it hard, and beyond the many well-justified criticisms, many also use it as a scapegoat and a punching bag for politicians to show off. That's not a good position to be in.
Yep, they’re a “content producer” but maybe 1 in 20 shows or movies they put our OS actually compelling. They have certain titles they do well with (The Witcher comes to mind) but for everything else they have the well-established Netflix-Curse of cancelling shows instead of finishing them, so that they can crow about having a new show.
> * Amazon is about to enter a decade of unionization all over the world.
World wide is probably too strong a claim, but I think here's something to this. However, I think this would work in Amazon's favor. It would make warehousing quite a bit more expensive and would be a significant barrier to competitors. AWS provides them with deep pockets, and the have a huge advantage in logistics so I think they could eat the cost and keep moving. It would also suck a lot of air out of the anti-amazon movement, such that it is. One day delivery with high labor standards might be the pitch that catapults them to real market dominance.
I agree, especially if by "huge advantage in logistics" you include things like warehouse automation. If everyone is paying high wages then it seems like whoever automates the most will do well?
Netflix only has about 200 million subscribers. That is astonishingly small (IMHO). Though, I'm not a subscriber, so it probably shouldn't surprise me, but it still does.
Why is it so unbelievable that someone could disrupt any of these companies? Aside from Apple and Netflix I don't think the rest are doing a particularly good job. Apple iTunes had it's lunch eaten by Spotify (45.83B) and just look at https://killedbygoogle.com/
Google Search is beset from all sides right now. Their search results are terrible and people are looking for alternatives. They’re definitely at or past the peak of that product lifecycle.
>All of these companies are too big to fail at this point. They all have at least a decade of reserves to power through anything that gets thrown their way.
Yes each of these has enough of a war chest that they could drift along for a decade + several have ownership structures where there wouldn't be market pressure to remove the C-level / board if that happened.
That said... each of these has weaknesses. I think about Microsoft (the one missing from the list that rightfully belongs there...)... they came out of their lost decade a very different company. Their stock price barely moved for that entire time, though has since rebounded. It's not that hard to imagine that Netflix is just one of many streaming studios in another 5-10 years, or that people might be just as willing to turn to another search provider than Google. Facebook seems to be acutely aware that its core big blue app is seen as a baby boomer thing and that it had better do things to stay relevant to another generation. So - too big to fail? Maybe, but then again we could ask GE, GM, and Ma Bell that same question once upon a time.
It is very hard for me to imagine a world in which Google isnt the default search provider for almost the totality of people outside China or Russia. I don't think I even see my tech-aware colleagues using anything else except the rare unicorns with duckduckgo.
I just can't see putting netflix and google search in the same basket.
Netflix is already on the way down. They infused all of their new shows with wokeness. Every new show feels like woke concepts are shoehorned in without regard for their impact on the story that's told.
Look at the Witcher for an example. Or if you want to see this kind of shift happening over the course of a show, look at Madam Secretary. Season 1 didn't feature any of this crap and showed a strong woman main character that wasn't shoehorned in, by the last season everything was about "hurr durr let's ban guns and white men suck".
I'm not even white and I can notice the excellent storylines being ruined. It's like the writers don't know how to write a story with woke concepts that's actually strong so instead they shove it into every successful show until the show isn't successful anymore. HBO and Disney are going to eat their lunch at this rate with more compelling content.
I don't totally agree that this is a problem, but to be fair, every network is doing this. Even previously silly and light-hearted TV shows like Brooklyn Nine-Nine have become noticeably heavier as they try to shed light on real-world social issues. There's nothing specific to Netflix here.
I 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.
Clint Eastwood did like 90000 movies, why are there only like 3 on Netflix? That but for every actor. Its like on-demand now rather than a catalog you rent.
The only reason I still have Netflix is because it's essentially free on my satellite TV package - I think I pay £2 extra a month because it's mostly covered by their "on demand" package, which I wanted anyway.
Netflix has a huge amount of content with pro paedophile tendancies. So many of their shows have underage sex or themes thereof. I have yet to see anyone catalogue these, only point them out in favourite shows.
(Aware of the cuties debacle, but this is a rather overt example, aforementioned are sometimes subtle.)
A show I had one episode left of went off Netflix on 1/1. I tried to find it EVERYWHERE, I even downloaded iTunes on my PC. “Not available in your region” left right and center. I luckily found a torrent and it was legitimately the only way I could find the content beyond buying DVDs on eBay.
100%
It's worse than the old days of only having cable and having to pay a small fortune. I'm not going to pay the same (or more) and then have to jump around between 12 different apps.
We literally went back to cable because other than the ideology, it wasn't beneficial. For the streaming services I do want, I can actually order then through Xfinity and keep things simple.
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.
It seems they are following the McRib model. Taking it off the menu for awhile probably generates more views overall than simply leaving it on all the time. Plus you can license it out to another streaming service while it's off yours.
But surely it makes more sense to peddle old movies and TV shows because you've already made them. Isn't that why content creation is so lucrative - you make it once and then sell it for years and years?
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"
The biggest problem for me is that my local cable company is the cheapest/best internet provider. So, no, it's not cheaper for me than cable. Internet without cable is almost the cost of the "bundle". (it's evil) I just have cable on 1 of 4 TVs, but still.
Also you can't get most streaming content on cable, or the sports content I get on cable without 4 streaming services (ESPN+, Peacock, Paramount+ & Hulu).
So I've got a cable package w/ sports + a couple streaming services. Sometimes I'll pick one up for a month or 2 and drop it just for something I want to see. Sometimes I rent something from Amazon.
It's just a mess.
But the search is pretty easy. My Rokus, Amazon sticks, or even cable box search fine for me.
Tivo has been doing this for years. I can search for a show, see if it's live, upcoming in the next couple of weeks to record or if it's available on Amazon/Hulu/Netflix/Vudu to stream or buy. Then just click it to go straight there.
Also has a nifty feature where you can list all available episodes of a show across all seasons and it will mix in your live recordings with streaming options. I honestly don't know why Tivo doesn't get a lot more love. Cable when you aren't paying per-TV fees for boxes is pretty great. Just a couple of bucks a month for a cable card in the Tivo and then you hook up Tivo Mini units on all of the other TVs in your house to access the main box.
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.
It's not illegal to download movies/music from the Internet in most jurisdictions I know of (Europe). It doesn't extend to computer programs though (i.e. using them). It's also usually illegal to make copyrighted (materially) media available for others (outside of group of family/friends), so torrents are tricky.
But it was quite a success for RIAA/MPAA to stick a label of criminal to everyone who downloads free audio-visual content even if it's not true. Though, let's not aid them in their quest by throwing sentences like 'illegal content' too frequently around.
Getting prosecuted for downloading material or using it is rather rare. Unless you are a business. But sharing it is really messy which is why I don't really do torrents anymore. Not that I download much anything.
yeah pretty much, I've even found myself pirating things that are actually on the services I pay for because playing a file is just a better user experience
I also find collecting to be satisfying, there's something nice about knowing that Netflix can't just decide to take Arcane away from me
Other advantage of piracy is that you can actually get the quality you want.
In Australia I can’t get anything better than 1080 for some unknown reason, it’s not because it doesn’t exist in higher quality - torrent sites often list 4K resolution files. Presumably it’s the potato-quality internet in this country.
