All of these companies are too big to fail at this point. They all have at least a decade of reserves to power through anything that gets thrown their way.
However, I do predict that they will change in significant ways in the next decade.
* Apple is one Supreme Court ruling away from ending their App Store monopoly that could disrupt the entire world, since it would also affect all other digital marketplaces.
* Amazon is about to enter a decade of unionization all over the world.
* Google and Facebook both lost a key ability to micro-target on their ad platforms so they are both reinventing themselves to drive revenue from other sources, hardware being the biggest moats they can invest in.
* Netflix has some of the worlds brightest minds in data science and they've built up a war-chest of understanding viewing habits. They've also gobbled up a lot of key Hollywood players in the last few years, so I expect some huge cultural changes ahead as these creatives start to take more leadership roles in the company.
I see very little evidence that Netflix' data science has been a unique differentiator. For what they've developed, they have some hits and quite a few duds. Their licensed catalog is not exceptional--and even less exceptional when it comes to film.
They'll likely mostly turn into another studio with a streaming platform.
To add to this, given the resources spent on it their UX is pretty bad and I don't think their data scientists are giving them much if any edge over the competition at this point.
Features such as only using company generated ratings, aggressively cancelling shows, and the lack of ability to browse/sort/filter the catalog, in favor of Netflix pushing the recommendations they choose on users, is probably great for quarterly KPIs but bad for long term customer satisfaction.
Netflix is of course already a behemoth and not going anywhere but I expect their future to be much more of a generic media company than an elite tech company.
Ha, that is so true. Netflix is infamous for this. It’s to the extent that I cannot start watching a Netflix production unless I know it’s finished or if it’s a big hit from day one (so I know it won’t be cancelled, like The Witcher). It’s odd, because Netflix’s reputation for prematurely cancelling content without resolving their endings has extended to beyond just youth-dominated social media. For example, my parents of all people who cannot use a computer nor the internet, don’t like investing in new Netflix content because they’ve been burned too many times from incomplete series. That’s just like me. It’s sad because Netflix dared to create decent and interesting content, but now it would be hard to escape their infamy.
People don’t want to watch shows in case it gets cancelled early. Then Netflix cancels the show early because there wasn’t enough interest.
If they didn’t have the reputation people would watch the shows and if it’s good tell their friends. At this point it seems like everyone just stays away though.
They could always just keep making new seasons to add to their catalog and eventually people might watch it, but it seems risky to spend the money.
I've completely stopped watching unfinished Netflix shows because of this, which wiped out anything interesting on their platform I hadn't already seen. My partner still likes to use Netflix for times when she wants a random show on in the background, but once she switches to another app for that I'll be killing our subscription. There are many good shows on other platforms and Netflix is my least favorite to use.
I think their UX is intentionally user hostile to keep you from realizing there’s not much to watch. That and showing random trailers hoping you like one of them.
Tell me about it. And there are some obnoxious ones. I’m browsing my library to pick something to watch late at night. Some horror trailer starts and scares the kids… great! Now I need to wait to pick a movie. Essentially movie watching time is spent just picking something.
>given the resources spent on it their UX is pretty bad
I think all of those companies fall into common problem of falling deep into A/B test local maximum. It's impossible to rework entire site at once, especially for an A/B test.
I actually find all their cover art to be extremely banal. There is a signature look to their content. It all feels very “made for tv” quality. I know that’s basically what it is.
Plus I hate their way of trying to soup up stale content by making various sexy versions of cover art. Like The Net with Sandra Bullock. A long forgotten, mediocre, and comically out-dated tech thriller. People were wandering right past it on Blockbuster Video shelves. That’s how old and stale it is. Yet Netflix goes and sources these sexy shots of Bullock in an attempt to get me to watch it. I find the whole thing very insulting.
They'll be a studio with a streaming platform. One that is perhaps better than average. Which implies the engineers will be the help on-par with the other studios with streaming platforms. If content is the differentiator why overspend on the platform?
The issue is their content is actually a very poor point in differentiation. I watch a larger amount of TV than I'd care to admit, and honestly Netflix is awful for content.
- Disney has Star Wars, Marvel, Pixar, and a long tail of childhood classic films.
- HBO has Warner Brothers, DC, Cartoon Network (including a nostalgia back catalog), the best TV shows made in the 00s, and a long tail of adult films.
- Netflix's largest successes in the last two years are Tiger King, Squid Game, The Witcher, and a long tail of shows cancelled after Season 1 and short-run miniseries.
At this point, Netflix is a last-resort source of entertainment for me, even after (ad-riddled) YouTube. I mostly only use it to watch their weird reality shows (Blown Away, Sugar Rush) and check out shows friends recommend. I suspect even Paramount+ has a larger selection of TV shows I'd like to watch compared to Netflix.
Oh interesting. My continue watching is the top row. Honestly - this is something I am disliking more and more about the A/B, personalized experience effect.
Somethings are much better for everyone to have a common experience without it being unique.
Your second and third point though are accurate for me too. Thanks for explaining.
The viewing controls when watching a show are fine for me, but everything else is awful.
The UI constantly shuffles around, having to hunt for my list or currently watching shows is particularly annoying.
Incessant autoplay that couldn't be disabled for years, and still can't be in all cases.
Awful controls for browsing content. The categories are meaningless and constantly changing.
There's no way to find new shows I'm likely to like within the app. They refuse to have any sort of objective ratings and the custom ones are unbelievably bad, even after years of watching. I have to go to outside sources any time I want to find a new show.
I could go on. Prime gets a lot of criticism for their UX but I actually much prefer it to Netflix's. At least with Prime the ratings have some signal and the layout is simple and consistent. It's not pretty but at least it doesn't go out of the way to annoy me, which is just fine with me. Amazon has probably spent far less on their UX but has a better result.
The moment they put up a user reviews feature similar to steam, the entire platform would be exposed as the barren wasteland that it actually is. Most of the content is pretty substandard and not worth the time investment.
Even so much so I can’t find shows I saw ads for in 2017 or 2018 even existing because they were so bad. It makes me feel the Mandela effect is happening.
FAANG was originally about hot stocks. Jim Cramer coined it. And then, in tech circles, it became mostly about compensation--which had some correlation but imperfectly.
Today, especially with Netflix being less unique technically (they did a lot of early out-of-the-box stuff like going all in on AWS and microservices), they're pretty much an outlier from the other companies although as far as I know they still pay very well. As they become more of a studio they'll become even more of an outlier.
Microsoft certainly has more in common with the others, but their stock (as well as the company generally) was out of favor when Cramer coined the term.
Yes, I am aware of the history, which is why I specified the "purpose" of the poll.
A poll about FAANG with netflix and excluding microsoft seems simply like a poll about a group of companies that a tv show host made a catchy acronym about, rather than a poll about which of the big tech companies today is likely to decline or not.
> in October 2021, Cramer suggested replacing FAANG with MAMAA; this included replacing Netflix with Microsoft among the five companies represented as Netflix's valuation had not kept up with the other companies included in his acronym; with Microsoft, these new five companies had market caps of at least $900 billion compared to Netflix's $310 billion at the time of Meta's rebranding.
They're (relatively speaking) tiny. About 12,000 employees. That's in the ballpark of 10% the size of Microsoft and Alphabet, 20% the size of Facebook. That's about the same number of employees as you'll find at a lot of tech companies you'd consider medium-sized at most.
An observation that I've made is that people disregard Microsoft as if they've crossed over from some alternate universe where Windows isn't the predominant operating system on both desktops and servers, and Azure isn't the second biggest public cloud platform.
I regularly see comments like: "The public clouds providers like Amazon, Google, and I suppose even Oracle".
It's kind of hilarious to see people just skip over the second biggest company in the world like it doesn't even exist in their minds.
Although back in 2013 the criteria was: "totally dominant in their markets". AFAIK, Microsoft dominates only two markets (OS and office suites) and it's only if we limit ourselves to desktop; even then, it's not a total domination.
Yes. But the point is that a term coined by a TV stock personality years ago has pretty much zero relevance for looking at what the arc is going to be for what are seen as leading tech companies (through a Silicon Valley lens).
You are judging them based on perceived quality. There is the potential mistake. Have you considered that maybe quality isn't the most important factor at all times? Or maybe that what you perceive as quality is not what most people are looking for?
Fair enough. They care about subscriber numbers. Although there's probably some correlation with quality so long as you equate the term with quality that appeals to a fairly mainstream audience (i.e. not Euro arthouse fare).
But I don't actually see Netflix programming as aiming to make, e.g. reality TV drek. Most of their programming does seem to be aiming for midbrow quality although it often doesn't hit it.
Most shows and movies developed by Netflix are profoundly uninspired: they take no risks and produce content that is mostly acceptable but quickly forgotten.
Looking down the list, I don't really disagree. House of Cards which got me to subscribe to streaming was 5 star in my book at first. I'd probably put some others in the 4 star range. (Never could really get into Stranger Things or, really, The Crown.)
This. For a firm with all these supposed high-performers trying to discover and cater to my viewing habits, they sure had a hard time figuring out that I never chose their "original content" that they were shoving in my face all the time.
There was this storyline that data was going to replace lunches with authors, pitch meetings, and a lot of other creative activities. It's mostly been BS. And recommendation engines barely work at all 10+ years in.
>There was this storyline that data was going to replace lunches with authors, pitch meetings, and a lot of other creative activities. It's mostly been BS.
Let this be a lesson. Data and fancy algorithms can NEVER replace a smart human who cares. Data and algorithms can enhance and expedite humans - but if your humans are stupid, you will just make stupid decisions faster
Some of my favorite works in the past few years have been Netflix originals. You might want to consider giving them another chance! They’ve got some of the film industries most talented minds working on them.
Examples? I haven't mostly seen them although I do subscribe. I could name at least two shows on Apple TV+ (which is rarely discussed) that I consider better than anything on Netflix of late. (For All Mankind and The Morning Show)
But that is what Netflix was supposed to be able to avoid because they know so much about the viewing habits of their users. More likely it turns out that knowing that doesn't help them create new content and they just need exclusive titles to draw people like all of the other studios.
If the Netflix recommendation engine is the result of any data science then obviously they have no special knowledge from their mountain of data because the engine is worthless.
