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Dark Days Ahead For Facebook and Google?
An anonymous reader writes "Dallas Mavericks owner and media entrepreneur Mark Cuban thinks he knows the reason for Facebook's disappointing IPO; smart money has realized that 'mobile is going to crush Facebook', as the world's population increasingly accesses the Internet mostly through smartphones and tablets. Cuban notes that the limited screen real estate hampers the branding and ad placement that Google and Facebook are accustomed to when serving to desktop browsers, while phone plans typically have strict data limits, so subscribers won't necessarily take kindly to YouTube or other video ads. Forbes' Eric Jackson likewise sees a generational shift to mobile that will produce a new set of winners at the expense of Facebook and Google."
Flame baitin article is flame baitin.
It's too bad they don't make phone software or something that could help them pick up at least a little market share in that area, amirite?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
...at the same time mobiles are able to establish higher rate connections, and it would probably make sense for Google to purchase a mobile phone operator or assist an one into providing much larger data limits than currently exists. Then the limits discussed above disappear and Google/Facebook resume letting the good times roll .....
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
bankruptcy ahead of facebook, all the people i know stopped using it (and over 200 people i got to stop using facebook)
Maybe the smart money recognized hype when they saw it and is starting to think that hype isn't a safe investment?
Rememeber MySpace? No? Vaguely, maybe? How about AOL? AOL isn't entirely in the same category but it's close. Facebook will go the way of the dinosaur just like AOL, and MySpace, and LiveJournal, and whatever comes after Facebook will sooner than you think Not Be The New Hotness anymore. What we're seeing with Facebook today is just the opening overture of it's swan-song, and I for one will not miss it.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Seriously, this is considered worthy as a featured article on /.?
Facebook and Google should go the way of the dodo because in the long run users would benefit from controlling the means of communication. We should make the services on the internet free and open and decentralized and distributed or if there's a technical reason for central servage, the users should run those central servers.
Go Freedom! Go commons! Go opennes! Go democracy!
Peace.
One is the designer and developer of the most popular smartphone + tablet OS. The other has a garish social networking website.
Now which one do you think is better positioned to take advantage of mobile Internet users?
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
A shift in usage from desktops to mobile will not take down Google; if anyone were in a position to embrace this sort of change, Google would be a top contender. As for Facebook, I would venture to say that it is reaching the end of its life-cycle.
How did Google get dragged into this? Google's main source of revenue is through ads and unlike Facebook, that includes mobile and video ads. Unlike Facebook, Google has a vast array of projects/services and is constantly developing new ones. Google is truly an innovative company willing to find the next great techonology. How can this be compared to a company that lets users add photos to a webpage to showboat about themselves or their family. Stick to baseball, Mr Cuban.
What a surprise, multiple anonymous posters in this story once again trying to dismiss a piece of negative news involving Google. Infiltrated by Google employees and well-wishers, Slashdot consistently offers justifications and dismissals for every bad behavior, terrible decision, or piece of bad Google news.
Google is a multibillion dollar advertising megacorporation that was caught by the German government sniffing people's wifi data (they "accidentally" did it for three years before admitting it only when authorities threatened an investigation), forced people to use real names on Google+ and admitted it was an identity service and not a social network, stuffed Google+ results into the search engine without any competing social networks even though they have those networks indexed by the search engine (hello, Microsoft tactics), said that the only people who care about privacy "have something to hide," hacked into Mocality to call its customers, removed H.264 support in Chrome out of "openness" only to turn around and ship the closed-source Flash plugin, withheld Android source from the public but shared it with privileged hardware partners so they could have a leg up, abused their Android compatibility program to make things difficult for smartphone makers who chose Bing over Google, and on and on and on.
With all this crap they pull that would get them completely trashed if they were Microsoft or any other company, there's one reason and one reason only that they have been propped up as the good guy on Slashdot all these years--Linux. They use Linux. Slashdot is a Linux advocacy site, and so because Google uses Linux, they are good guys and get a pass for everything. That's all it takes to get Slashdot to love you. Just use Linux.