There's a site I've come to really appreciate, justwatch.com which is a great way to see who (if anybody) has a particular movie or TV show available. What's nice is that they include the library-based streaming services like Hoopla and Kanopy. I have a 2/month DVD Netflix subscription still the queue for which I use as my master to-watch list, but I'll check the top few movies on the list from time to time to make sure I can't watch them with one of the streaming services I already have.
I was taking stock of all the streaming services I have recently (too many now) and realized Netflix is one I can easily do without. I'm not super into their originals and many movies I do want to watch aren't on the service anyway.
Netflix is also the most expensive service that I am subscribed to. Netflix is €14 and Amazon Prime is only €6. I basically only watch Netflix for a few of their originals (which are arguably aren't that great).
My big issue with the Netflix model is that I'm subscribing to a content smorgasbord where the only thing they have in common is the distributor. With Disney+ at least I know I'm getting specific brands (Marvel, Pixar, etc).
True, but the price seems a bit lower (for now). A fully loaded cable account back in the day for me was $180 (including internet).
Now days you can get internet for $50 or $100 (depending on location, speed etc).
Then if you wanted say 5 of the various platforms, that's going to roughly be $50 to $70 more. So that's still a likely savings.
And on top of that, all new movies are basically being PRODUCED by these networks, so for the most part you don't need a theater (or their prices).
And on top of all that, instead of just fully subscribing to all of them, just get one at a time. Want the new Dexter series, get Showtime. Done with that? drop it until season 2 is out.
So it definitely can be a lot cheaper than the old days.
Is it even close to that? You can bundle a ton of services and still come out cheaper, plus you avoid ads. The biggest difference is also that you can mix and match services at will, so if you arent using one, you can just drop it for a few months.
Its significantly better than cable TV still. I also dont get people reminiscing about one streaming service dominating, we shouldnt be wishing for monopolies. Everyone coming out with their own platform should drive up competition and give us better quality services
A streaming subscription is much cheaper than a cable subscription, no? If you're a very heavy consumer of streaming video, doesn't it make sense that you'd pay more? I don't see why anyone should expect to get to stream everything they could want for a minimal monthly fee.
Having to switch apps is a trivial inconvenience. Seems to me that price-point is what we should be focusing on, and I'm fairly confident things have improved greatly.
More generally, I'm sceptical of any argument that laments the lack of a monopoly.
My only problem at this point with going back to piracy is that the torrent sites I used to rely on are dead, and if there's a modern replacement for Covenant that actually works then I don't know what it is.
Covenant on Kodi was the first and last time I actually felt like TV was in the future.
The thing that bothers me is that the subscription services cannot give full attention to the quality of their apps on all devices. Un-pausing HBO Max on my Roku Plus only works 50% of the time.
And don't get me started on Netflix auto-preview (which cannot be disabled on my device).
I had netflix from 2003 to 2020, and still got DVDs until 2018 when I moved to an area with broadband. It has been a ride: from it's rapid decline from having all sorts of art-house films (Preminger, Castle, Fassbinder) on DVD, to having almost nothing, to it's near 100% self-generated content which is largely meh. But those first years were epic. I must have watched 800 films the first year, limited only by USPS latency.
Yeah, I have completely reverted to piracy, due to those reasons.
Also, many of these platforms made the strange decision to not accept subscriptions from locations outside the US in the beginning. I tried to subscribe to Disney+ and HBO max when they started, but was denied due to location.
Probably works now, but I don't care. They had their one chance.
Before, we used piracy because the media wasn't easily accessible (physical media). I now see piracy having an uptick in the future because the media is all paywalled. Five years ago, anything you wanted to watch was on Netflix, Hulu, or TPB. With the success of those platforms, all the IP holders have started their own streaming platforms which is great, but it's lead to a massive fragmentation of the market. No one is going back to paying those cable prices of $120+ a month for content by signing up for all these services, so piracy it is.
Same, I'm one of them. I now donate to the developers of the *aar web apps instead.
I had Netflix and Prime till recently in an effort to promote the defragmentation of streaming services as a show of unity but, its getting worse. And these guys do not need my money while the service they provide gets worse and worse.
How many of these people complained about the cable bundle? I dropped cable and have a few streaming services and save $50+ a month. (No, I don't have live TV which would bring it back up to close to my previous rate.)
if you choose to go this route, jellyfin is a great privacy-respecting media server. plex is great, but requiring an email or third party account on a self-hosted app is just weird.
+1, it's ridiculous and misleading that Netflix is still being included in this list after all this time.
Netflix is a TV company. Their tech is a commodity. An important commodity, for sure, but it's not what makes them valuable. Their critical offering is their reach and programming.
FAAMG (or MAAAM now, I guess?) is a sane grouping of giant companies because their critical offerings and expertise areas are their software and their platforms. I think Google would be totally capable of reimplementing Netflix's streaming services if they needed to, but after years of trying they still haven't been able to fully match Amazon Web Services. That's the difference between Big Company and Big Tech Company. Similarly, it's why Tesla isn't on this list: they're huge and growing and they write software, but their software is just a means to an end, not a valuable platform in itself.
+2, FAANG was coined by Jim Cramer to be a grouping of fast growing tech stocks almost 10 years ago, not a grouping of the largest and most important tech companies. Apple and Microsoft are both about 10x the market cap of Netflix.
Is their tech a commodity? I knew one of the principals (who was hired away by Uber for an ungodly sum of money) who had spent years writing a lot of proprietary networking code. I don't think that IP is a commodity, is it?
Netflix will be fine; they sell a reasonable, understandable product at a reasonable, understandable price, which makes me most confident in them by far.
The product is getting worse over time due to content providers cutting them off in favor of their own services.
It's a lot easier for Disney and their ilk to build streaming services than it is for Netflix to build Disney's content catalog. Props to Netflix though, they've been punching above their weight in that area.
Definitely. A huge boon for Netflix to have been included in this group because of the first letter of its name.
Reminds me of the Dow Jones, which is just 30 somewhat-arbitrary companies, and is basically the sum of the stock prices of those companies (yes, that means a $800/share company matters 20X more than a $20/share company).
Interestingly, from a physical perspective there's not much difference between saying "fagm" and saying "fact". But one of those is easy for English speakers and one is impossible.
Coarticulated velar/labial consonants exist in other languages, though.
FB may be getting slaughtered by the media, hated by both the left and the right, but the truth is no one is actually leaving FB. It's still the #1 place to find restaurants, buy/sell used items, neighborhood groups, etc etc etc. And if FB Proper were to ever fall behind, IG still has a lot of stamina left.
I don't think it will happen any time soon, but I would like to see Apple decline. Their ideals and design and software quality from the previous decades are nowhere to be seen. Their software and UX especially have suffered from mismanagement, and I wonder how bad it will need to get before people start switching away. The alternatives are still behind, but the gap is closing in a bad way.
Your experience of Facebook is very different to mine. In my bubble Facebook is basically a graveyard; I see posts from friends every now and then and use it to chat with people I don't have contact with on other platforms and that's it.
I tried marketplace but it's empty in my area. Restaurants don't use it, nor do neighbourhoods.