I think an underrated advantage that the online platforms have over the legacy studios is that the original content from Netflix, Prime, et al is available globally and the legacy content is not.
Netflix originals are available everywhere, the licensed content is far more restrictive. On Prime the only things available outside the US are Amazon Originals. Hulu won’t even let you log in if you’re outside the US. For whatever reason, legacy media decided they don’t want the rest of the world to be fans of their content and give them money for it. Disney is an exception since they’re starting to expand Disney+ overseas.
> the original content from Netflix, Prime, et al is available globally and the legacy content is not
This is not always true, and it depends on the nature of the “Original”. There’s really two classes: Originals fully owned by Netflix, and ones produced in partnership with a traditional TV network. The latter are branded as Netflix Originals everywhere except their home country (where they are carried by the local network instead).
> On Prime the only things available outside the US are Amazon Originals.
This isn’t true; the UK also has a lot of licensed content, if you have Prime in the UK. My understanding is they do in other markets where they offer Prime as well, but you only get access to the full library when you’re in the region where you have Prime, unlike Netflix.
That may be part of their content licensing, but that could also be a commercial decision by Amazon. (eg I also don’t get other Prime benefits from Amazon.de with my .co.uk Prime subscription.)
> For whatever reason, legacy media decided they don’t want the rest of the world to be fans of their content and give them money for it.
No, legacy media has distribution issues which they address by licensing distribution geographically before release, and once those rights are divided it's very hard to reconsolidate them.
Online streaming has been a thing for 10+ years now. Whatever distribution issues used to exist with finding a local guy to drive around a truck full of DVDs are long gone. They could have fixed this issue by now if they cared to.
> Online streaming has been a thing for 10+ years now.
Movie theaters and broadcast/cable are still a thing, and still an important component of how legacy video makes money on content. And the geographic distribution issues there still exist. And for them to work, geographic exclusivity can't ignore streaming, either.
Yeah, the thing is consumers don't care. They'll watch the content that's available. And as time goes on, that's what they'll know, what their kids grew up watching, and what they'll look for. The stuff that wasn't available they're not going to care about.
You can't convince me that, say, Warner Bros doesn't have sufficient leverage to wrest their online streaming rights away from some Bulgarian movie theater chain or whatever. I mean, come on.
Yes, for the last few years, every time I logged into Netflix I was stunned at poorly they seemed to understand me. Heist movies, murder mysteries, drug cartels fighting, stuff I never watch, and this was the majority of the stuff they showed. Recently I spent 20 minutes looking for something to watch, but I couldn't find anything at all that looked interesting. I thought that was so shocking, I decided it was time to cancel Netflix. So I finally gave up my account. There is an abundance of good material I can watch elsewhere.
But the main question is, why can't Netflix write a recommendation engine that actually shows me something I want to watch?
Because they can't get the rights to stream anything you'd actually want to watch, and they think they can trick you into accepting their catalogue and continuing to pay them away.
Netflix is facing the rise of competing streaming platforms. They're forced into creating their own content because other producers would rather release content on their own platforms and keep all the streaming revenue, rather than license it to Netflix. Streaming video on demand isn't a technical moat that is stopping anyone.
Agreed. What made netflix successful initially was their access to IP. That's going away fast as every IP producer is pushing for their own paid streaming service (which sucks, btw).
With big heavyweights like Disney that own a huge percentage of content having their own services, netflix is really going to struggle being anything more than niche media providers (anime) and their own inhouse media.
If they are lucky, they'll be an HBO style platform. However, the quality of their in-house content has left a lot to be desired. Some is good, but a lot is garbage.
That netflix has technical chops isn't going to be a saving grace. Rather, it will mean engineers from netflix will likely be able to secure jobs at other streaming providers.
That said, until other streaming services entered the scene I didn't appreciate exactly how good Netflix's engineering is. The only service comparable is YouTube, but even then, Netflix has much higher quality. HBO Max has a great content library, but barely works.
If you follow the ratings (granted the ratings for streaming services are likely not as easy to calculate as network tv), Netflix pretty much dominates top 10 most watched shows every week. It's weaker on Movies but still does pretty well there as well.
If netflix keeps producing content at the rate it is, it won't be long until it has a fairly large back catalogue itself. At the end of the day it's Netflix's core business, whereas for most of the other streaming services it's a side gig.
Yep. Netflix correctly saw that if it was successful at streaming, content holders would be quick to try and cut it out as a middleman. They've had their sight on being a content producer since very early on, and have been extremely successful at it. There are many people out there who can only afford a few streaming services, and Netflix remains a top choice to hold, despite the fact they license comparatively little top tier US content any more.
Netflix can calculate their equivalent to Nielsen ratings preposterously easy and with far more accuracy and they can get far more data than Nielsen will ever be able to produce for anyone.
The reasons the networks cared about the Nielsens so much was that they directly translated into how much they could charge for a 30 second ad block.
Netflix obviously does care about how many people are watching its shows. If no one is watching licensed content they won't renew licenses on it or similar content. If a new show isn't doing well and doesn't have passionate fans, they'll cancel it. (Possibly faster than a network would have.)
But they only care about how many people are watching something to the degree it increases the number of people subscribing which is a correlation that is harder to measure.
uh yes, but for the purposes of this discussion unless you can compare them vs the watch times of other services that's not very useful. So far as I know Netflix and nobody else releases those numbers so they have to be estimated.
No doubt, Netflix has optimized content delivery better than pretty much anyone. They spend all the right time in all the right places to get media the plays well and looks good on pretty much every device and any bitrate. They are leaders in video codecs and encoding.
Everyone else have been learning, slowly, the lessons Netflix learned years ago.
Pretty subjective, but I find Disney+ quite superior to Netflix in both quality of the streaming and UX - two areas I'm surprised a "non-tech company" can win in. Seems to me like the tech part (anything but the content, really) is actually a commodity already.
Have you used HBO Max recently? Aside from the first month or so it’s been nearly flawless for me across a variety of platforms (Roku/Chromecast/iPhone).
And the first month pains were very clearly because it was rushed out to time it with the release of certain IPs during the pandemic.
HBO Max on Apple TV is a terrible experience. The app doesn't appear to use the standard playback and navigation functions in most other Apple TV apps so you get unintuitive scrubbing behavior and inconsistent searching. Also, the app signs me out on a regular basis at random intervals. When this happens, you can still browse shows and click play but at that point you're interrupted with a "buy HBO Max" screen which is totally confusing. You have to manually navigate to the account, sign out, then sign back in and re-find the one episode you wanted to play.
To be fair, Apple TV is a pretty terrible experience, especially regarding them trying to force users to give Tim Apple a cut of streaming subscriptions.
> With big heavyweights like Disney that own a huge percentage of content having their own services, netflix is really going to struggle being anything more than niche media providers (anime) and their own inhouse media.
The thing is, they now pump out their own content quickly enough that they don't need anyone else's anymore, and as I understand it, that was always their goal. I imagine most of the TV-watching population (myself included) is okay with mediocre shows/movies, and Netflix has enough content that you're unlikely to completely run out of stuff to watch on their platform.
What Netflix is currently lacking is big blockbuster movies with well-known actors, but even that is changing. (See: Red Notice, Army of the Dead, Bird Box, etc.)
>That netflix has technical chops isn't going to be a saving grace. Rather, it will mean engineers from netflix will likely be able to secure jobs at other streaming providers.
Presumably it also means that there's no reason for Netflix to be paying absolute top of the heap salaries for engineering talent. And I assume companies like Disney mostly don't and won't.
I'm surprised Netflix hasn't been buying IP owners or aggressively expanding into other entertainment channels. Imagine if they straight up acquired Nintendo (or a large part of it), the amount of movies + series they could produce (zelda series like the witcher, donkey kong animated series for kids, metroid prime series for adults, star fox, etc)
Iirc, Nintendo has too many large shareholders to ever be acquireable. How they let Disney and Amazon purchase Marvel, Star Wars and Paramount for around 5 billion a piece without jumping in I'll never understand.
Although I don’t think that the Marvel IP would have been as valuable in Netflix’s hands. Compare all of the early Marvel shows on Netflix compared to what Disney has done with the MCU.
> Although I don’t think that the Marvel IP would have been as valuable in Netflix’s hands. Compare all of the early Marvel shows on Netflix compared to what Disney has done with the MCU.
I'm not sure what you're comparing. Netflix's Jessica Jones, Daredevil, and Luke Cage were standouts. WandaVision and Loki are certainly flashier, but are they really better shows?
I’m not saying those shows weren’t good, just that Disney has monetized the Marvel brand really well with a long streak of movies that are printing money, and sure a few shows to promote their streaming service.
4 out for the top 5 grossing movies of all time for Disney (adjusted for inflation) are Marvel IP. By comparison none of the Marvel shows on Netflix have been a commercial hit for Netflix. Looking at the list of most watched Netflix shows none of those make the cut.
Basically Disney is well suited to turn Marvel IP into dollars and Netflix just wasn’t.
> Basically Disney is well suited to turn Marvel IP into dollars and Netflix just wasn’t.
Oh. Well, I can't argue with that, especially since Netflix almost certainly never had the necessary rights to develop a revenue stream from merchandising. There is probably no other company on Earth better suited to turning IP into dollars than Disney, especially since they've acquired Pixar, Lucasfilm, Jim Henson, Marvel, etc. Netflix has only started trying to make tentpole 'blockbuster' (irony intended) movies in the past few years.
I’m sort of on board with your argument, but might it have been different if Netflix owned Marvel instead of having a license to make a few shows?
Probably not and that is why they didn’t bid, and the Netflix execs are in a better position to know than us… but I think the comparison is a little tilted against Netflix at least.
And back catalogue stuff too. Amazon bought MGM, something netflix should have done. Paramount is launching its own service rather than Netflix buying them.
I'm not sure there is a difference between these concepts here. The quality Netflix is after isn't highbrow content that feeds pretentiousness but isn't actually watched. It's masterful execution of a craft, which can happen in any genre.
As an example: the original Police Academy movie had both quality and a large audience. The rest of the franchise was increasingly cringy and saw, I assume, declining viewership.
The reason why Netflix should care about quality and not just eyeballs is that it's a leading indicator: Police Academy II may well have had a larger audience, surfing on the coattails of the first installment. But that's not a sustainable strategy, and unlike the producers of Police Academy XI, Netflix can't just leave the husk and find a new home if it ruins its brand.