When Microsoft used their Windows monopoly revenues to fund development of Internet Explorer and release it for free to try to dominate the web market, everyone here cried "antitrust!" But when Google uses its web search monopoly revenues to fund development of Android and release it for free to try to dominate smartphones, everyone defends it. For anyone who was on Slashdot during those times, to see Google doing all the very same things Microsoft did but get a completely different reaction is surreal.
Slashdot is a bubble. You only get pro-Google, pro-Linux news. Major news occurring elsewhere is often days late, if it gets reported at all. This will get modded down because trolls have taken over the moderation system and openly subvert it. That's fine. It just proves that Slashdot reacts negatively to anything outside the partyline.
I will see your shenanigans and raise you 1 Bullshit. There's always some "expert" out there that can predict the future. Expert, Ex-spurt, Ex - someone who used to be something significant but is no longer. Spurt - drip under pressure.
I call your bullshit, but I don't have enough chips, I guess I'm all in.
I probably should have said something more insightful like, hmm, I didn't know facebook and google didn't work on mobile devices,
oh, wait, they do
In fact, I probably use google maps more on my iphone than on my desktop.
Smart money knows that no company in the world should be valued at $86 billion when its profits are just $1.8 billion.
ll mk mllns!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Yes, mobile is important, but it's not some totally new paradigm. People do most of the same things on mobile that they do on desktops, and the difference is narrowing all of the time. It's true that facebook has been a bit slow to develop on mobile, but it hardly matters in the long run as they're not seeing any real competition in that space.
And yes, ad rates are lower for mobile (for now), but the user base is exploding, so revenue is still increasing.
TL;DR Mark Cuban is just throwing around buzz words to sound relevant.
bankruptcy ahead of facebook, all the people i know stopped using it (and over 200 people i got to stop using facebook)
So that's 300? out of 900 Million Users which makes it 899,999,700 more to go and you'll show them!
And I find this interesting that that article:
Kinda flies in the face of what Cuban said, doesn't it.
Google has the most popular mobile operating system, and has working HUD glasses, I dont see how life is going to be difficult for them.
What does that have to do with profitability? Android doesn't make money for Google, and the point about data limits in the summary still applies. "A little market share" isn't going to help much without profits.
According to this article, Google is estimated to bring in $4 billion in mobile Ad revenue in 2012. Even if these estimates were off by (a generous) 25%, that still sounds like a lot of money. What exactly am I missing here that led the Forbes author to predict Google's demise? I must admit I don't know much about where Facebook stands in this regard.
cause he made his selling broadcast.com to yahoo idiots for about 6 billion more then it was ever worth.
Facebook is what people use their Smart Phones for! When Facebook needs a new revenue stream it can extract money from Verizon and AT&T for letting their users access it with mobile devices.
There are multiple anonymous posters in Google stories that try to dismiss the article and sway conversation away from negativity toward Google. Notice that they often use the same speech patterns and scripts. Come on, "Google is invincible"?
Simple grade 3 math explained why the shares went down. It's hard to justify that kind of multiple of earnings. Their income growth rate makes it unlikely it'll ever sustain that kind of value. It's got nothing to do with generational shifts to mobile.
Facebook is different than Google, very different. Facebook is one well developed web app, with remarkable popularity. Google is founded on the strengths of their search engine. Search is key, search is where you start. Search means you're looking for something, and susceptible to being introduced to something else that you might not have been looking for. Facebook is a tool, an application. Ads in applications diminish my experience with my application, ads in my tools make me not use said tool.
It's true he invested money into Real networks (anyone use RealPlayer lately? Thought not.)
Mark is a good example of the write once-read-many kind of things.
Sadly, everything he's ever touched has ended up on the back end of a donkey.
Real-networks. Sorry, glad you made your buck back, nobody uses it.
The Mavericks? Yes, they won... nothing.
HDnet? That's like the ONLY US HD TV network never to succeed in HD.
Mark Cuban is the Charlie Brown of kicking a good investment to the... whoops, /. mods - suck it.
Lucy just pulled it out from right under him.
E
Yahoo stupidly paid a couple billion to Cuban for a worthless website at the height of the dot-com boom.