I'm not saying you're wrong but we'd need to see numbers to say which of our experiences is the more average one.
Facebook's other properties are successful for now though. WhatsApp is prolific around me in a way Messenger is very much not and Instagram has some level of popularity, though TikTok is the new shiny thing.
The question was which is the most likely to decline, not to disappear.
I don't think Facebook (or Meta) will disappear, but I do think it is the mostly likely to decline.
The only one I think may disappear is Netflix - this is because Facebook benefits from the network effect which helps slow any sudden decline as all your family are still on it etc. whereas Netflix just needs a bad run of poor quality content and it could lose a lot of subscribers to competing services.
Netflix is also less diversified (even though now it's adding Netflix Games for some reason.. we'll see how popular that is..) which further weakens its position.
With companies the size of the FAANGs they appear to struggle with change and being dynamic. A lot of the time they purchase existing companies/tech in the direction they want to steer towards.
I would argue that while Facebook/Meta has been more of a gradual evolution Netflix has shown that it can transition to a whole new way of working within its domain. They revolutionised DVD rentals by combining a web UI with efficient warehousing and logistics. When they saw that infrastructure was getting close to making streaming viable they pivoted to digital delivery and not only did it allow them to keep their existing customer base who would have eventually moved away from DVD rentals on their own, but it also brought in other international markets where DVD rentals never would have worked.
I think I agree that Facebook/Meta will decline without disappearing in much the same way that IBM has. They will acquire new businesses and sell off old ones without really being seen as particularly innovative. Netflix on the other hand I think will stick around but will likely change into more of a content producer rather than a distributor like it has been. Beyond that, who knows?
Facebook is for old people now. I organized an event for new students at the university and we had a discussion in the team whether we should advertize on FB or whether it would even be a hindrance because FB is not cool. We then agreed to post it there after all because people expect "serious" information such as dates of university events on Facebook.
I don't post regularly on Facebook, because my old FB friends are not very active. I'm in the age (late 30s) where you don't meet so many new people, and if you do it is no longer appropriate to add them on FB. So it is effectively dead for me. I communicate with one person via FB messenger and post uni events there. On Whatsapp, I communicate with my family and some coworkers. Everyone else is on Signal, Telegram, Instagram, maybe Twitter. TikTok is terrifying.
I don't think it's inappropriate to add people you meet on Facebook in your late 30's. Don't miss out on a chance to become friends with someone just because you think FB adding is a faux pas!
Also, where else would you post an event details page aside from Facebook? Meetup? That's even more dead..
Sure. Still millions of eyes for ads, and those eyes have money to spend after they rage out in the comments of a targeted news post about wokeism or vaccine mandates.
TBF, when I looked at this list, I didn't think any of these companies would decline.
Although, I didn't pick FB, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the votes were just people that picked the company they thought might grow the least. Or the company they hate the most - which no one should be surprised is FB by a large margin. It's been the tech punching bag for like almost a decade now.
The largest reason I DON'T see a decline from FB is that everyone has been talking about how much they hate FB for years. And despite that, it's still been growing like a weed.
> I would like to see Apple decline. Their ideals and design and software quality from the previous decades are nowhere to be seen
I wish it was true but I feel like their quality is great where it matters. One of the biggest threats to technology is that Apple successfully captures a large slice of the computing world into a proprietary architecture with Apple extensions. Having spent a decade plus with Intel as a lingua franca we may not appreciate yet how this has kept parts of Apple's ecosystem open and the computing world interoperable.
I've been an FB user for ages, and don't use it for any of the things you list. Mostly just staying in touch with distant relatives, school chums and professional colleagues that I know socially, and a few special interest groups. I only log in to FB maybe 2-4 times per week, for less than an hour at a time.
Facebook is just shy of 3 billion monthly active users. More than one third the planet's population. If ever there was a company that anecdotal evidence doesn't work, it'd be this one.
Yes, I'm aware and many others are aware those alternatives exist. People seem confused how people are spending time on FB if not through their news feeds, and I'm telling you. A bajillion people continue to use FB outside of your circle.
Also Yelp is practically nonexistent in my suburban area. And restaurants often have more updates/activity on their FB pages than their own standalone websites.
And older people seem to think Nextdoor is a scam since they keep using real people's names on paper mail when they weren't aware that they consented to it after signing up.
Nearly all pro-Facebook ( or more accurately described as non Facebook hostile ) opinion has been downvoted in the past five years. And they were less than 5% of the comments. They are so rare I could nearly count them with my fingers.
>It's still the #1 place to find restaurants, buy/sell used items, neighborhood groups, etc etc etc.
The demographics within HN tends to not use Facebook for those functions. At least there are very little evidence any comments, opinion or votes has shown they do. Not to mention it tends to be US and EUR specific.
So long as I’m keeping my account as a calendar of friends’ events but never (ever) actually use or interact with the platform in other ways, it would seem I’m just an expensive freeloader.
People know there isn’t much point “leaving” Facebook for integrity reasons. They know who I am anyway.
I’m guessing I’m not alone in using their service this way.
I'm not sure how facebook fares in big cities, but back where I'm from - a small rural town, facebook has pretty much replaced everything. It's the de facto digital community place.
Want to get regular updates from local businesses, local government, hobby groups, sports and cultural events? You'll find it on FB. Sure, most of those also have their own dedicated websites or similar, 90% of the most recent info comes to FB first.
Same goes for community groups, public announcements, and what not. Older people (50 and up) are well-established on FB, and have no plans to move anywhere else. So it might be true that FB has become a "boomer platform", but at least those users are very active and very loyal. Many of these older users get all their news and updates via FB.
I'd imagine that this would be the case in similar towns and places.
> I'm not sure how facebook fares in big cities, but back where I'm from - a small rural town, facebook has pretty much replaced everything. It's the de facto digital community place.
I don't think this is a good thing. It means change won't be easy to implement because their customer base relies on it for a certain function, if that function changes too much or goes away, they loose what's left.
My mistake, I didn’t mean it’s the place to discover new restaurants, but it’s the best way to get the latest menu, latest hours, and speak directly with the owners through Messenger. Quite often the FB page is more up-to-date than the websites they own.
FB is declining in America, but only technically and in terms of user count. It's more than made up for by increasing user monetization and growth in the rest of the world.
Facebook is currently ahead, but I wonder how much of that is perception. There is a lot of media about how Facebook is evil, but that is mostly from a pretty small circle of media and political people, that Facebook is naturally in opposition to. Facebook also owns instagram and whatsapp as well. But everyone over 30 I know uses Facebook, heavily. Instagram is also used very heavily. Amazon has threats from other E-commerce sites, lots of bad press, Governmental attacks, and unionization. Google prints money on search and I don't see enough people swapping to Duckduckgo to bring them down.
Amazon is also kept up by AWS, which who knows if one day that is spun off.
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, and purchase smaller competitors for a while.
The most recent warning flag for me is their rebranding. Announcing a major pivot to center on Occulus (I’m sorry “the metaverse”.), when VR has been nothing more than niche gaming is very weird and troublesome.
On the bright side, Facebook is a giant ossified megacorp. All that’s going to happen is some division is going to get new signage, and every PM is going to update their slide decks to say “metaverse”, and everyone is going to do what they were already doing.