So for Netflix, it's not just important to get many people to watch something. They also need to come away from the experience with a wish to repeat it. There may well be more to the experience than mere enjoyment, as well: I feel like there is a sense of "quality" I get when watching something that is distinct from my enjoyment, and that I am more likely to remember it, and fondly so, if I find that quality.
All that suggests a few ideas that mere viewership wouldn't: Netflix would try, for example, to keep me from watching something that I end up despising, and especially if I do so because I consider it "low-quality". You can do reality TV even if your audience has more Ivy League credentials than a New England Hospital, but you better make sure it has a chance to become a pop-cultural phenomenon, like, say, a show about interior decorating that neatly fits into a wider trend of minimalism.
Netflix needs content which results in the maximum number of subscribers at a given point in time. Which has some correlation to eyeballs but is very different from networks selling ads based literally on eyeballs (and their demographics).
This requires some combination of quality (whatever that means exactly), pop culture relevance (Squid Games), and good enough filler so that less selective viewers don't run out of stuff to watch. Of course, they can program for niches more than traditional broadcast TV did too.
True, but Netflix has gotten really good at this over the past 10 years. They create/fund some great content (and a lot of mediocre/bad content) - kind of similar to a VC fund now that I'm writing this out. They're an integral component of the entertainment industry now.
I keep hearing this from people, so I must be in the minority.
But I actually like the fact that they do limited run or self contained shows.
Not only does it mean that the show doesn't drag on for 10 seasons slowly reducing in quality until it's axed due to waning viewership.
But I've found their limited series runs to be more engaging since the writers and director are able to tell a self contained and complete story since they know the duration of the series and can pace out the story from start to end.
Also on a personal note, seeing a show has more than 5 seasons just feels like an exhausting time commitment to me at this point.
I've always said that I have a 5 season rule--especially with network-length 20 episode seasons. Hit somewhere in that vicinity and I'm tired of the setting, style, and characters. There are a number of series who got to the 5, 6, 7 season point and even though they didn't necessarily "jump the shark" I just got less and less interested in them and eventually stopped watching.
I actually really like the fact that streaming helps allow for limited runs with episodes of the length that they want to be though one always hopes that a series ends at a natural point.
I'm with you. If a show ends after two solid seasons I might wish there was more, but I'd rather that than watch it descend into an additional six seasons of mediocrity as so often happens.
I was thinking as I was leaving the movie theater over the weekend and saw a poster for some movie billed as an Amazon Studios production that Google and Facebook are the only ones in the FAANG who aren't producing TV/movies. It will be very interesting to see how that progresses over the next decade. I want to believe that the data-driven approach that Netflix and Amazon have taken with their productions won't be the future of entertainment but who knows?
Thinking about this a bit more (and triggered by your comment), it occurs to me that the big difference between Google and Facebook vs Apple/Amazon/Netflix is that the former derive their income primarily from advertising. Netflix has established an expectation that online video is largely a premium thing that you pay for and don't have to watch ads during and while there are some exceptions to this in the major streaming services (Amazon's imdb.tv has free-with-ads programming, Hulu shows ads to most subscribers, and I'm pretty sure a lot of the lower-tier players do ads, but the big names in the space are all ad free with subscriptions and I don't know that Google/Facebook really have it in their DNA to do anything like that.
There’s too many now though. The producers are getting greedy. I don’t think people will put up with having multiple subscriptions and eventually it’ll all come back down to a few key players.
My money is on Netflix, Prime (because we want the free shipping) and Disney.
In our household if it is not on Netflix, Amazon Prime (since I have that for work purposes anyway), or YouTube, it doesn't exist. We are not going to subscribe to Disney, CBS, or anything else. The kids can watch old Disney movies on DVD.
Netflix is just another television network at this point, pivoting from being primarily a tech company. There's a bunch of content which jumps around between different streaming services, but Netflix produced shows and movies are on solid ground at this point (eg, Stranger Things is over 5 years old). It's weird that it's included in the same list as these others.
If they came out with a phone, office suite, cloud service, social network, or something of that ilk, then yeah they'd be more in "tech company" territory again. Until then their engineering is going to assist their content production, not the other way around.
Google to me seems to be the one with the worst execution at the moment. For all of their spend in various areas when is the last time they’ve had a win? Their core business is still strong but they seem to have lost their ability to innovate. That alone makes their decline seem inevitable to me even without considering external forces
You can't think of any times they've had a win? They saw the largest growth of any FAANG in the past year. What about cloud and devices (pixel, nest, stadia, Chromecast, etc.)? They made 22 billion just on "other" bets in 2020.
With some of their big bets in custom SoCs, waymo, verily, and all of the research that comes out of it (especially in ML) are certainly interesting, I don't think any other companies are innovating at that level. Whether or not they will profit is another matter, of course.
For starters just looking at growth in the past year is very favorable for them, but look at the past 5 and they’re the weakest aside from Facebook and by a relatively small margin. Almost all of their growth has been post-COVID, so it’s hard to say whether that trend will hold. Personally I expect them to return to the slower growth they had pre-pandemic as to me it doesn’t seem like anything core to their business has changed or is going to change within the decade.
Pixel has always lived in the shadow of Samsung and probably always will. Android hardware profit margins are slim. Chromebooks are doing well in education at the moment but they can’t break out of the low end of the market and each of their attempts to do so have failed. Devices overall are a mixed bag in my opinion.
Stadia isn’t very good, costs too much, has a mediocre game library, and given the massive development cost definitely hasn’t paid off and probably never will.
Nest is a business they acquired that’s continued to grow. This is definitely a win, but it’s a small one, and it definitely doesn’t pay for all the unsuccessful products they’ve built.
Custom SoCs are potentially promising, but it’s a specific niche and others are doing the same so that’s kind of a “wait and see” for me.
Their paid services don’t seem popular at all with the exception of gsuite & YouTube premium (which people mainly buy to get around annoyances like not being able to listen to audio from a video with your phone locked or switch apps on mobile while leaving a video running)
I expect a large chunk of that “other” revenue you mentioned is also Google Cloud which despite how hard they’ve tried is far behind it’s competitors and hasn’t seen nearly the growth that Azure in particular has had.
Nope. I actually signed up for the free trial while I was out of state in December so I could quickly do a couple things and only bring along my MacBook (complete a few daily objectives on my MMO of choice).
I don't think streaming games will ever quite work out for something like a first person shooter or competitive scenes, but I was really impressed otherwise. I didn't notice input lag nearly as much as I thought I would.
Not to mention YouTube, which has exploded over the last few years to have roughly the same revenue as Netflix [1]. They've basically grown a FAANG, and nobody seems to have noticed.
I know someone who just lost access to their Facebook account, and more because resetting their Google password lead to account lockout, and their phone number too, and that means everything that used that email and phone number as well. A cautionary tale and a terrifying reality to depend on a place famous for no human help available.
Totally agree that the pace of innovation in their core business seems to have stalled. However, I'd argue that Waymo (Google subsidiary) is leading the pack, by far, in terms of self-driving capability.
Not only do they have publicly-usable self-driving vehicles on the road today, they are also testing autonomous trucks for freight. Both of these industries are worth multiple 10's of billions/year in the U.S. alone.
Waymo may be ahead but I’m not sure that’s good enough by itself. The largest manufacturers are all working on their own self driving systems. If Waymo software ends up shipping with Nissan, Jaguar/Land Rover, and Volvo products, that’s still a fairly small portion of the market. They might have some success as a robotaxi business but there will be a lot of competition there as well and likely thin margins for companies that can’t achieve significant vertical integration (Tesla, GM, Ford, VW, etc)
I agree this is definitely their biggest opportunity, but it may be more difficult to achieve mainstream success with it than it seems.
I agree somewhat. About 80% or more of their business is still ads. It only takes some major advertising segment to have a downturn or otherwise decide that digital ads are useless and they'll see a hue dip in revenue. Although I'd see FaceBook as more precarious for similar reasons which is what I voted for.
> Apple is one Supreme Court ruling away from ending their App Store monopoly
However, if the app store were to open up, it could create a more vibrant ecosystem underneath and even create even more network effects within ios. Less direct money for apple but more vibrant developer economy.
"Monopoly" is an interesting term in this situation. Obviously they are the sole provider of the iOS platform access, but iOS itself is not the largest smartphone platform.
Well, for someone owning an apple product, the App Store is a monopoly, without an easy way to change that. Especially where nowadays owning a phone is almost a must and you only have 2 choices.
TBTF is a term usually applying to companies like banks and Beoing, that have to be rescued due to some kind of economic importance.
These companies will not fail, but could face existential headwinds that no amount of money will 'fix'.
...
"Netflix has some of the worlds brightest minds in data science"
Their data science is a 3rd tier issue. #1 is their incumbency, #2 is the content they produce.
-> Netflix 'problem' is increasing competition from HBO, Disney and others.
...
"Apple is one Supreme Court ruling away from ending their App Store monopoly that could disrupt the entire world"
No, their App Store will do just fine. They will reduce their 30% cut to something lower and companies will stay there because of the distribution opportunity: being in App Store will mean considerably more downloads.
-> Apples 'problem' is that their iPhone is slowly becoming a commodity - there's only so many ways to 'improve' upon it and those margins will probably come down.
...
"Google and Facebook both lost a key ability to micro-target on their ad platforms"
No, they have not, they have enough data.
-> Facebook's problem is that FB usage is going down, Insta is a bit stagnating and they have little to replace it with.
-> Google's problem is that they have no obvious new products on the horizon to grow and that it's possible DDG and others may actually start to eat away at them (probably not, but possible).
...
"Amazon is about to enter a decade of unionization all over the world."
Probably not so much, and, rules are entirely different around the world.
Amazon's problem is that it's never been profitable and there's only so many ways to make that business work.
As fast delivery and one-click purchase work out in regular retail, AMZN advantage is limited.
AWS however, the profit base doesn't show any signs of slowing down.
Netflix seems to simply become the next entertainment giant, like e.g. Disney or major film studios.
Apple will still have their hardware business.
Amazon's AWS business is unaffected by their online shopping platform business.
