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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

One can hope. But unlike MySpace I think Facebook has enough momentum behind it and has collected enough capital that they will be able to buy their way out of any decline. TikTok won't replace Facebook, though it may take some marketshare away from it.

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Facebook may have momentum, but the VR side of things has little momentum at all.

For people to really start using this, they need two things: trust and goodwill. People trusted that Facebook would rectify its privacy issues at the start. Remember the promise of a global council for Facebook? That got killed pretty quickly, along with apps you could plug into Facebook and other innovative things for creators. But enough scandals and there is no more trust, so if Facebook launches something truly different then no one feels they can trust it.

And goodwill. There is no more of it left. For people to try something new from an existing company, it really takes a reasonable amount of goodwill before they will give it a try. Like the reasons for a lack of trust, there is a lack of goodwill.

So Facebook has momentum. This Meta VR or whatever it is called has none. And it’s unlikely to gather much at this point.

Frankly, as one of the people who distrust Facebook, I hope they die and wither on the vine.

It's a generational thing, Kids don't want to be seen on the same place as their parents. Youth know facebook by name but they won't touch it. Changing name to Meta might get some over by mistake until they see their parents and then they are gone again :-)

I wonder when it would be that I or my family elders would be online in a metaverse. Do you hop on during lunch time at work? Would you need the VR helmet thing? Or would there be some sort of text timeline showing what metamates are up to? Would people without powerful enough phones be outright excluded? If I'm setting up an ad campaign on the metaverse, do I have to "virtually physically" walk my avatar to some office in the metaverse to talk to an ad rep? If I have neck problems will this make it worse? Will it affect my eyesight?

I can imagine a Discord-type of world, basically Second Life without the game mechanics. Could I have my Pikachu follow me around? What about an avatar of my real dog?

This stuff exists already though. So the value add is that I feel more immersed, while simultaneously being more disconnected from the flow of my everyday life? It's already rude to get on your phone when you have company, how much worse is it if you have to don a headset or something to take a call?

Anyways, I'm 30 and it all sounds lame to me. I don't play video games. I didn't even get the Pokemon Go thing when everyone my age got obsessed. Maybe I'm just too literal minded. I guess I'll focus on buying real stuff with the real money I make by making virtual stuff for the metaverse.

Technically, MySpace is still alive, so while I do think that Facebook won't technically die, it may, at least for North America and Europe, functionally die, although its momentum might stop its fall in i.e. Africa (in a similar vein, the Opera name is very popular there even though it's no longer heard very much back in Silicon Valley).

An organization could indeed buy their way out of an decline, if it is flexible and fast enough and if the managment is able to spend the money on sane decisions.

An organisation could spend infinite funds wrongly and still fall, if not a single deciding person in your organisation is willing to not lie to themselves and act on it.

True and most large organisationa are institutionally rigid by default. They also don't like back-pedalling because shareholders get funny and share price is the main driver behind their decisions.

Even with massive amounts of cash, you can only support 72000 employees for so long. With most of these things, if you get enough downward momentum, income dries up, layoffs start, customers get more nervous etc.

I guess we don't have too many stories of very long-lived companies (certainly of Faang size) that have survived the changes in the world unless they have stuck to a strong core product, which hasn't changed so much in 100 years+ like cars, boats etc. What I wonder is if it is possible that a 1 product company like Meta can really survive in the long-term.

There are some companies that managed to pivot, though it wasn't easy.

https://github.com/fikrikarim/companies-with-successful-pivo...

Some of these are pretty funny actually.

IBM and HP are still around, too.

Or to phrase it in one of those naval references that they now seem so keen on: "The Metanic cannot sink!"

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