Since then he has goofed around with sports teams and had a bunch of failed business ventures. Apparently on Slashdot this makes you a technology genius who's every blog post is front page material.
Don't get me wrong, the forces that be, want desperately to make desktops go away... They can't be locked down or locked in the way mobile devices can be, and the people who use them well are unruly, demand their right and freedom, and typically don't play well with service providers walking all over them. So I understand the pundits claiming the PC is dead long live the mobile device!!!
The problem is that there's this peculiar thing. Its called a DISPLAY, and the one on a COMPUTER is just a wee bit larger than a hamster's cage mirror, sized display that passes for a screen on smartphones. I swear there will in 50 years be an entire generation of blind people dancing to their retro ringtones from devices long abandoned for the health problems. I personally want a great big, huge frigging display. One that won't make every person over 35 squint so hard, they look like they're doing a Clint Eastwood imitation. I want to see what I'm working on without having a microfilm reader's lens welded to my eyes. I like movies and art that fill my field of vision. I like lots of windows up so I can code, and debug, and document, and browse, and email, and edit pictures all at the same friggin time.
If the price of my great big display is that it sadly that leaves room for greedy clowns to slip advertisement into my field of view, so be it, I have to keep getting more creative to keep the stupid stuff out. This is a request for the world at large. Someone out there. Provide commercial media without commercials and people will gladly pay the premium. I would, in a heart beat!
I think that'll hurt Google some. When does that run out? Of course, PageRank isn't really that great, and they've had to tweak it over the years; but if they don't innovate beyond "Google has returned 1,254,352 results, 10 of which you have time to realize aren't actually relevant", then they will flounder. Self driving cars? Don't want.
FaceBook? Never wanted. I guess it just goes to show how out of touch I am with "normal" American idiots.
I probably should have said something more insightful like, hmm, I didn't know facebook and google didn't work on mobile devices, oh, wait, they do In fact, I probably use google maps more on my iphone than on my desktop.
How much do you pay for using Google maps? Do you follow ads a lot? If the answer is that you don't pay anything to Google for your mobile maps, and you don't follow ads, then how is Google making money off you? The same observation applies to Facebook.
I find it strange for you to dismiss Facebook as a social network website when Google recently announced that it was shifting its services toward social networking. They view Facebook as a direct threat because Facebook has replaced email and the web for a lot of people. The same issues facing Facebook also face Google, such as limited data plans and a decrease in revenue from mobile advertising compared to traditional web advertising (which is why Facebook lowered its revenue forecast days before its IPO).
I realize that this is Slashdot which is rah-rah-Google/anti-Facebook, but honestly, both companies have reached a stagnation point.
Also, iOS is the #1 tablet operating system, not Android. Without carrier infrastructure, Android has not been able to gain a foothold in that market. Really, people place way too much emphasis on marketshare rather than revenue and long-term profitability. Plenty of companies have had majority marketshare and then became irrelevant, from IBM to Microsoft.
I find it odd that they would identify Google as being threatened by the same problem. First of all Google search defined successful online advertising (Yup that was what I was looking for, and yup, Google got paid). Not to mention Google Apps tend to have both a free and commercial version. The reason Facebook tanked was pure Greed, and stupidity.
I call your bullshit, but I don't have enough chips, I guess I'm all in.
bullshit... chips... nice.
Google bought Motorola's mobile and cable top business.....
first a blind man cant figure out that traffic for bittorent has gone dwn NOT cause there are fewer pirates but cause the standard video codec makes videos at half the size AKA 12.7 X2 = 25.5% compared to previous year they didn't do it at 17% = fail....
then this garbage post where the word idiot just cant be said loud enough...
NO really ....1 out of hundreds why? its too damn expensive and ill add a home pc can do i dunno TONS more. they are better then xboxs for games...they can make phone calls , they can program and make games if i want to ....they can OMG lets be stupid oh wait the poster is american i forgot your math skills ratings im sorry carry on be stupid....
how many people do i know with a smart phone
Maybe it's because Google, despite what many critics are saying, have diversified away fromt their core offering of search. Wrong. Google isn't a search company. It's an advertising and data mining company. Facebook, by far, is just a social networking company. By the same metric, Mircrosoft isn't going to go away, even if it's desktop and server business fail massively. They've already diversified. Facebook is just a one-trick pony, to use the words of a certain CEO.