Facebook is facing a reputation crisis that is also causing regulators to come down on it hard, and beyond the many well-justified criticisms, many also use it as a scapegoat and a punching bag for politicians to show off. That's not a good position to be in.
Yep, they’re a “content producer” but maybe 1 in 20 shows or movies they put our OS actually compelling. They have certain titles they do well with (The Witcher comes to mind) but for everything else they have the well-established Netflix-Curse of cancelling shows instead of finishing them, so that they can crow about having a new show.
> the well-established Netflix-Curse of cancelling shows
Every outlet cancels underperforming shows. Netflix fires a lot of more against the wall than just about anyone else, so they end up with a lot more that doesn't stick.
> * Amazon is about to enter a decade of unionization all over the world.
World wide is probably too strong a claim, but I think here's something to this. However, I think this would work in Amazon's favor. It would make warehousing quite a bit more expensive and would be a significant barrier to competitors. AWS provides them with deep pockets, and the have a huge advantage in logistics so I think they could eat the cost and keep moving. It would also suck a lot of air out of the anti-amazon movement, such that it is. One day delivery with high labor standards might be the pitch that catapults them to real market dominance.
I agree, especially if by "huge advantage in logistics" you include things like warehouse automation. If everyone is paying high wages then it seems like whoever automates the most will do well?
Netflix only has about 200 million subscribers. That is astonishingly small (IMHO). Though, I'm not a subscriber, so it probably shouldn't surprise me, but it still does.
Yet, in the US, they make less per paid subscriber than Facebook does per free user. There's also 3 to 4 times the amount of said free users as there are of those paid users.
Netflix's first free-cash-flow positive year was 2020. A measly $2B, less than 10% of Facebook's (the least cash flowing FAAMG).
Netflix is a big company, but not in the same league as FAAMG.
Why is it so unbelievable that someone could disrupt any of these companies? Aside from Apple and Netflix I don't think the rest are doing a particularly good job. Apple iTunes had it's lunch eaten by Spotify (45.83B) and just look at https://killedbygoogle.com/
Google Search is beset from all sides right now. Their search results are terrible and people are looking for alternatives. They’re definitely at or past the peak of that product lifecycle.
>All of these companies are too big to fail at this point. They all have at least a decade of reserves to power through anything that gets thrown their way.
Yes each of these has enough of a war chest that they could drift along for a decade + several have ownership structures where there wouldn't be market pressure to remove the C-level / board if that happened.
That said... each of these has weaknesses. I think about Microsoft (the one missing from the list that rightfully belongs there...)... they came out of their lost decade a very different company. Their stock price barely moved for that entire time, though has since rebounded. It's not that hard to imagine that Netflix is just one of many streaming studios in another 5-10 years, or that people might be just as willing to turn to another search provider than Google. Facebook seems to be acutely aware that its core big blue app is seen as a baby boomer thing and that it had better do things to stay relevant to another generation. So - too big to fail? Maybe, but then again we could ask GE, GM, and Ma Bell that same question once upon a time.
It is very hard for me to imagine a world in which Google isnt the default search provider for almost the totality of people outside China or Russia. I don't think I even see my tech-aware colleagues using anything else except the rare unicorns with duckduckgo.
I just can't see putting netflix and google search in the same basket.
See the comment lower down in this thread:
>Google Search is beset from all sides right now. Their search results are terrible and people are looking for alternatives. They’re definitely at or past the peak of that product lifecycle.
Note the discussion not just here on HN but across several channels over the past 48 hours about how bad Google Search results have become. Personally, apart from a Google Business page I don't use any other Google products and haven't in years. Their product track record is poor and their search quality has slipped. Given another 5-10 years, I don't find it difficult at all to believe that someone like Apple, if they wanted to replace Google entirely as the default search on their device, couldn't make significant headway in search market share.
Sure, Netflix and Google aren't the same here - that wasn't my point. My point was simply in reference to the previous poster's comment about "too big to fail." The past 100 years of the stock market is littered with companies that were deemed unstoppable leviathans.
Netflix is already on the way down. They infused all of their new shows with wokeness. Every new show feels like woke concepts are shoehorned in without regard for their impact on the story that's told.
Look at the Witcher for an example. Or if you want to see this kind of shift happening over the course of a show, look at Madam Secretary. Season 1 didn't feature any of this crap and showed a strong woman main character that wasn't shoehorned in, by the last season everything was about "hurr durr let's ban guns and white men suck".
I'm not even white and I can notice the excellent storylines being ruined. It's like the writers don't know how to write a story with woke concepts that's actually strong so instead they shove it into every successful show until the show isn't successful anymore. HBO and Disney are going to eat their lunch at this rate with more compelling content.
I don't totally agree that this is a problem, but to be fair, every network is doing this. Even previously silly and light-hearted TV shows like Brooklyn Nine-Nine have become noticeably heavier as they try to shed light on real-world social issues. There's nothing specific to Netflix here.
If it were done well it would be one thing but it’s typically just thinly veiled (DNC) propaganda. Not much to be said on always climbing record fentanyl overdoses, class issues, etc though. If they were actually talking about anything of value to the vast majority of working people instead of rhetoric that’s specifically designed to keep them divided and afraid of each other I wouldn’t complain.
I didn’t say comedy specifically, no. But comedy should probably actually be funny and not feel like I’m being lectured to, which has become increasingly common. And at times comedy can cover even the darkest topics, that’s really up to the comedian to decide.
And I actually consider myself a leftist I just strongly dislike corporate Democrats. So if I sound like right wing propaganda that comes mainly for our mutual distaste for certain aspects of “progressives” in the U.S. or whatever you’d like to call them.
In fact now that I think about it the only jokes I’ve heard about the opioid crisis have basically amounted to “lol white people are dying and they deserve it” despite the fact that this shit is killing everyone. So-called journalists have written about it with the same sentiment — white people didn’t have compassion during the crack epidemic and they don’t deserve any now.
That’s a pretty good example of popular media using racial antagonism to divide & conquer the working class.
Some of the most vocal critics of the DNC are coming from the left. [1] They’re a center-right party masquerading as left-wing opposition. They have no interest in helping working folks and every interest in making sure corporations are as powerful as they can be. A lot of folks who previously drank the DNC koolaid are realizing how bad it is with how the democratic administration has tried to gaslight us about Covid this holiday season.
This exactly. They use progressive language to create this image for themselves and their role is only to serve as controlled opposition and prevent any challenge to the current economic order from occurring.
Being a Democrat these days is like being in a “union” that your bosses set up just to try and convince you that you had representation when they were deciding what you were going to “win” from “organizing” ahead of time.
This is why I dislike propaganda aimed at supporting them in television etc. No matter how nice the individual thing sounds, it serves to reinforce this institution who’s only mission in life is to fuck you over and continue extracting wealth from you and your family.
I think black actors is the least woke thing of concern compared to others.
I watched half a first episode and the amount of ideological conditioning is comparable only to the old soviet movie I've watched.
The whole plot is based on "good natured people who are different are unjustly considered monsters because of prejudice, and have to do bad things because of it", and they'll make sure to mention this injustice every 2 minutes or so.
When it's not about "bigotry", it's about girls proving they are "strong independent women" by dressing boys etc...
Maybe the authors find a way to turn it all on its head, but considering the naiive seriousness in which all this is delivered, I don't think so.
From what I've seen, all this series is for people who are still amused by all the "antiestablishment" trope
Many of the characters have been changed (in personality/storyline and in ethnicity) from the books and from the games. For example Yennefer is no longer a mature, smart person but now is a stereotypical "I'm a strong independent woman" character that has the personality of a 15 year old. Triss is completely different from the books and game. Fringilla magically changed to be black even though EVERY other Nilfgaardian is white. Side characters were changed to be black but still act as if they come from the same background as their original book characters. This doesn't make sense in a medieval Eastern Europe type environment.
This is what I mean by shoehorned in. HBO Rome did a great job of integrating racial diversity in a plausible way that made sense in the context of the story. Egypt/North Africa historically had Numidians in major leadership roles. The Witcher does not bother to write a story that makes sense with the replaced characters.
Again, I'm not white and even I can notice these changes.
> characters have been changed ... Yennefer is no longer a mature, smart person but now is a stereotypical "I'm a strong independent woman" character that has the personality of a 15 year old. Triss is completely different from the books and game
That doesn't sound like wokeness, it sounds like a character change that you just don't like. Fair enough, but it's not wokeness.
> Fringilla magically changed to be black even though EVERY other Nilfgaardian is white. Side characters were changed to be black
I just finished watching this series. Some actors have dark skin but it's not part of their character or even mentioned. There's no reference to any sort of Black culture or even nation in-universe where people tend darker. There's no sense in which they are black except for the literal colour of their skin. And at that level, there's no sense in which the characters in the books aren't black. There's no "changed to be black" here.
I assumed you had some objection about the actual storyline which does in fact revolve around discrimination against Witchers, racism and genocide and slavery against Elves, culture wars between nations, and cultures domineering others through centuries of abuse and slavery. But really you're just annoyed that some actors are black?
> There's no sense in which they are black except for the literal colour of their skin
That's the _point_. The writing is completely unrelated to the actors being black. They were casted as black people because the writers/producers wanted black people for the sake of having black people on screen. If there was reference to black culture or some sort of backstory then it would be a _justified casting_ and I wouldn't be complaining.
You don't cast a British person as a Hispanic character in Narcos. Why are random characters in the Witcher magically changed to be black when there's no story reason for them to be black?
> I assumed you had some objection about the actual storyline which does in fact revolve around discrimination against Witchers, racism and genocide and slavery against Elves, culture wars between nations, and cultures domineering others through centuries of abuse and slavery
I actually think the Witcher does a great job at showing the effects of discrimination and racial conflict in this sense.
> You don't cast a British person as a Hispanic character in Narcos
But they aren't British nor Hispanic. They're Nilfgaardian and Elves. If you have some idea in your head about what that means for skin colour, it's clearly not the same idea that the writers do.
Right, but the show casts all other Nilfgaardians and elves as white people. If the show casted all Nilfgaardians as black people or gave a story reason for a mixed composition then it would be compelling. But they don't. That's why Fringilla's casting seems shoehorned in.
Maybe there's a recessive gene that causes some tone difference. Maybe there's some historical war that caused the blahblahblah migration of the whoseits to the whatsits. Or maybe it's not part of the story at all and doesn't need to be.
