Facebook will lose dominance as a major Web company in
less than a decade, Eric Jackson, founder of Ironfire Capital said in a June 4 video interview broadcast on CNBC's Squawk on the Street.
"In five to eight years they are going to disappear
in the way that Yahoo has disappeared," Jackson said. "Yahoo is still
making money, it's still profitable, still has 13,000 employees working for it,
but it's 10 percent of the value that it was at the height of 2000. For all
intents and purposes, it's disappeared."
Jackson assumes that Facebook will not be able to evolve any better.
“When you look at Web companies … there have been three generations of Web
companies over the last 15 years: Web portals, social Web, and, currently,
companies that are purely focused on Mobile (phones or tablets)…. No matter how
successful you are in one generation, you don’t seem to be able to translate
that into success in the second generation, no matter how much money you have
in the bank or how many smart PhDs you have working for you."
Jackson forecasts Mobile as Facebook's Achilles heel. "I think Facebook will have the same sort of
challenge moving into Mobile … The world is moving faster. It’s getting more
competitive, not less, and those who were dominant in their prior generation are
really going to have a hard time moving into this newer generation."
Google, too, will struggle, Jackson predicts. "Specifically, with Google, in five to ten years, the world of typing into a
blue box on your desktop PC to get search terms? That’s going away. In the
world of mobile, search is far less profitable for Google."
How can a company with 900 million subscribers disappear? It won't. "I think Facebook is NOT going bankrupt … but something new is coming along that we haven’t seen yet probably… People will be fascinated by it and attracted to it …[As for Facebook] what makes you successful in generation one, doesn’t make you successful in generation two. [In the world of mobile], Facebook is still a big fat website.”
-- Scrubbed by Marketing Brillo
Source: Cadie Thompson, Technology Editor, CNBC.com
No comments:
Post a Comment