This story is beyond hilarious in how incorrect it is. Turns out the main link is to blog of some "expert" (from self-help book business) which apparently got picked up by some Web 2.0 hyper at Forbes. As has already been pointed out in this article, both of these companies are already doing well in the mobile world. This guy Eric Jackson who picked up this brainfart on Forbes is right about now giving a bad name for the magazine and defacing Forbes, a usually insightful business magazine.
At least, here I can get a mobile flat data plan for 15€/month. This would make Mark Cuban's point moot.
then facebook came along. Where will the crowd head next ? I think that's the problem with facebook; no reason for people not to move on when something shinier and less profligate with privacy comes along in a few years.
Nullius in verba
Troll? Not only can you get your data out by the provided interfaces, but the backends are proddable with the development tools, and you can manually extract any data out of the databases that you like.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
That sounds a lot like Google's business plan for their search engine. Give it away for free, and make ads dirt cheap. But get enough ads and all those tiny sums turn into huge piles of cash.
The point is that even IF Google continues to be the search engine of choice on Mobile (as it will on Android), they still make way less than they do on the desktop. Think of how much space on the desktop Google they devote to ads in the result. Now do a search on a mobile device - there is hardly any space left for ads anywhere after you display the results, perhaps one or two...
So that's an order of magnitude reduction in ad revenue for Facebook and Google, even IF they remain sole search provider...
But as we have seen from other past stories, Google being the primary search engine outside Android is possibly a thing that will pass. Already Siri acts as an intermediary that can pull results from things besides Google and certainly does not do advertising with Google. And I'm not just talking about Siri, if voice driving searches take off where does Google put the ads even if they are the ones doing the Siri like service on Android (it has something like it today).
Even if you think about desktops, increasingly people are using iPads or netbooks - and THOSE have smaller screens as well, so even with a desktop browser you cannot display as many ads.
All that is why it is hard to think that Facebook or Google can possibly maintain the revenue they enjoy now.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
One problem with the internet's growth is that some ISP's, namely AT&T, have started rationing their internet services, which makes it hard for small companies in rural areas to get anywhere but in the hole. Some of the net gets lagged down a good bit due to their lack of resources. It's definitely going to take a little expansion on the ISP's parts to keep things going. Some of the satellites they use are getting old, need repairs, etc. Could see some shortages if they aren't careful.
Or something less prvacy-invading like that. A big honking display doesn't make sense when the same effect can be produced by wearing a headmounted display or by having the image "projected" directly into your brain. I think the future of mobile is heading toward that personal "Matrix" experience, where you can take your reality along with you. This assumes the same rate of technological progress that would make video walls a cheap option for the masses. Otherwise, we're stuck in today's tablet/smarthphone limbo where your tablet becomes your deskotp.
Facebook is too risque. I removed my page two days before the stock went public out of fear of being associated with a nasty company. It's known they monitored some SMS messages, and I figured it would be the right thing to do for various reasons. Then the cofounder denounced his American citizenship, and I knew I was right. Ya'll have a good one, I'm going to read a book instead. Sorry to troll though. I always have a lot to say.
Thanks Captain Obvious...nice to see you finally have a relevant opinion.
A smartphone with a REALLY big screen -- http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/05/80-inch-windows-8-tablets/ . Steve Ballmer thought of it. They are going to release a line of clothing that will allow you to carry it, too - http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/hulc.html .
So given the big 5 mobile providers have all at a min looked at data caps providers of content have a vested interest in keeping unlimited plans for mobile, since the caps are so small. I would wager the same is in the future for home internet with data caps. Since they didn't stand up sooner they should be allowed to fail.
I don't follow ads on my PC when I'm driving either.
Rethinking email
I think the entire market is a sham. The smart users block every ad, tracking cookie and other marketing tool they possibly can, and I think everyone else mentally blocks they ads that do get placed on pages. I can't recall a SINGLE WEB AD, although I periodically scan my spam box for funny phishing emails or Nigerian scams.