When I meet a new black person they don't spend a bunch of time explaining to me why they're black. That would be pretty weird. It sounds like you have some real hangups about race that just isn't shared by the writers.
> Maybe there's a recessive gene that causes some tone difference. Maybe there's some historical war that caused the blahblahblah migration of the whoseits to the whatsits.
I'm not saying the black character is supposed to explain why they're black. I'm saying the writers should have written some reason into the story for why out of all the Nilfgaardians, Fringilla is the only one that's black. The black character doesn't need to be the one explaining it. Otherwise it seems like a poor casting choice because it doesn't make sense within the story. Which makes it seem shoehorned.
> Maybe there's some historical war that caused the blahblahblah migration of the whoseits to the whatsits
And that would have been great backstory to flesh out the universe...
> It sounds like you have some real hangups about race that just isn't shared by the writers.
It sounds like you don't feel like one character that has a different ethnicity than their entire fantasy race seems out of place. If in Black Panther there was a singular white main character and everyone else in Wakanda was black would you feel the same way?
What if she was just the person who auditioned best for the role? Why are you assuming her blackness means she must have been shoehorned into the role? I see no valid reason why her blackness should have to be explained to anyone.
Okay, so if Jason Momoa was the one who auditioned best for T'Challah you would say that's a good casting? Because I would say having the supposed leader of a kingdom of black people look completely different from all the people in that kingdom is really poor casting.
> Why are you assuming her blackness means she must have been shoehorned into the role?
Perhaps because every other Nilfgaardian is white. If Nilfgaardians were a mixture then it would be a good casting. Just like if all Nilfgaardians were black then casting a white person as Fringilla would also be garbage casting.
You are free to assume in your fantasy world that outside appearance has no impact on story telling in a TV show but I and many others in the Witcher fanbase have opinions to the contrary.
> Okay, so if Jason Momoa was the one who auditioned best for T'Challah you would say that's a good casting?
I would say Black Panther is a story about blackness. The blackness of the main character is kind of the point of the whole thing, it’s even in the title. This is not true for the Nilfgaardians. There is no race component here to that story, so why does race need to be explained? Why don’t any other characters have to explain what makes them unique from the rest?
There is a parallel here I would like to draw. Growing up my class was all white, except one black kid. In a whole school of almost 1000 kids. I noticed he had to justify his existence a lot. People would ask him why he was there — as if he was lost or something. He was there because he lived in our community, and that’s really all there is to it. Nevertheless he had to have a reason to be at the school, while none of us did. It wasn’t enough for him to just exist.
> Why don’t any other characters have to explain what makes them unique from the rest
They do. Geralt has a huge back story that explains why he's ripped and has a bunch of scars and why every peasant is afraid of him. Yennefer has a huge back story that explains why she's beautiful. If they casted someone ugly as Yennefer then that backstory wouldn't exactly apply anymore would it?
> I would say Black Panther is a story about blackness
Let's use another example then. Narcos - if some Asian guy was the one who auditioned best as Pablo Escobar, would you think that's good casting? Narcos is clearly not about Colombian culture, it's about the War on Drugs. If all the random cartel members are casted as Latino but the leader is Asian you think that's good casting? Or if we look at House of Cards - what if you replaced Garret Walker with a Korean dude. You think that's good casting?
> why does race need to be explained
Because one character is different from all the other people in their supposed race (Nilfgaardian). If there was a character that was taller than everyone in their kingdom I'd expect that to be explained too. Or if the character was white and everyone else was not.
> Growing up my class was all white, except one black kid
That's great, but completely irrelevant in this case. You are trying to impose your own social justice values on a high fantasy TV show. Ironically I find it's always white dudes in their 20s and 30s that have this view of the world. I bet you're white, male, a millennial or Gen Z, you live in a big city, and you work in tech.
> Geralt has a huge back story that explains why he's ripped and has a bunch of scars and why every peasant is afraid of him.
And is that strength relevant to the story, or is it apropos of nothing? Yennefer's beauty has no context in the story? Of course it does - these qualities bring these characters power that shapes the events as they unfold. Fringilla does not derive her power from her blackness because it's not relevant to her character's story. It doesn't need to be explained because it doesn't advance the story.
The very simple explanation is: she's fantastic and terrifying in the role, and that's why she has the part. The exact pigmentation of the actress' skin doesn't need to be explained in the story, no matter the skin pigmentation of her co-stars.
> You think that's good casting?
I mean, maybe it's just my bad taste, but I see nothing wrong with any of your suggestions. But I haven't seen either of those programs so I can't really give a good answer. Is Garret Walker anti-Korean? Is that why it would be a bad decision?
> If there was a character that was taller than everyone in their kingdom I'd expect that to be explained too.
Why? Some people are just taller than others. The explanation is: that guy is taller. We don't know why, he just is. We all grew to this height, and he just kept growing until he got to that height. The same thing goes for skin tone. For all you know this is a sampling issue. We're talking about a fantasy race here. If you really want some sort of satisfactory explanation, go write some fanfiction.
> You are trying to impose your own social justice values on a high fantasy TV show.
No, I'm actually projecting the experience of my youth onto this situation right now. I'm not trying to impose my view on anything -- quite the opposite; I'm saying things are fine the way they are.
I'm actually going to bookmark this conversation as a discussion piece because there's a lot to unpack here, you've been very candid.
> I bet you're white, male, a millennial or Gen Z, you live in a big city, and you work in tech.
Right on 3, wrong on 2 - I'll let you guess which!
> I'm actually going to bookmark this conversation as a discussion piece because there's a lot to unpack here, you've been very candid.
Funny, you've got the same attitude of condescending moral superiority as the demographics I mentioned too. You act as if you speak for all people of color (as a white person), who need to be defended by you, the savior. You probably consciously think you're just trying to help. Unfortunately you're not the first person of this type I've encountered on HN.
If you want to address my specific points that's fine, but turning instead to attack me through your perception of my skin color is a different conversation entirely, one that I'm not interested in having.
Maybe the fantasy world of the Witcher is less racially divided than our world (and also seemingly how you see the world too). Why does it need to be that the nilfgaardians have to be one skin color? Why can’t they be multicultural like the US?
>You don't cast a British person as a Hispanic character in Narcos.
YYou realize in Narcos they cast a Brazilian actor to play Pablo Escobar a famous Columbian. The actor had to literally learn Spanish for the role and despite his best spoke with an obvious Brazilian accent. Besides Pablo, numerous other characters were played by actors who, while native Spanish speakers are not from Columbia and you can tell by their accent. You literally couldn't have picked a worse example to make your point.A
> The writing is completely unrelated to the actors being black.
It is just as unrelated to them being White where the actors chosen are White. “Black needs justification but White doesn't” is a recipe (long followed, btw) for White favoritism in casting.
I have loads of friends who started to cancel their netflix subs and went back to piracy because they grew tired of searching for a way to watch something legally. Now its disney, hbo, prime, whatever. Screw all of this.
Clint Eastwood did like 90000 movies, why are there only like 3 on Netflix? That but for every actor. Its like on-demand now rather than a catalog you rent.
For this reason, I do have Netflix DVD subscription along with Netflix streaming. At least until now, I feel that there is still vast catalog of movies available to choose from their DVD service unlike their streaming one.
Obviously waiting for DVDs to arrive is a hassle in comparison to watch-at-any-time streaming but that's ok tradeoff for the freedom it gives me to chose a title to watch from its vast DVD and Blue Ray catalog.
I used to be a Netflix DVD customer until last year (so roughly a decade or so?). But between the shrinking catalog and poor quality control (broken or unplayable discs), it became too much. I cancelled my sub and spent the $15/month buying Blu-Ray discs that never get taken out of the catalog. I get them faster (Amazon shipping is far better than NFlix), and since they're new, I rarely have any playback problems.
They're obviously letting their DVD back catalog rot. I resubscribed for a while during early pandemic but so much is just not available. So, yeah, I just buy DVDs from time to time or pay for a la carte rentals.
Yeah it’s funny I never watch movies on Netflix anymore. I need to rent or buy on Prime Video because the selection on Netflix is basically nonexistent
You should look into how movie licensing works on Netflix, or any network like cruise ships, or airplanes, for example. Each movie is owned by some company that will license it out for a fee, based on length of time and estimated audience size.
The only reason I still have Netflix is because it's essentially free on my satellite TV package - I think I pay £2 extra a month because it's mostly covered by their "on demand" package, which I wanted anyway.
It's not an exaggeration - back when Netflix sent out DVD's by mail it WAS like having a Blockbuster in your living room (since Blockbuster didn't do streaming)
They still mail dvd's. I have a coworker who still uses their mail plan. I kinda considered it silly at first by now I'm thinking this is the way to go. It's relatively cheap compared to renting movies via amazon etc. He gets them fast. Blu-ray quality is better than streaming in some cases.
> Blu-ray quality is better than streaming in some cases.
The wording here sounded a bit off to me here; I read it as "usually Blu-ray quality is worse or the same as streaming quality but sometimes it's better" while I think what you probably meant (and would make a lot more sense) was "usually streaming is just as good as Blu-ray but sometimes the streaming quality is bad and a Blu-ray is better".
Is the latter what you meant?
Though there is also the possibility that there's a 4K version of a movie available to stream but not released on Blu-ray. Maybe that's what you referred to?
Blu Ray quality is always better than streaming, by an order of magnitude. Blu Ray 4k has a bitrate of between 92 and 144Mb/s[1], Netflix bitrate at 4K is around 16Mb/s[2] - the resolution is the same but online streaming platforms will need to use loads of compression or most of their user base would not have a fast enough connection to watch video in 4K.
Full HD 1080p bitrates are a similar story, Blu Ray is much higher than streaming (36Mb/s vs around 6Mb/s, respectively)[3][4].
You're right of course that given the same resolution, a Blu-ray will have a higher bitrate but to elaborate on what I was saying:
- The perceived streaming quality may match Blu-ray because the bitrate is high enough that humans can't tell the difference anymore. This is especially likely to be the case is the content isn't challenging.
