I tend to think all the Facebook market cap schadenfreude is jut wishful thinking and it will go back to being wildly profitable or continue to be. But having been in this space for a long time I'm starting to wonder whether it cld be another version of what happened ...
2/ to Yahoo and AOL. Which is to say hugely profitable behemoths which were dead men walking but continued to throw off huge amounts of cash for many years after the writing was on the wall. Indeed, for many years this was the basic question with both companies.
3/ It was a given that both companies original business models were dying. But they generated so much cash that it seemed that with some astute management they could simply buy a new business model. And no, that's not as silly as it sounds. And yet, as we know ...
4/ neither was able to do so. They spent years blowing money and eventually ended up as they are today, basically corporate skin grafts on other corporate media/tech frankensteins. Sad. Really sad. But also funny sad.
5/ It's not hard to see something similar with Facebook. Buy the metaverse. Buy the youngs with some new platform, FaceTok. Whatever. There were some paradoxical stories a week ago about how despite being the most fuddy duddy of tech companies Microsoft is actually ...
6/ highly diversified. So is Amazon. But we know that. Facebook is really amazingly undiversified. Those articles said the same was kind of true with Google, inasmuch as both Facebook and Google are so dependent on advertising. But that's misleading.
7/ Google is highly dependent on advertising but through channels that are deeply and organically built into the internet itself. Google is the Borg. Its tendrils are so deeply embedded into the synapses of the internet itself. It also owns and runs much of the infrastructure ...
8/ of advertising. Facebook meanwhile is highly highly focused on advertising ON FACEBOOK and INSTAGRAM. That's very different. It's pretty hard to take meaning stock of a company after a week in which its lost a significant percentage of its value. So in a while maybe ...
9/ things seem very different. BUT... It's certainly possible at the moment to see the entirety of Facebook as based on some killer network effects from the mid-aughts that were then followed by VERY SHREWD decisions in the mid-late aughts about how to use those
10/ network effects to build psychographic profiles which could then be used for advertising. It's easy to forget that despite the aesthetic shitpile that is the current incarnation of Facebook, Zuckerberg was very, very shrewd in keeping advertising off the platform ...
11/ for a very long time. But that was all a long time ago. What's the next big thing or the branch out into some new business. Those haven't happened. And network efforts don't always last forever. Sad.
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