I joined HN 12 years ago and I don't remember things that way at all. My impression is that it's extremely rare for anyone to claim that FB's demise is imminent, but it seems like it has become more common for HN posters to comment on FB's decline in recent years. ...but you could say the same thing for Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google as well -- it doesn't seem to be FB specific to me.
Including my ex-account period I have been reading HN for 12 years now, while I agree Facebook has always been unpopular on HN. It was since may be 2015 it became extremely one sided. Even the very rare few who speak up with Facebook financial and user growth are all gone. ( Arguably speaking lots of things on HN have become one sided )
There is this phenomenon I witness time and time again, people confuse what they wish to happen; the decline or death of Facebook with any real facts.
It is like saying Apple is doomed for 10 years and yet Apple is now a 3 trillion company.
Unionization is no threat to Amazon. Their margins and hence their shareholders maybe (briefly), but that's just fine and won't affect their ability to be successful. It'll also push them towards further automation on the medium and long term time horizons.
That would in turn alleviate a lot of the governmental attacks and bad press. I can't think of anyone who hates Amazon the service - they hate Amazon the pee-bottle-broker and tornado-warning-ignorer.
As for other e-commerce sites, they'll probably just buy them, crush them, or if they can't do that - sell them logistics and infrastructure services.
[edit] Consider FedEx vs UPS. FedEx can't hire staffers right now, while UPS, unionized, saw basically zero attrition. FedEx is suffering right now. UPS, crushing it. [1]
The massive labor shortage that’s rocked the U.S. since the pandemic and disrupted long-established employment relationships hasn’t had much impact on UPS, which pays its unionized drivers the highest wages in the industry. That’s helped it maintain a stable workforce and rising profits throughout the current disruptions. Meanwhile, lower-paying, nonunionized FedEx racked up $450 million in extra costs because of labor shortages. And while UPS easily beat earnings expectations and predicted a rising profit margin in the U.S. for the fourth quarter, FedEx signaled that its profit margin will fall further.
>I can't think of anyone who hates Amazon the service
I don't like the destruction of smaller companies. Why go with a smaller company who is going to charge more for the product, quite probably charge for shipping, all while taking longer with the shipping?
> But everyone over 30 I know uses Facebook, heavily
That's an interesting perspective, I was pretty convinced that facebook was almost dead since all of my friends (in France) have almost completely stopper using it. Well most of us are still casually browsing it every once in a while, but it's far less often than it used to be, and worse: we don't have interactions together on that platform. The last remaining usage was events, but since covid basically killed most large-group events for a while, even this usage died off.
I wonder if it's more of a group difference, or maybe it depends from country to country. Where do you live?
Midwestern GenX suburban parent here. Nothing important happens in our subdivision (hundreds of homes) without mention of it in the neighborhood's private Facebook group. Our public school district uses a Facebook page as a primary announcement platform. Kids' sports and social groups are all organized as Facebook groups and pages. You cannot escape Facebook if you're a suburban parent in the US.
No one's posting to their news feed anymore. They're spending all their time commenting on news posts, posting in neighborhood groups, and and buying/selling on Marketplace.
The strongest signal that Facebook will fall is the recently publicized trouble they're having in hiring people. I expect that to have rather strong knock-on effects... 10-15 years down the road. For example if VR turns out to be as big as everyone says and FB/Meta/whatever are only able to put up a weak offering. I tend to agree that they'll be harder to kill than a lot of us wish.
Do they really? It seems to be blown up by media. Talented people are still applying in droves for a job at FB. The competition has definitely increased with good options out there for candidates but hiring trouble is bit preposterous.
For me, overwhelmingly the strongest signal is that they appear to be going all in on what is to be a widely used social interaction platform that's more-or-less explicitly banning sex; when that's been a primary or secondary driver for so many new internet/tech platform things.
My thought process on Facebook declining isn't about perception. It's that they are putting a ton of capital into and taking a huge risk on the Metaverse. If it fails it could mean a major decline for Facebook.
Well, as those 30+ year olds get older, marketers are going to give less and less of a shit about them.
Facebook makes most of their money from their ad network that mostly exists on sites that nobody actually needs to visit (Facebook, ig). In addition, Meta is spending a boat load on engineers who don't really want to work there, so they can make a "metaverse" which I'll bet most of them don't give half a shit about. Then they're going to market the hell out of it and at the end of the day I just don't think that many people are going to use it enough to make it all worthwhile.
I could be wrong but I think if Meta isn't careful in how they diversify their focus they could face a real reckoning that has nothing to do with their current political pushback.
Google search is still pretty good, and their ad network is used throughout the internet so I think they're safe.
Amazon will do whatever it takes to keep sales up, so I have faith in them. If nothing else they're a company that seems extremely capable of adapting to changing market conditions.
I love Instagram as well as Pinterest. Two unpopular things on HN. There is no service out there to curate visual culture like these two. Want to build a image collection of vintage receipts!? You got it. These two platforms are truly amazing for this kind of a thing. Also ads on IG are something I'd actually want.
My two cents is that people are dramatically under-weighting the possibility that Zuckerberg is a visionary with his AR/VR plays. I am extremely bullish on FB solely because of that.
I think people will be as wrong about his VR plays as they were about the Instagram acquisition.
Agree with you there. You've got a founder led company making visionary plays that have every appearance of being on the right track. The Quest is not just a tech marvel, it was also the best selling game console this Christmas. The overall vision will take a few more hardware iterations, but has huge potential to replace smartphones, laptops, game consoles and offices. At this very moment there's another comment thread talking about how the web is an SEO spam graveyard and Google is ripe to be disrupted. Those thinking the disrupter is going to be Duck Duck Go are kidding themselves.
Unless there will be another communication platform that could capture a good chunk of Facebook's users, Facebook is here to stay. A lot of Facebook features are just very difficult to implement in other platforms nowadays. One example is group messaging. WhatsApp has users from a wide range of age groups and no other platforms could easily compete with that. Communicating with our family, regardless of their age group, is a very crucial part of our culture and Facebook fills that gap. Another example is online selling. Buy-and-sell groups are thriving in Facebook because it's so easy to publish your products and immediately communicate with your potential customers. For example, in the Southeast Asian region, Facebook took a large chunk of users from Carousell, the most popular online selling platform there for years before Facebook released Marketplace. Even for me personally, I've tried to stop using Facebook for several months but in my home country, Facebook is just too integrated in its culture.
Amazon / Google I think will stay strong due to their infrastructure in cloud technology. Amazon has the physical delivery infrastructure as well, which doesn't have a great competitor yet.
Apple is currently doing fine with their devices. I think the health industry will adopt some of their tech soon (like the apple watch) to get some of that sweet, sweet healthcare / insurance money
That leaves the "worst" of the group to either Facebook or Netflix.
I haven't heard much about what Netflix is doing, but things seem to be going generally okay so far.
Facebook has extremely negative news all over the media on seemingly both the tech and political side. For example, malicious targeting of children and their platform being used for fake news / propaganda. On the tech side, I don't have confidence in their current, future, or past projects such as Oculus or their extreme hype around the metaverse.
For these reasons (by default and past/present/future speculation) given the wording on this question, I think Facebook is the obvious "loser."