- The perceived quality may be higher than Blu-Ray because 4K is available for streaming but not as a Blu-Ray release. So the comparison isn't 1080p streaming vs. 1080p Blu-ray but 4K streaming vs. 1080p Blu-ray. If you plot perceived quality vs. bitrate against each other for multiple resolutions, you usually find that it makes sense to increase resolution at lower bitrates than you might expect. I'd honestly expect that 16Mb/s 4K would look better to viewers than 40Mb/s 1080p. Plus, 4K is usually encoded using a more modern and efficient codec than the ancient ones we use for 1080p Blu-ray.
But note that I'm talking about perceived quality here. Higher bitrates might lead to higher computed quality metrics like PSNR and SSIM but past a point, those metrics no longer have any correlation to human perception and that point is lower than you might think.
I get your point, just to play devil's advocate though: up until a few years ago, there was an often repeated argument that "the human eye can't see more than 30fps" (it was used to justify the fact that many console games were capped at 30fps back then)... Today, many gamers use a 144hz monitor and would never go back to a lower refresh rate.
I wonder if the same story will happen with regards to lossy video compression, I mean perhaps, once our tech will be so much better that we will be able to use lossless formats for video, people will look back at the formats we have today and think that they look bad.
Remember VHS? I used to think they looked alright back then :-)
I think that the lower adoption of Blu Ray vs. streaming is purely due to convenience, not quality. Most people don't want to deal with physical media. In the same way that uncompressed audio is better than Spotify and similar services, yet almost no one buys audio CDs any more.
In Audio, there are now services that let you download uncompressed and/or lossless audio (Bandcamp, Beatport etc.), they are not as mainstream as Spotify but they are moderately successful and have their place in the market.
I wonder if the same thing could happen for movies: offering higher quality downloadable movies, without the physical medium. Perhaps cinephiles could be interested. Maybe it will happen when average bandwidth, at least in the developed world, approaches the equivalent of a 4K Blu Ray bitrate: no one wants to wait for a long download to end, people want just-in-time streaming.
(Note: Blu Ray, unlike Audio CD, is not lossless, it's just that it's got much less compression than the typical streaming services).
I don't think the claim that the human eye can't see more than 30fps was ever supported by evidence, it was just "common knowledge" like other falsehoods such as certain parts of the tongue only detecting certain tastes. I think it was actually based on the minimum frame rate necessary for a human to perceive motion instead of a slide show. Scientifically, a quick Google indicates that humans can see up to around 90Hz for more normal cases and 500Hz for a specific edge-case [0].
When it comes to video compression though, industry practice is largely based on the result of user testing. There are well-controlled tests where a bunch of people are put in a specific test environment and shown videos encoded using different parameters and there are larger scale A/B tests where a streaming platform will tweak parameters and see how they affect metrics like time spent consuming content. So I'm confident that the compression of today matches the users and hardware of today.
However hardware can change and I expect that's what will drive increases in video quality. For example the encodes of today are biases to some extent by the fact that people watch videos on tiny screens like phones or tablets, which are likely a bottleneck for quality perception. If people start consuming more content on say VR headsets, streaming platforms may see the need to increase quality. 8K is also a possible driver (especially for very large displays).
Connectivity is also a big deal. Lossless music is possible because the bitrate is relatively low but streaming 4K blu-ray is out of the question for many people at the moment. In the future though it's definitely a possibility.
Yes I mostly meant the latter but like you said, occasionally there are 4k streaming versions when there is only 1080p on blu-ray. Most of the time I don't feel the 4k versions are that much better looking though.
Sound is also mastered differently on blue rays than on streaming - streams are optimized for TV and phone speakers and maybe headphones, Blu-rays have home theater quality sound.
I only have Netflix disc rental (blu-ray, one disc out at a time, costs about $10/month).
The library is huge and goes back decades. There are usually good user reviews at the Netflix web site for guidance. I suspect there are thousands of theatrically released movies that Netflix only offers on disc, not streaming.
In the last ten years, I've rented almost 900 movies (including a few TV shows like Breaking Bad) on disc, so that's well below $2/rental. I live about 50 miles from the nearest distribution center, so turnaround is almost always just two days, because the post office scans the returned disk when I post it, so Netflix sends out the new one the next day, even before they receive my return. They did pull a fast one a few years back by silently stopping outgoing shipments on Saturdays, but I live with it.
Discs have great resolution, often have bonus features, and almost always have closed captioning, which I appreciate more and more as I age. And the credits don't get reduced to a thumbnail on screen so the next show can be promoted. And I don't have to log in, or enable wi-fi on my TV.
I use an old PS3 as my blu ray player, works great with a Logitech remote control, supports HDMI output. I also have a blu-ray external disk drive for my laptop if I'm on the road (only about $100 as I recall).
Since Netflix is primarily responsible for putting Blockbuster, Hollywood Video, and various local video stores out of business, I'd be really pissed if they ended the disc rental service.
> Discs have great resolution, often have bonus features, and almost always have closed captioning, which I appreciate more and more as I age.
Don't they get scratched these days? I remember the DVD days of Blockbuster, and also thinking "DVD as a technology is just not ready for rental" every time I got a disc that was scratched and/or had sticky stuff glued to it.
Nope. Out of those 900 discs I rented, I've only had to return maybe 2 or 3 as unplayable, and Netflix will immediately send out a replacement or the next disc in your queue, without waiting to receive the return.
Does anyone use it? I am thinking that people are so accustomed to immediate online gratification that waiting a day or three for a DVD in the mail is just not something a lot of people will do anymore. That means you are going to have to think ahead about what you want to watch, and plan a time to do it, rather than just flopping down on the couch and surfing to find whatever catches your eye.
And many people don't even have DVD players anymore. I don't.
I do. There are a bunch of movies I have on my list that fall into the one day I want to watch this category. I do have the cheapest plan because they closed the Chicago-area distribution center and it was hard to get enough DVDs per month with shipping times for anything more generous to be cost-effective.
Back in the day, people had these things called "lives" with irl friends and loved ones. Back then, watching a movie was a special thing you did that brought people together, they didn't need to binge 10 hours of content every night. A few movies a week was plenty.
Part of why it's niche is they basically abandoned that line of business. Remember that they even tried to spin it off into its own separate company, and only changed their minds after a huge backlash.
Many companies fail to adapt and stick with old business models. Netflix did the exact opposite and took their dvd business behind the barn and shot it in the head.
The DVD service had pretty much everything as far as I can recall. So streaming + DVD was a pretty complete offering with balanced convenience and catalog.
The early streaming catalog was pretty huge compared to what it is today. They were the only name in town and there wasn't anywhere for IP rights holders to pull out and park their content instead, so there was a lot of TV shows and movies from major studios on the streaming service. DVD service had seemingly everything every made into a DVD.
From what I recall from those early days though is the streaming catalog was constantly shuffling what was available. You could bookmark some movie you wanted to watch, and then a couple weeks later, it suddenly wasn't available anymore - 2 months later it would return.
Certainly convenient though if you didn't care much when you saw something.
I figured that by inside your living room they were referring to streaming rather than to disc rental. I agree that disc rental services (regardless of provider, in my experience) have very good selections.
̶A̶l̶s̶o̶,̶ ̶h̶e̶r̶e̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶U̶K̶,̶ ̶N̶e̶t̶f̶l̶i̶x̶ ̶n̶e̶v̶e̶r̶ ̶o̶f̶f̶e̶r̶e̶d̶ ̶a̶ ̶d̶i̶s̶c̶ ̶r̶e̶n̶t̶a̶l̶ ̶s̶e̶r̶v̶i̶c̶e̶.̶ edit: I'm mistaken, they used to. There's just one provider left here that does (called Cinema Paradiso).
>There was never a time when you could name a film and expect it to be on Netflix to stream.
That's not what your parent comment was suggesting. It was saying that Netflix's streaming collection was the same as Blockbuster's physical DVD collection, which was big but not unlimited (i.e. "every film you can think of")
The GP comment referenced the netflix "subscription", not streaming. Netflix used to have the content brought to you on DVD if it wasn't available to stream.
They actually still offer the DVD service which has a much broader selection (basically any and all new releases just like RedBox plus a lot of stuff from the past 20-30+ years) but it's basically a stand-alone service now that costs between 7.99 - 14.99/month depending on how many simaltaneous DVDs you want to have out and the format (DVD vs Blu-ray)
Netflix has a huge amount of content with pro paedophile tendancies. So many of their shows have underage sex or themes thereof. I have yet to see anyone catalogue these, only point them out in favourite shows.
(Aware of the cuties debacle, but this is a rather overt example, aforementioned are sometimes subtle.)
There's really odd undertones in a lot of Netflix shows
Big Mouth (a cartoon) is about child sex
Emily in Paris, character lead has sex with a 17yo on screen.
There are more, I just can't bring them to mind at the moment. Perhaps I should begin to document them.
Hmm... Black Mirror (the Netflix episodes) had child sex in, End of The Fucking World had child sex in it; although both with negative consequences so poor examples.
Maybe it's coincidental, but it is something I've started to notice more and more.
Keep it in mind next time you watch some shows on Netflix and perhaps it will stand out.
A show I had one episode left of went off Netflix on 1/1. I tried to find it EVERYWHERE, I even downloaded iTunes on my PC. “Not available in your region” left right and center. I luckily found a torrent and it was legitimately the only way I could find the content beyond buying DVDs on eBay.
I was living in Ireland for a little while and wanted to watch Game of Thrones. At the time, piracy was literally the only possible way to watch it; there was no legal avenue whatsoever (including purchasing cable from HBO, etc) that included it.
That’s crazy. Would a VPN work? I think it would have for me, since my show was available in the UK, but I was not really into buying and setting up a VPN when my wife wanted me to just find the damn show.
VPNs and cloud services' IP ranges are mostly blocked nowadays (by AS number and so on). You can setup your own wireguard vpn running e.g. on a Raspberry Pi on someones cable Internet, of course.
100%
It's worse than the old days of only having cable and having to pay a small fortune. I'm not going to pay the same (or more) and then have to jump around between 12 different apps.
We literally went back to cable because other than the ideology, it wasn't beneficial. For the streaming services I do want, I can actually order then through Xfinity and keep things simple.
I recently stayed somewhere with cable and relatives were watching content for the holidays. I was reminded of just how obnoxious having 30+ minutes of ads for 1.5 hours of content is. I’d rather just not have any content.
