This delusion that Facebook is somehow dramatically more replaceable than Google or Amazon is kinda amusing. There are plenty of other places to buy online and plenty of other places to search. I can't imagine the mental contortions that are required to hold both of these beliefs at once: "Facebook is replaceable," and, "Google is irreplaceable." They are both replaceable, but it would be tough in both cases.
Facebook is a website that lets you share text and images with your friends. Their only value proposition is that they have a lot of customers: the value of facebook is not provided by facebook. What makes them valuable is simply inertia, and if they lose that inertia they are dead. They have no technical advantage to the competition.
If a notably better competitor comes along tomorrow, within a year the whole money empire could crumble. People would just go to the new place, one at a time.
Facebook has TREMENDOUS lock-in. For any new place to have value, it's got to have the majority of the people Facebook has change over in a very short timeframe.
The problem with technical advantage is that when it's gone, it's gone.
Eh. I quit it a few years ago and honestly, no one cared. I kept up with the people I kept up with, they did the same.
it completely vanished with nary a ripple.
How can a website lock you in to only being able to share things with your friends through their website? Do they lock you out of your friendships if you quit the site? This is a very bizarre notion to me. Facebook accounts have no value, the people behind the accounts and the relationships have the value. Facebook disappearing wouldn't prevent you from communicating with them. Is this real life?
> and companies with real technical prowess will fail because they rely on producing something new
Err, what? Do you mean that smart people working on hard problems are destined to fail? That facebook has some how consumed all of the available users and prevented them from existing any where else on the internet?
Consider this web ad from three days ago from Microsoft:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNWuOJXP-R4
It makes the claim that in blind tests people choose Bing to Google nearly 2:1. Which is a pretty bold and substantial claim. Question: Do you believe that? Does this new info make you want to try it and set bing even one week as your default search engine? Do you even care? (Notice also that I linked to the bing account on Youtube, a subsidiary of Google, and the chances are high that you are either browsing with Chrome or use Safari/Firefox which use Google as default search.)
I'd say, though, that the ads network is the bigger lock-in for Google, because it's vastly superior than alternativea.
But marginally better doesn't matter much, which is why I was careful to say "notably" better.
Search now is nothing like what it will be in a decade, and someone is going to make that leap. Might be Google, might not.
What happens when someone makes that quantum leap in delivering the information you want?
If it's not Google, the ad network disintegrates at least as fast as the search users vanish.
I would argue that Youtube has the most lock-in of any Google product, with Gmail second. Neither is invulnerable, but Youtube in particular will be hard to pull folks away from. Moving video around is tedious, and people largely just won't do it.
Everything from source discovery, to unearthing basic facts, to hypertextual excursions through human knowledge is so much easier and more fruitful now, it's hard to imagine going back to the way things were before.
Life would be a lot worse without my Kindle, but in terms of a website that changes the world in itself, I can only think of arXiV. I remember what trying to look up actual research papers as a high school student was like before it.