I believe nobody talking about Netflix is worse than people talking negatively about Facebook. Facebook has far-reaching influence over non-US societies, and are generally capable of living off of just those societies. Netflix, on the other hand, is very quickly losing the content war to the likes of Disney and HBO, plus further losing its bread-and-butter catalog backfill to Hulu. Facebook is going to keep being the popular boogeyman, possibly declining over the next decade. Netflix may truly be gone in 10 years, though.
I voted for FB but yeah I really have no idea. I don't get social media at all. I don't get Twitter or TikTok. I don't get how anyone makes a nickel in advertising. I also don't get crypto. They're worth billions based on network effects for reasons I can't comprehend. I understand the internal logic of how they function and monetize but I can't understand how they get so much engagement.
I have never used any mainstream social media. I do participate in this and a few other online forums. For communicating directly with others online, I use email.
I think they've lost GenZ, though. Boomers and GenX use Facebook, Millennials use Instagram, but GenZ uses TickTock, and unlike with Instagram, it doesn't look like they can just buy it out to reach the next generation.
I would fully expect this trend to continue - each new generational cohort will latch onto a new social network that is separate from the ones their lame parents and older siblings use.
This poses a massive institutional risk to any social network. They either need to aggressively pump out new brands to try and capture that themselves, or buy promising startups, but it wouldn't be too difficult to fail at both of those and just completely skip a generation. A few of those misses added up could be a terminal failure.
... which is owned by FB. Between Instagram securing the audience of the next generation, and Whatsapp gaining huge share as the communication tool of developing world, FB is going to do just fine, even if facebook.com usage totally tanks (also unlikely)
I worked at Facebook last year and Google this year. I don't have an insider view of the other companies but some of my closest friends work at all of them except Netflix.
My guess is that none of these will stop growing in the next few years, but Facebook is especially undervalued. They execute on new products faster and better than the others listed, so regardless of current sentiment they are probably not going to fail any time soon.
I chose Netflix because I have the least evidence to suggest they will remain stable, but would say the odds are <10% any of these have a lower market cap in 5 years than they do now.
Having worked at Facebook and seeing where they are headed I think the HN numbers are way off and this poll is mostly "what company does HN hate the most" not which is most likely to decline. Hating FB as a company is fine, and FB as a product is probably likely to decline, but they are as OP mentioned significantly better at shipping new product than any other company listed except Apple. Facebook's biggest challenges are not owning a real platform (platform holders could hurt them) and having lots of serious competitors. These are real problems, but I think their ability to fast follow can put them in #2 for a lot of different categories they care about.
Netflix has a lot of room to grow in new markets, gaming and possibly other types of media. I think they can continue to produce good content and I think some smaller players that are locking content to their own services might return to Netflix in the future (like Microsoft, Sony and EA are now all back on Steam)
I don't think any of these companies is in serious threat of decline, but out of all of them Google seems most stagnant.
The only thing I could think of without cheating and using Google is the Oculus line. I'm not personally convinced there's a huge VR market, but there could be, and Facebook probably has the best product for this market. They aren't competing against the other megacorps listed in that particular market though, so I can't evaluate if they execute faster/better than others.
I know Apple executes pretty well on products, and at a rate that far exceeds my own upgrade cycle.
I bet he means like "Copy stories in instagram!" by "Products". I've heard a lot of social media devs talk about features as products. I'm guessing because that's how product managers see them in those orgs.
I don't find it a very good definition. Implementing a feature is not a new product.
Initially voted Google based on a hunch: Google Search is the most likely flagship product of a FAANG to get displaced by a competitor. Unlike, say, Amazon as a hub for products or Facebook as a social network, Google Search is not a natural monopoly -- there's no inherent reason a search engine should maintain dominance if it loses its competitive advantage. The complaints from tech friends ("you can't find anything anymore") that I've heard for years now are starting to come from tech-agnostic family instead. Alternatives are still worse, but it's easy to imagine a breakthrough.
However, this doesn't mean Google/Alphabet itself, with its diverse product suite and huge amount of advertising data, will decline in any meaningful sense; that will happen on a much slower scale.
Google is the dominant search engine essentially everywhere except for China and Russia.
Amazon's marketplace dominance is pretty US/UK specific, and even there, there are plenty of alternatives. Amazon marketplace is actually only available natively in a small handful of countries.
I feel like most people in this thread are grossly overevaluating Amazon's ability to stay relevant. If a competitor pops up with consistently better prices/better products/better marketing then they'll steal users from Amazon and over time dominance is lost.
What exactly does Amazon have that prevents me from stopping the use of it?
Google has excellent quality search results and a ton of products with a huge lock-in to their account ecosystem. Apple has fantastic product quality. Meta has a ridiculous network effect in three of the four products I use it for -- I can't even leave two of them (Whatsapp and FB) despite not even liking them! And Netflix consistently produces and publishes some of my favourite shows.
Amazon has nothing I can't get elsewhere, it's just a bit more consolidated. With the exception of AWS, and as I said upthread, who knows if that will remain the same company.
What is invisible to most consumers about Amazon is that they have a massive footprint across the entire supply chain for a wide and growing range of consumer good categories. Brands have been slowly outsourcing various parts of their production processes to Amazon. Amazon manages these parts of the business much more efficiently, and in a more integrated way, than what brands were doing before so it is both attractive and sticky. Many new brands are purely virtual organizations with almost everything built on top of Amazon's ecosystem -- virtual brands were always a thing, but Amazon has made it nearly frictionless.
Because of this, I expect them to make a ton of money off consumer retail even if their marketplace fades into the background. The brand management business on Amazon has been growing like crazy too, which pretty much assures Amazon will always be taking their dollar.
Another thing is that searching the web is steadily becoming displaced by more structured and localized forms of search, such as videos, nearby restaurants, products, used goods and so on. In some cases keyword search is replaced entirely - by recommendations & personalized simple buttons (gas stations on the way to my destination, the latest episodes of my favorite podcasts, etc etc).
From an ad-pipeline perspective, Google isn't entirely left behind in this new world, they still have YouTube, Google maps, Gmail, etc. However, they missed most of social and e-commerce, which feels irrecoverable at this point.
I think we have out grown FAANG. There are tech companies with moats and great tech that should be included. IE: Microsoft and Shopify. Decline is kinda open ended too, but if we are talking about ability to hire the best talent, I think it's safe to say Facebook/Meta is going to see a decline in talent. Despite their amazing salaries, because of the brand name that's attached to it they won't see as great talent anymore.
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However, I do predict that they will change in significant ways in the next decade.
* Apple is one Supreme Court ruling away from ending their App Store monopoly that could disrupt the entire world, since it would also affect all other digital marketplaces.
* Amazon is about to enter a decade of unionization all over the world.
* Google and Facebook both lost a key ability to micro-target on their ad platforms so they are both reinventing themselves to drive revenue from other sources, hardware being the biggest moats they can invest in.
* Netflix has some of the worlds brightest minds in data science and they've built up a war-chest of understanding viewing habits. They've also gobbled up a lot of key Hollywood players in the last few years, so I expect some huge cultural changes ahead as these creatives start to take more leadership roles in the company.
They'll likely mostly turn into another studio with a streaming platform.