Yeah I can't watch anything with unskipable ads anymore. It's just not worth it. The one exception is live sports, but that's not soo bad because there are timeouts anyway. I just hit mute when the ads are running.
I watch NFL RedZone, which jumps game to game to follow the action, with no commercials. Obviously that only works when you have that many games going at once. (Also ironically one of the reasons why I switched back to cable, as it really wasn't on the streaming packages that made sense for us)
I agree it's not perfect. I was just tired of having to train an ML model and spin up a 24-node Kubernetes cluster just to figure out what services I needed to watch the particular combination of shows my wife and I like.
Yeah and have you noticed how the industry doesn't really want you to watch old stuff? Obviously they want to keep peddling new movies and series, so it does make sense, but I think it should be easier to find old classic movies. I often have to resort to torrents for this reason alone.
That's why I still believe in owning physical media (applies to both music and movies). It's the highest quality available at the time (at least until a higher-res version comes out), and can never be updated/censored/"remastered" or otherwise removed from my library.
Friends and Seinfeld regularly make headlines for having their syndication rights sold to Streaming Service A or Streaming Service B for $100 kajillion or whatever.
It seems they are following the McRib model. Taking it off the menu for awhile probably generates more views overall than simply leaving it on all the time. Plus you can license it out to another streaming service while it's off yours.
But surely it makes more sense to peddle old movies and TV shows because you've already made them. Isn't that why content creation is so lucrative - you make it once and then sell it for years and years?
Well, streaming services are being balkanized at such a rate that soon most of the content on each service is by the company the runs the service. That is, if it isn't already.
All of that is way cheaper (currently) than cable.
The biggest problem is finding what you want. Need a TV Guide for streaming, so I can search for say "The Martian", and it would tell me "This is on netflix in your country", or "this isn't available on subscription, but you can rent it on amazon for x.xx or buy it on apple tv for y.yy"
The biggest problem for me is that my local cable company is the cheapest/best internet provider. So, no, it's not cheaper for me than cable. Internet without cable is almost the cost of the "bundle". (it's evil) I just have cable on 1 of 4 TVs, but still.
Also you can't get most streaming content on cable, or the sports content I get on cable without 4 streaming services (ESPN+, Peacock, Paramount+ & Hulu).
So I've got a cable package w/ sports + a couple streaming services. Sometimes I'll pick one up for a month or 2 and drop it just for something I want to see. Sometimes I rent something from Amazon.
It's just a mess.
But the search is pretty easy. My Rokus, Amazon sticks, or even cable box search fine for me.
Tivo has been doing this for years. I can search for a show, see if it's live, upcoming in the next couple of weeks to record or if it's available on Amazon/Hulu/Netflix/Vudu to stream or buy. Then just click it to go straight there.
Also has a nifty feature where you can list all available episodes of a show across all seasons and it will mix in your live recordings with streaming options. I honestly don't know why Tivo doesn't get a lot more love. Cable when you aren't paying per-TV fees for boxes is pretty great. Just a couple of bucks a month for a cable card in the Tivo and then you hook up Tivo Mini units on all of the other TVs in your house to access the main box.
Still you have to go out of your way AND spend money, vs just opening your favorite torrent tracker, searching for whatever you want, and choosing the quality/codec/language. I've honestly never understood the appeal of not pirating.
It does, but Netflix is the one provider (that I know of) that's decided to entirely opt out of Apple TV integration, so I can't add any of their shows to my universal queue and have to specifically switch to Netflix to see what I'm in the middle of or want I to watch next.
I have a premium subscription but end up forgetting to watch Netflix because they won't integrate with Up Next. I pick something from my queue - I mean you usually watch TV when your brain is fried and it's not going to remember everything. Don't know why they're so adamant about this.
I’d really like apple tv to stop showing me things on streaming services I don’t have, and at the same time not show me the options grime the ones that I do.
Yup. Apple TV for most things and Just Watch for obscure stuff or if there's a chance it could be on Netflix. Just Watch has some major blindspots. I have had multiple searches that return wrong titles.
It's not illegal to download movies/music from the Internet in most jurisdictions I know of (Europe). It doesn't extend to computer programs though (i.e. using them). It's also usually illegal to make copyrighted (materially) media available for others (outside of group of family/friends), so torrents are tricky.
But it was quite a success for RIAA/MPAA to stick a label of criminal to everyone who downloads free audio-visual content even if it's not true. Though, let's not aid them in their quest by throwing sentences like 'illegal content' too frequently around.
Getting prosecuted for downloading material or using it is rather rare. Unless you are a business. But sharing it is really messy which is why I don't really do torrents anymore. Not that I download much anything.
yeah pretty much, I've even found myself pirating things that are actually on the services I pay for because playing a file is just a better user experience
I also find collecting to be satisfying, there's something nice about knowing that Netflix can't just decide to take Arcane away from me
Other advantage of piracy is that you can actually get the quality you want.
In Australia I can’t get anything better than 1080 for some unknown reason, it’s not because it doesn’t exist in higher quality - torrent sites often list 4K resolution files. Presumably it’s the potato-quality internet in this country.
There's a site I've come to really appreciate, justwatch.com which is a great way to see who (if anybody) has a particular movie or TV show available. What's nice is that they include the library-based streaming services like Hoopla and Kanopy. I have a 2/month DVD Netflix subscription still the queue for which I use as my master to-watch list, but I'll check the top few movies on the list from time to time to make sure I can't watch them with one of the streaming services I already have.
I was taking stock of all the streaming services I have recently (too many now) and realized Netflix is one I can easily do without. I'm not super into their originals and many movies I do want to watch aren't on the service anyway.
Netflix is also the most expensive service that I am subscribed to. Netflix is €14 and Amazon Prime is only €6. I basically only watch Netflix for a few of their originals (which are arguably aren't that great).
My big issue with the Netflix model is that I'm subscribing to a content smorgasbord where the only thing they have in common is the distributor. With Disney+ at least I know I'm getting specific brands (Marvel, Pixar, etc).
True, but the price seems a bit lower (for now). A fully loaded cable account back in the day for me was $180 (including internet).
Now days you can get internet for $50 or $100 (depending on location, speed etc).
Then if you wanted say 5 of the various platforms, that's going to roughly be $50 to $70 more. So that's still a likely savings.
And on top of that, all new movies are basically being PRODUCED by these networks, so for the most part you don't need a theater (or their prices).
And on top of all that, instead of just fully subscribing to all of them, just get one at a time. Want the new Dexter series, get Showtime. Done with that? drop it until season 2 is out.
So it definitely can be a lot cheaper than the old days.
I haven't had a cable subscription in years. I think almost 5 or 6 years now. It's been a combination of streaming, movie rentals (streaming), and BitTorrent downloads.
And yes, it definitely can be cheaper if you willing to actively manage what subscriptions you need and don't need one month at a time.
Is it even close to that? You can bundle a ton of services and still come out cheaper, plus you avoid ads. The biggest difference is also that you can mix and match services at will, so if you arent using one, you can just drop it for a few months.
Its significantly better than cable TV still. I also dont get people reminiscing about one streaming service dominating, we shouldnt be wishing for monopolies. Everyone coming out with their own platform should drive up competition and give us better quality services
A streaming subscription is much cheaper than a cable subscription, no? If you're a very heavy consumer of streaming video, doesn't it make sense that you'd pay more? I don't see why anyone should expect to get to stream everything they could want for a minimal monthly fee.
Having to switch apps is a trivial inconvenience. Seems to me that price-point is what we should be focusing on, and I'm fairly confident things have improved greatly.
More generally, I'm sceptical of any argument that laments the lack of a monopoly.
Absolutely not. I am absolutely confident of that statement. One box of drives, a small machine to act as a Plex server, and VPN is all you need. Pre-made, high quality tools exist to automate everything. It's almost completely friction-less.
Pirating is easier, better, and faster now than it has ever been. The push to splinter streaming services is only speeding up its adoption, again. Cable is the old cable, streaming services are the new cable, but with more barriers and more difficult setup.
I'm not sure who downvoted you, but I cannot agree more.
For giggles, I just went ahead and priced this out:
One-time costs:
* Plex Pass: $80
* NZB indexer access: $10 (for 2 or 3)
Ongoing monthly costs:
* File server (three-year deprecation): $55
* IPTV: $15
* Unlimited Usenet account: $3
This took an afternoon of setup, but has just worked since. Heck, the other day I discovered a new season of a show had apparently been released – because it completed downloading and filled Plex overnight.
I bought a one-time Plex pass, so there's no ongoing cost. I've yet to see any significant reason to change away from it yet. Is Jellyfin better beyond the price?
I had been using Plex for many years and got sick of the way they try to force things like podcasts and web shows on you. I knew that advertising and library scanning was on the way if it wasn't already there so I switched to Jellyfin a couple of years ago. I have a number of friends and family that use my server as well and none of them have complained.
I tried Jellyfin. Although it is great for an open source project, it lacks polish. Especially on the android TV app, there are multiple obvious problems. I encountered too dealbreakers within the first half hour of usage:
- Resume does not work reliably
- Subtitles are ugly and un-configurable
I will keep monitoring it from time-to-time, and switch from Plex as soon as these 2 problems are fixed. Thanks for recommending, I have been on the lookout for such an app for a long time.
I picked up Thundernews when there was an "unlimited for $4" sale going on, and have used it ever since. Keep an eye out for their sales, because they don't seem to expire them. They resell UsenetExpress so pick up a block account or two from another provider for fills as always.
My only problem at this point with going back to piracy is that the torrent sites I used to rely on are dead, and if there's a modern replacement for Covenant that actually works then I don't know what it is.
Covenant on Kodi was the first and last time I actually felt like TV was in the future.
The thing that bothers me is that the subscription services cannot give full attention to the quality of their apps on all devices. Un-pausing HBO Max on my Roku Plus only works 50% of the time.
And don't get me started on Netflix auto-preview (which cannot be disabled on my device).
I had netflix from 2003 to 2020, and still got DVDs until 2018 when I moved to an area with broadband. It has been a ride: from it's rapid decline from having all sorts of art-house films (Preminger, Castle, Fassbinder) on DVD, to having almost nothing, to it's near 100% self-generated content which is largely meh. But those first years were epic. I must have watched 800 films the first year, limited only by USPS latency.
