Re:Facebook reports second quarter results
by thehappypm on Friday July 31, 2020 @11:56AM
(#24009967)
Facebook broke through. We could have easily had a world with dozens of major social networks, each catering to a different subset of the world and consumer groups. Facebook, though, was able to gain nearly universal acceptance -- outside of countries where it is explicitly banned. There was no guarantee one company would take that prize. In fact it was more likely that we'd have Reddit, MySpace, TikTok, etc all catering to different audiences with no one platform that basically everyone at least has an account for.
For instance Shimano crushed all other cycling equipment vendors in an unprecedented way, at a scale never see before and built a worldwide empire.
But did Shimano’s entry fundamentally change the field ? I’d argue no. They iterated and executed flawlessly, actually not disrupting what was a good business to them from the start.
I’d argue Facebook is in the same position. They brought unprecedented scale and became the massively dominant player, while keeping the field mostly the same in quality (targeted ads, social games etc. were already a thing, older SNS already pivoted on that before facebook coming in)