Features such as only using company generated ratings, aggressively cancelling shows, and the lack of ability to browse/sort/filter the catalog, in favor of Netflix pushing the recommendations they choose on users, is probably great for quarterly KPIs but bad for long term customer satisfaction.
Netflix is of course already a behemoth and not going anywhere but I expect their future to be much more of a generic media company than an elite tech company.
I dropped them in 2020.
But the main question is, why can't Netflix write a recommendation engine that actually shows me something I want to watch?
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, they'll be an HBO style platform. However, the quality of their in-house content has left a lot to be desired. Some is good, but a lot is garbage.
That netflix has technical chops isn't going to be a saving grace. Rather, it will mean engineers from netflix will likely be able to secure jobs at other streaming providers.
My money is on Netflix, Prime (because we want the free shipping) and Disney.
If they came out with a phone, office suite, cloud service, social network, or something of that ilk, then yeah they'd be more in "tech company" territory again. Until then their engineering is going to assist their content production, not the other way around.
Headwinds for sure (Disney, Amazon, Apple!) but they seem to have made the right calls so far.
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 innovating at that level. Whether or not they will profit is another matter, of course.
Not only do they have publicly-usable self-driving vehicles on the road today, they are also testing autonomous trucks for freight. Both of these industries are worth multiple 10's of billions/year in the U.S. alone.
Which of Google, Facebook, Microsoft doesn't?
Everyone else are just making fancy spreadsheets.
However, if the app store were to open up, it could create a more vibrant ecosystem underneath and even create even more network effects within ios. Less direct money for apple but more vibrant developer economy.
These companies will not fail, but could face existential headwinds that no amount of money will 'fix'.
...
"Netflix has some of the worlds brightest minds in data science"
Their data science is a 3rd tier issue. #1 is their incumbency, #2 is the content they produce.
-> Netflix 'problem' is increasing competition from HBO, Disney and others.
...
"Apple is one Supreme Court ruling away from ending their App Store monopoly that could disrupt the entire world"
No, their App Store will do just fine. They will reduce their 30% cut to something lower and companies will stay there because of the distribution opportunity: being in App Store will mean considerably more downloads.
-> Apples 'problem' is that their iPhone is slowly becoming a commodity - there's only so many ways to 'improve' upon it and those margins will probably come down.
...
"Google and Facebook both lost a key ability to micro-target on their ad platforms"
No, they have not, they have enough data.
-> Facebook's problem is that FB usage is going down, Insta is a bit stagnating and they have little to replace it with.
-> Google's problem is that they have no obvious new products on the horizon to grow and that it's possible DDG and others may actually start to eat away at them (probably not, but possible).
...
"Amazon is about to enter a decade of unionization all over the world."
Probably not so much, and, rules are entirely different around the world.
Amazon's problem is that it's never been profitable and there's only so many ways to make that business work.
As fast delivery and one-click purchase work out in regular retail, AMZN advantage is limited.
AWS however, the profit base doesn't show any signs of slowing down.
Apple will still have their hardware business.
Amazon's AWS business is unaffected by their online shopping platform business.
Facebook is facing a reputation crisis that is also causing regulators to come down on it hard, and beyond the many well-justified criticisms, many also use it as a scapegoat and a punching bag for politicians to show off. That's not a good position to be in.
World wide is probably too strong a claim, but I think here's something to this. However, I think this would work in Amazon's favor. It would make warehousing quite a bit more expensive and would be a significant barrier to competitors. AWS provides them with deep pockets, and the have a huge advantage in logistics so I think they could eat the cost and keep moving. It would also suck a lot of air out of the anti-amazon movement, such that it is. One day delivery with high labor standards might be the pitch that catapults them to real market dominance.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-09-21/inside-am...
Yes each of these has enough of a war chest that they could drift along for a decade + several have ownership structures where there wouldn't be market pressure to remove the C-level / board if that happened.
That said... each of these has weaknesses. I think about Microsoft (the one missing from the list that rightfully belongs there...)... they came out of their lost decade a very different company. Their stock price barely moved for that entire time, though has since rebounded. It's not that hard to imagine that Netflix is just one of many streaming studios in another 5-10 years, or that people might be just as willing to turn to another search provider than Google. Facebook seems to be acutely aware that its core big blue app is seen as a baby boomer thing and that it had better do things to stay relevant to another generation. So - too big to fail? Maybe, but then again we could ask GE, GM, and Ma Bell that same question once upon a time.
I just can't see putting netflix and google search in the same basket.
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Look at the Witcher for an example. Or if you want to see this kind of shift happening over the course of a show, look at Madam Secretary. Season 1 didn't feature any of this crap and showed a strong woman main character that wasn't shoehorned in, by the last season everything was about "hurr durr let's ban guns and white men suck".
I'm not even white and I can notice the excellent storylines being ruined. It's like the writers don't know how to write a story with woke concepts that's actually strong so instead they shove it into every successful show until the show isn't successful anymore. HBO and Disney are going to eat their lunch at this rate with more compelling content.
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Now its mostly just Netflix originals which aren't necessarily bad but maybe not worth it's own subscription every month.
That's a great exaggeration. There was never a time when you could name a film and expect it to be on Netflix to stream.
(Aware of the cuties debacle, but this is a rather overt example, aforementioned are sometimes subtle.)
https://www.theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones
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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"
Also you can't get most streaming content on cable, or the sports content I get on cable without 4 streaming services (ESPN+, Peacock, Paramount+ & Hulu).
So I've got a cable package w/ sports + a couple streaming services. Sometimes I'll pick one up for a month or 2 and drop it just for something I want to see. Sometimes I rent something from Amazon.
It's just a mess.
But the search is pretty easy. My Rokus, Amazon sticks, or even cable box search fine for me.
Also has a nifty feature where you can list all available episodes of a show across all seasons and it will mix in your live recordings with streaming options. I honestly don't know why Tivo doesn't get a lot more love. Cable when you aren't paying per-TV fees for boxes is pretty great. Just a couple of bucks a month for a cable card in the Tivo and then you hook up Tivo Mini units on all of the other TVs in your house to access the main box.
But it was quite a success for RIAA/MPAA to stick a label of criminal to everyone who downloads free audio-visual content even if it's not true. Though, let's not aid them in their quest by throwing sentences like 'illegal content' too frequently around.
I also find collecting to be satisfying, there's something nice about knowing that Netflix can't just decide to take Arcane away from me
In Australia I can’t get anything better than 1080 for some unknown reason, it’s not because it doesn’t exist in higher quality - torrent sites often list 4K resolution files. Presumably it’s the potato-quality internet in this country.
Now days you can get internet for $50 or $100 (depending on location, speed etc).
Then if you wanted say 5 of the various platforms, that's going to roughly be $50 to $70 more. So that's still a likely savings.
And on top of that, all new movies are basically being PRODUCED by these networks, so for the most part you don't need a theater (or their prices).
And on top of all that, instead of just fully subscribing to all of them, just get one at a time. Want the new Dexter series, get Showtime. Done with that? drop it until season 2 is out.
So it definitely can be a lot cheaper than the old days.