Facebook is worth about $12 a share based on FUTURE potential. That is about it. But that is combined with the inherent risk of a product that could literally implode over night like MySpace or AOL.
Why would I care one whit if "Facebook and Google" are facing "dark days ahead"?
Are "Facebook and Google" supposed to be exempt from the overall decline and fall of Western Civilization? I mean, is anyone paying attention?
On my list of concerns about dark days ahead, Facebook and Google is some ways behind the massive die-off of bees and the Fall TV season.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Facebook is not a company, facebook is an application developed by the company also coincidentally named facebook. Think of it as the angry birds of the social networking universe, theres a few smaller, similar versions that have their advantages (google+, twitter (at the moment, it may have a bright future), tumblr etc.) and many people have them, and I in no way am calling them obsolete and worse. But it is universally assumed that you would have a facebook account, as well as have the app angry birds. This is comparable to the great depression in the 30's, after world war 1, markets boomed as car purchases, house purchases (assumption) and other large appliance purchases skyrocketed. As a result, industries were built but purchases (account creation and app downloads) dropped, as everyone already had a (facebook account), these industries became obsolete and markets crashed, I would be at no surprise if the same happened to facebook.
Google on the other hand, is a company, they are experimenting in different fields and if one of their products or ideas bombs it doesn't take out the whole company, because they can bring themselves back up to speed with the rest of their applications and experiments and keep experimenting, one of those experiments was google+, it bombed and they gave up, but they still have all of their other things keeping them afloat until they recover.
All the rest is just padding to entice the consumer
... demand a simple answer: No!
Oh... and he lost me just by comparing Google to Facebook. That's just ignorance.
What then? Will Facebook make a comeback? Facebook is having a whole series of problems. One of them is privacy. Whenever I talk about Facebook I always mention Facebook owning the data and about the user having little to no control over his own data. The 16 year olds who first started using Facebook are now out of college and don't want the rest of the world, nor their employers, nor their adult friends and acquaintances to see their teenage angst and college pranks.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
is there some easy option to filter out the sponsored tweets?
The point of this article wasn't that "Facebook and Google will cease to be popular" it was more like "Mobile will prevent them from blasting ads everywhere and monetizing the popularity they have." Some people seem to think Cuban meant the former when he was clearly talking about the latter.
The article mistake's Google's lack of direct revenue from Android with revenue of all the different products Google delivers over Android and other mobile OSs. The money-making parts of Google deliver apps to Android, iOS, and other mobile platforms, and make money from those apps.
Facebook has a greater challenge, and is off to a later start, but you have to ask if that's really a worry, compared with getting the mobile launch right. Facebook faces very little competition. Other than Google+, there are no social networks that have an in-house phone OS. The mobile Google+ app is among the least well-executed mobile apps among all of Google's products.
Amazon has shown it's possible to have a successful product entry with a mobile device, even with Android and iOS as competitors. Facebook has a large ecosystem, like Amazon. There is no reason to think Facebook's mobile market window is closing. On the other hand, if Facebook were to ship a "Kin"-like flop, that would set them back substantially.
If a Facebook mobile device is coming, Facebook has every incentive to wait until it is done right.
I wrote parts of this stuff
They suck at what they do but there are no other real choices so were stuck with them. Youtube: has no way to filter or sort videos you subscribe to so you end up with a bit pile of videos you have seen or arnt interested in piled in a poo pile. Facebook: has such odd ways of doign stuff that it greatly limits any real usefullness and lets not forget the randomly dissapearing facebook pages Google: has messed up their search profile with bias and predious that your better off starting a few pages into the search to get past googles bias and prejustice that end up not giving you the search you asked for. curtomer service NOT there becoming dinosaures and just like some car companies that fail to adapt they become extinct.
I think that the cute icons on google maps that appears on some business are not for free.
Also the more people search in maps the more ads with geo extensions will worth.
Or Zagat property.
People used to say the same about search, there is no way to earn money out of it.
I think the road to maps money is the same.