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Comment by Yhippa | Hacker News Reader

Based on history what you've said is true. This feels slightly different though. I feel that Facebook and the other big tech companies are more self-aware and have made bold and smart acquisitions (Instagram and WhatsApp) to stave off obsolescence. It feels like they've built a nice walled garden effectively now. Anecdotally in other parts of the world Facebook is "the internet".

Yet similar services like AOL, Friendster, and Myspace were once big and are no longer what they were. I have no idea what will possibly supersede Facebook but I bet it will be something out of left field.

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I think the times have changed, and methods of survival changes also. We can compare previous behemoths, and their lack of actionable strategy to survive, with current times.

I think we are entering much more violent times, where huge corporations will see a crashing end.

If there will be great, easy to use, easy for user alternative to Facebook, that will be able to fill all the blanks quickly, would Facebook's value, stock and revenue withstand for example 250 Million user drop? Those would be the users that are unlikely to come back, and this would initiate huge migration.

There is a time when a company screws one time too many, disruptor shows up at the right time with the right cards in its hand and literally syphon the value out of the big company. This happened many times before. See how Google showed up with better solution, very adaptive strategy and no annoying noise and rip apart the whole search engine niche.

Facebook is "the internet" not everywhere. In Russia (and other countries with many Russian people) major social websites are: vk.com (vkontakte) and ok.ru (odnoklassniki). It's a lot of users who don't like Facebook. Honestly, as a former user of both vk and facebook, I can say thay facebook is very inferior website, it's absurdly illogical with terrible UI. I have no idea why Facebook is so popular. The only reason is network effect, when everyone uses it, some people don't want to stay alone.

Regardless of how self-aware they are and how many times the executives have read "The Innovator's Dilemma", eventually every company makes a mistake by missing a disruptive innovation or shift in customer preferences. No one can be right 100% of the time.

I don't think we will see another Facebook-scale social media service until the shift to AR wearables. However, at that point I think Facebook's disruption will be almost inevitable.

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