Its significantly better than cable TV still. I also dont get people reminiscing about one streaming service dominating, we shouldnt be wishing for monopolies. Everyone coming out with their own platform should drive up competition and give us better quality services
Having to switch apps is a trivial inconvenience. Seems to me that price-point is what we should be focusing on, and I'm fairly confident things have improved greatly.
More generally, I'm sceptical of any argument that laments the lack of a monopoly.
Certainly myriad streaming services are better than cable- but are they better than pirating? Harder to be confident of that now than a few years ago
Covenant on Kodi was the first and last time I actually felt like TV was in the future.
And don't get me started on Netflix auto-preview (which cannot be disabled on my device).
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Also, many of these platforms made the strange decision to not accept subscriptions from locations outside the US in the beginning. I tried to subscribe to Disney+ and HBO max when they started, but was denied due to location.
Probably works now, but I don't care. They had their one chance.
I had Netflix and Prime till recently in an effort to promote the defragmentation of streaming services as a show of unity but, its getting worse. And these guys do not need my money while the service they provide gets worse and worse.
Netflix is a TV company. Their tech is a commodity. An important commodity, for sure, but it's not what makes them valuable. Their critical offering is their reach and programming.
FAAMG (or MAAAM now, I guess?) is a sane grouping of giant companies because their critical offerings and expertise areas are their software and their platforms. I think Google would be totally capable of reimplementing Netflix's streaming services if they needed to, but after years of trying they still haven't been able to fully match Amazon Web Services. That's the difference between Big Company and Big Tech Company. Similarly, it's why Tesla isn't on this list: they're huge and growing and they write software, but their software is just a means to an end, not a valuable platform in itself.
Perhaps some sort of "Tube" that "You" could use to watch content, maybe with a subscription option?
It's a lot easier for Disney and their ilk to build streaming services than it is for Netflix to build Disney's content catalog. Props to Netflix though, they've been punching above their weight in that area.
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Reminds me of the Dow Jones, which is just 30 somewhat-arbitrary companies, and is basically the sum of the stock prices of those companies (yes, that means a $800/share company matters 20X more than a $20/share company).
Interestingly, from a physical perspective there's not much difference between saying "fagm" and saying "fact". But one of those is easy for English speakers and one is impossible.
Coarticulated velar/labial consonants exist in other languages, though.
Microsoft
Alphabet
Apple
Amazon
Netflix
F*** the MMAAAN!
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FB may be getting slaughtered by the media, hated by both the left and the right, but the truth is no one is actually leaving FB. It's still the #1 place to find restaurants, buy/sell used items, neighborhood groups, etc etc etc. And if FB Proper were to ever fall behind, IG still has a lot of stamina left.
I don't think it will happen any time soon, but I would like to see Apple decline. Their ideals and design and software quality from the previous decades are nowhere to be seen. Their software and UX especially have suffered from mismanagement, and I wonder how bad it will need to get before people start switching away. The alternatives are still behind, but the gap is closing in a bad way.
I tried marketplace but it's empty in my area. Restaurants don't use it, nor do neighbourhoods.
I'm not saying you're wrong but we'd need to see numbers to say which of our experiences is the more average one.
Facebook's other properties are successful for now though. WhatsApp is prolific around me in a way Messenger is very much not and Instagram has some level of popularity, though TikTok is the new shiny thing.
I don't think Facebook (or Meta) will disappear, but I do think it is the mostly likely to decline.
The only one I think may disappear is Netflix - this is because Facebook benefits from the network effect which helps slow any sudden decline as all your family are still on it etc. whereas Netflix just needs a bad run of poor quality content and it could lose a lot of subscribers to competing services.
Netflix is also less diversified (even though now it's adding Netflix Games for some reason.. we'll see how popular that is..) which further weakens its position.
I would argue that while Facebook/Meta has been more of a gradual evolution Netflix has shown that it can transition to a whole new way of working within its domain. They revolutionised DVD rentals by combining a web UI with efficient warehousing and logistics. When they saw that infrastructure was getting close to making streaming viable they pivoted to digital delivery and not only did it allow them to keep their existing customer base who would have eventually moved away from DVD rentals on their own, but it also brought in other international markets where DVD rentals never would have worked.
I think I agree that Facebook/Meta will decline without disappearing in much the same way that IBM has. They will acquire new businesses and sell off old ones without really being seen as particularly innovative. Netflix on the other hand I think will stick around but will likely change into more of a content producer rather than a distributor like it has been. Beyond that, who knows?
I don't post regularly on Facebook, because my old FB friends are not very active. I'm in the age (late 30s) where you don't meet so many new people, and if you do it is no longer appropriate to add them on FB. So it is effectively dead for me. I communicate with one person via FB messenger and post uni events there. On Whatsapp, I communicate with my family and some coworkers. Everyone else is on Signal, Telegram, Instagram, maybe Twitter. TikTok is terrifying.
Also, where else would you post an event details page aside from Facebook? Meetup? That's even more dead..
Sure. Still millions of eyes for ads, and those eyes have money to spend after they rage out in the comments of a targeted news post about wokeism or vaccine mandates.
Although, I didn't pick FB, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the votes were just people that picked the company they thought might grow the least. Or the company they hate the most - which no one should be surprised is FB by a large margin. It's been the tech punching bag for like almost a decade now.
The largest reason I DON'T see a decline from FB is that everyone has been talking about how much they hate FB for years. And despite that, it's still been growing like a weed.
I wish it was true but I feel like their quality is great where it matters. One of the biggest threats to technology is that Apple successfully captures a large slice of the computing world into a proprietary architecture with Apple extensions. Having spent a decade plus with Intel as a lingua franca we may not appreciate yet how this has kept parts of Apple's ecosystem open and the computing world interoperable.
Yelp
> buy/sell used items,
Craigslist or Patch
> neighborhood groups
Nextdoor
I've been an FB user for ages, and don't use it for any of the things you list. Mostly just staying in touch with distant relatives, school chums and professional colleagues that I know socially, and a few special interest groups. I only log in to FB maybe 2-4 times per week, for less than an hour at a time.
Also Yelp is practically nonexistent in my suburban area. And restaurants often have more updates/activity on their FB pages than their own standalone websites.
And older people seem to think Nextdoor is a scam since they keep using real people's names on paper mail when they weren't aware that they consented to it after signing up.
Nearly all pro-Facebook ( or more accurately described as non Facebook hostile ) opinion has been downvoted in the past five years. And they were less than 5% of the comments. They are so rare I could nearly count them with my fingers.
>It's still the #1 place to find restaurants, buy/sell used items, neighborhood groups, etc etc etc.
The demographics within HN tends to not use Facebook for those functions. At least there are very little evidence any comments, opinion or votes has shown they do. Not to mention it tends to be US and EUR specific.
So long as I’m keeping my account as a calendar of friends’ events but never (ever) actually use or interact with the platform in other ways, it would seem I’m just an expensive freeloader.
People know there isn’t much point “leaving” Facebook for integrity reasons. They know who I am anyway.
I’m guessing I’m not alone in using their service this way.
Want to get regular updates from local businesses, local government, hobby groups, sports and cultural events? You'll find it on FB. Sure, most of those also have their own dedicated websites or similar, 90% of the most recent info comes to FB first.
Same goes for community groups, public announcements, and what not. Older people (50 and up) are well-established on FB, and have no plans to move anywhere else. So it might be true that FB has become a "boomer platform", but at least those users are very active and very loyal. Many of these older users get all their news and updates via FB.
I'd imagine that this would be the case in similar towns and places.
I don't think this is a good thing. It means change won't be easy to implement because their customer base relies on it for a certain function, if that function changes too much or goes away, they loose what's left.
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They are getting their lunch eaten amongst young people by TikTok.
Amazon is also kept up by AWS, which who knows if one day that is spun off.
I fully expect them to continue to be able to monetize their user base, and purchase smaller competitors for a while.
The most recent warning flag for me is their rebranding. Announcing a major pivot to center on Occulus (I’m sorry “the metaverse”.), when VR has been nothing more than niche gaming is very weird and troublesome.
On the bright side, Facebook is a giant ossified megacorp. All that’s going to happen is some division is going to get new signage, and every PM is going to update their slide decks to say “metaverse”, and everyone is going to do what they were already doing.
There is this phenomenon I witness time and time again, people confuse what they wish to happen; the decline or death of Facebook with any real facts.
It is like saying Apple is doomed for 10 years and yet Apple is now a 3 trillion company.
That would in turn alleviate a lot of the governmental attacks and bad press. I can't think of anyone who hates Amazon the service - they hate Amazon the pee-bottle-broker and tornado-warning-ignorer.
As for other e-commerce sites, they'll probably just buy them, crush them, or if they can't do that - sell them logistics and infrastructure services.
[edit] Consider FedEx vs UPS. FedEx can't hire staffers right now, while UPS, unionized, saw basically zero attrition. FedEx is suffering right now. UPS, crushing it. [1]
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-04/labor-sho...Wait, what? They do have a huge problem with counterfeit crap sold via bait-and-switch reviews.
Edit: A related article https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/12/amazon-still-has...
I don't like the destruction of smaller companies. Why go with a smaller company who is going to charge more for the product, quite probably charge for shipping, all while taking longer with the shipping?
That's an interesting perspective, I was pretty convinced that facebook was almost dead since all of my friends (in France) have almost completely stopper using it. Well most of us are still casually browsing it every once in a while, but it's far less often than it used to be, and worse: we don't have interactions together on that platform. The last remaining usage was events, but since covid basically killed most large-group events for a while, even this usage died off.
I wonder if it's more of a group difference, or maybe it depends from country to country. Where do you live?
Facebook makes most of their money from their ad network that mostly exists on sites that nobody actually needs to visit (Facebook, ig). In addition, Meta is spending a boat load on engineers who don't really want to work there, so they can make a "metaverse" which I'll bet most of them don't give half a shit about. Then they're going to market the hell out of it and at the end of the day I just don't think that many people are going to use it enough to make it all worthwhile.
I could be wrong but I think if Meta isn't careful in how they diversify their focus they could face a real reckoning that has nothing to do with their current political pushback.
Google search is still pretty good, and their ad network is used throughout the internet so I think they're safe.
Amazon will do whatever it takes to keep sales up, so I have faith in them. If nothing else they're a company that seems extremely capable of adapting to changing market conditions.
I think people will be as wrong about his VR plays as they were about the Instagram acquisition.
Apple is currently doing fine with their devices. I think the health industry will adopt some of their tech soon (like the apple watch) to get some of that sweet, sweet healthcare / insurance money
That leaves the "worst" of the group to either Facebook or Netflix.
I haven't heard much about what Netflix is doing, but things seem to be going generally okay so far.
Facebook has extremely negative news all over the media on seemingly both the tech and political side. For example, malicious targeting of children and their platform being used for fake news / propaganda. On the tech side, I don't have confidence in their current, future, or past projects such as Oculus or their extreme hype around the metaverse.
For these reasons (by default and past/present/future speculation) given the wording on this question, I think Facebook is the obvious "loser."
everyone over 30 i know are past facebook and realize Instagram is adware/spyware.
My survey isn't very data heavy, but from the people I know, it's mostly older people and the people who stayed in my hometown that still use it.
The "AI" has basically re-created Sport Illustrated in scroll form.
What about over 50?
I have never used any mainstream social media. I do participate in this and a few other online forums. For communicating directly with others online, I use email.
This poses a massive institutional risk to any social network. They either need to aggressively pump out new brands to try and capture that themselves, or buy promising startups, but it wouldn't be too difficult to fail at both of those and just completely skip a generation. A few of those misses added up could be a terminal failure.
Tiktok seems to have largely displaced Snapchat in under two years.
the youngsters seem more interested in insta and tiktok
... which is owned by FB. Between Instagram securing the audience of the next generation, and Whatsapp gaining huge share as the communication tool of developing world, FB is going to do just fine, even if facebook.com usage totally tanks (also unlikely)
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My guess is that none of these will stop growing in the next few years, but Facebook is especially undervalued. They execute on new products faster and better than the others listed, so regardless of current sentiment they are probably not going to fail any time soon.
I chose Netflix because I have the least evidence to suggest they will remain stable, but would say the odds are <10% any of these have a lower market cap in 5 years than they do now.
Netflix has a lot of room to grow in new markets, gaming and possibly other types of media. I think they can continue to produce good content and I think some smaller players that are locking content to their own services might return to Netflix in the future (like Microsoft, Sony and EA are now all back on Steam)
I don't think any of these companies is in serious threat of decline, but out of all of them Google seems most stagnant.
And which ones are worthwhile?
The only thing I could think of without cheating and using Google is the Oculus line. I'm not personally convinced there's a huge VR market, but there could be, and Facebook probably has the best product for this market. They aren't competing against the other megacorps listed in that particular market though, so I can't evaluate if they execute faster/better than others.
I know Apple executes pretty well on products, and at a rate that far exceeds my own upgrade cycle.
I don't find it a very good definition. Implementing a feature is not a new product.
However, this doesn't mean Google/Alphabet itself, with its diverse product suite and huge amount of advertising data, will decline in any meaningful sense; that will happen on a much slower scale.
Amazon's marketplace dominance is pretty US/UK specific, and even there, there are plenty of alternatives. Amazon marketplace is actually only available natively in a small handful of countries.
I feel like most people in this thread are grossly overevaluating Amazon's ability to stay relevant. If a competitor pops up with consistently better prices/better products/better marketing then they'll steal users from Amazon and over time dominance is lost.
What exactly does Amazon have that prevents me from stopping the use of it?
Google has excellent quality search results and a ton of products with a huge lock-in to their account ecosystem. Apple has fantastic product quality. Meta has a ridiculous network effect in three of the four products I use it for -- I can't even leave two of them (Whatsapp and FB) despite not even liking them! And Netflix consistently produces and publishes some of my favourite shows.
Amazon has nothing I can't get elsewhere, it's just a bit more consolidated. With the exception of AWS, and as I said upthread, who knows if that will remain the same company.
Because of this, I expect them to make a ton of money off consumer retail even if their marketplace fades into the background. The brand management business on Amazon has been growing like crazy too, which pretty much assures Amazon will always be taking their dollar.
From an ad-pipeline perspective, Google isn't entirely left behind in this new world, they still have YouTube, Google maps, Gmail, etc. However, they missed most of social and e-commerce, which feels irrecoverable at this point.
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