Yeah, I have completely reverted to piracy, due to those reasons.
Also, many of these platforms made the strange decision to not accept subscriptions from locations outside the US in the beginning. I tried to subscribe to Disney+ and HBO max when they started, but was denied due to location.
Probably works now, but I don't care. They had their one chance.
Before, we used piracy because the media wasn't easily accessible (physical media). I now see piracy having an uptick in the future because the media is all paywalled. Five years ago, anything you wanted to watch was on Netflix, Hulu, or TPB. With the success of those platforms, all the IP holders have started their own streaming platforms which is great, but it's lead to a massive fragmentation of the market. No one is going back to paying those cable prices of $120+ a month for content by signing up for all these services, so piracy it is.
Same, I'm one of them. I now donate to the developers of the *aar web apps instead.
I had Netflix and Prime till recently in an effort to promote the defragmentation of streaming services as a show of unity but, its getting worse. And these guys do not need my money while the service they provide gets worse and worse.
How many of these people complained about the cable bundle? I dropped cable and have a few streaming services and save $50+ a month. (No, I don't have live TV which would bring it back up to close to my previous rate.)
if you choose to go this route, jellyfin is a great privacy-respecting media server. plex is great, but requiring an email or third party account on a self-hosted app is just weird.
+1, it's ridiculous and misleading that Netflix is still being included in this list after all this time.
Netflix is a TV company. Their tech is a commodity. An important commodity, for sure, but it's not what makes them valuable. Their critical offering is their reach and programming.
FAAMG (or MAAAM now, I guess?) is a sane grouping of giant companies because their critical offerings and expertise areas are their software and their platforms. I think Google would be totally capable of reimplementing Netflix's streaming services if they needed to, but after years of trying they still haven't been able to fully match Amazon Web Services. That's the difference between Big Company and Big Tech Company. Similarly, it's why Tesla isn't on this list: they're huge and growing and they write software, but their software is just a means to an end, not a valuable platform in itself.
+2, FAANG was coined by Jim Cramer to be a grouping of fast growing tech stocks almost 10 years ago, not a grouping of the largest and most important tech companies. Apple and Microsoft are both about 10x the market cap of Netflix.
And around that time the Microsoft stock had beeen fairly flat for the previous decade. But the Microsoft of the 2010s isn’t the Microsoft of the 2000s stock wise. The stock has grown quite a lot as well since FAANG was coined.
Is their tech a commodity? I knew one of the principals (who was hired away by Uber for an ungodly sum of money) who had spent years writing a lot of proprietary networking code. I don't think that IP is a commodity, is it?
It’s definitely not a commodity in the usual sense that anyone can just buy it. It requires a lot of custom software, and importantly it also requires a lot of negotiations with CDNs and a lot of datacenter buildout to get the requisite amount of points of presence to serve content economically.
But it is a “commodity” in the sense that it’s just a thing that needs to be built to support their product offering, and which other similar companies with similar product offerings have built. Disney+ exists, Hulu exists, Amazon built Prime Video, Google has been operating YouTube for years. If you need to serve streaming video, it’s no longer a groundbreaking feat to be able to do it.
Netflix will be fine; they sell a reasonable, understandable product at a reasonable, understandable price, which makes me most confident in them by far.
The product is getting worse over time due to content providers cutting them off in favor of their own services.
It's a lot easier for Disney and their ilk to build streaming services than it is for Netflix to build Disney's content catalog. Props to Netflix though, they've been punching above their weight in that area.
It's also a lot easier to pirate than it is to sign up for a billion different services. I'd put my money on "Netflix making this work somewhow" over "Cable all over again."
No. I work for a FAANG company at the moment and Microsoft was my previous employer and i can confirm that Microsoft significantly underpays when compared with FAANG.
Well, when I left in 2010 it was extremely true. Not even remotely in the ballpark. According to Levels.fyi they pay about 50% more now, but still less than any FAANG.
My impression when I was at MS was that they hire you at a competitive market salary, and their HR claims to do surveys and keep your yearly increases in line with market rates, however it seemed pretty easy for increases to not keep pace with market rate increases, in part because the market rate has increased pretty steadily lately.
I don't think they're the only ones with this issue. Job hoppers can get bigger raises than people staying and climbing the ladder "the old fashioned way".
I'm not sure I agree with you, but it can vary with the time period being considered and for me it's been a long time.
Also worth noting that while many in Seattle complain about housing costs, cost of living is much lower than in the bay area. That was definitely part of my calculus for accepting an MS offer years ago.
The important metric is what percentile of the market band each company targets. The word on the street (blind) is that MS pays median to 60th, while G/FB pay at 90th percentile. Granted with how MS stock has performed from 2016 and onward, actual compensation has been pretty good, depending on when someone joins.
Definitely. A huge boon for Netflix to have been included in this group because of the first letter of its name.
Reminds me of the Dow Jones, which is just 30 somewhat-arbitrary companies, and is basically the sum of the stock prices of those companies (yes, that means a $800/share company matters 20X more than a $20/share company).
Interestingly, from a physical perspective there's not much difference between saying "fagm" and saying "fact". But one of those is easy for English speakers and one is impossible.
Coarticulated velar/labial consonants exist in other languages, though.
FB may be getting slaughtered by the media, hated by both the left and the right, but the truth is no one is actually leaving FB. It's still the #1 place to find restaurants, buy/sell used items, neighborhood groups, etc etc etc. And if FB Proper were to ever fall behind, IG still has a lot of stamina left.
I don't think it will happen any time soon, but I would like to see Apple decline. Their ideals and design and software quality from the previous decades are nowhere to be seen. Their software and UX especially have suffered from mismanagement, and I wonder how bad it will need to get before people start switching away. The alternatives are still behind, but the gap is closing in a bad way.
Your experience of Facebook is very different to mine. In my bubble Facebook is basically a graveyard; I see posts from friends every now and then and use it to chat with people I don't have contact with on other platforms and that's it.
I tried marketplace but it's empty in my area. Restaurants don't use it, nor do neighbourhoods.
I'm not saying you're wrong but we'd need to see numbers to say which of our experiences is the more average one.
Facebook's other properties are successful for now though. WhatsApp is prolific around me in a way Messenger is very much not and Instagram has some level of popularity, though TikTok is the new shiny thing.
The question was which is the most likely to decline, not to disappear.
I don't think Facebook (or Meta) will disappear, but I do think it is the mostly likely to decline.
The only one I think may disappear is Netflix - this is because Facebook benefits from the network effect which helps slow any sudden decline as all your family are still on it etc. whereas Netflix just needs a bad run of poor quality content and it could lose a lot of subscribers to competing services.
Netflix is also less diversified (even though now it's adding Netflix Games for some reason.. we'll see how popular that is..) which further weakens its position.
With companies the size of the FAANGs they appear to struggle with change and being dynamic. A lot of the time they purchase existing companies/tech in the direction they want to steer towards.
I would argue that while Facebook/Meta has been more of a gradual evolution Netflix has shown that it can transition to a whole new way of working within its domain. They revolutionised DVD rentals by combining a web UI with efficient warehousing and logistics. When they saw that infrastructure was getting close to making streaming viable they pivoted to digital delivery and not only did it allow them to keep their existing customer base who would have eventually moved away from DVD rentals on their own, but it also brought in other international markets where DVD rentals never would have worked.
I think I agree that Facebook/Meta will decline without disappearing in much the same way that IBM has. They will acquire new businesses and sell off old ones without really being seen as particularly innovative. Netflix on the other hand I think will stick around but will likely change into more of a content producer rather than a distributor like it has been. Beyond that, who knows?
Facebook is for old people now. I organized an event for new students at the university and we had a discussion in the team whether we should advertize on FB or whether it would even be a hindrance because FB is not cool. We then agreed to post it there after all because people expect "serious" information such as dates of university events on Facebook.
I don't post regularly on Facebook, because my old FB friends are not very active. I'm in the age (late 30s) where you don't meet so many new people, and if you do it is no longer appropriate to add them on FB. So it is effectively dead for me. I communicate with one person via FB messenger and post uni events there. On Whatsapp, I communicate with my family and some coworkers. Everyone else is on Signal, Telegram, Instagram, maybe Twitter. TikTok is terrifying.
I don't think it's inappropriate to add people you meet on Facebook in your late 30's. Don't miss out on a chance to become friends with someone just because you think FB adding is a faux pas!
Also, where else would you post an event details page aside from Facebook? Meetup? That's even more dead..
It's more like, when you are in university it's fine to add other students you barely know. But now with a job, I don't want to add my colleagues or business associates to social media. Also real friends != FB friends, I'm not going to miss out on making personal connections because of this.
I dunno, I guess for events FB is still the place to go.
Sure. Still millions of eyes for ads, and those eyes have money to spend after they rage out in the comments of a targeted news post about wokeism or vaccine mandates.
TBF, when I looked at this list, I didn't think any of these companies would decline.
Although, I didn't pick FB, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the votes were just people that picked the company they thought might grow the least. Or the company they hate the most - which no one should be surprised is FB by a large margin. It's been the tech punching bag for like almost a decade now.
The largest reason I DON'T see a decline from FB is that everyone has been talking about how much they hate FB for years. And despite that, it's still been growing like a weed.
> I would like to see Apple decline. Their ideals and design and software quality from the previous decades are nowhere to be seen
I wish it was true but I feel like their quality is great where it matters. One of the biggest threats to technology is that Apple successfully captures a large slice of the computing world into a proprietary architecture with Apple extensions. Having spent a decade plus with Intel as a lingua franca we may not appreciate yet how this has kept parts of Apple's ecosystem open and the computing world interoperable.
I've been an FB user for ages, and don't use it for any of the things you list. Mostly just staying in touch with distant relatives, school chums and professional colleagues that I know socially, and a few special interest groups. I only log in to FB maybe 2-4 times per week, for less than an hour at a time.
Facebook is just shy of 3 billion monthly active users. More than one third the planet's population. If ever there was a company that anecdotal evidence doesn't work, it'd be this one.
Yes, I'm aware and many others are aware those alternatives exist. People seem confused how people are spending time on FB if not through their news feeds, and I'm telling you. A bajillion people continue to use FB outside of your circle.
Also Yelp is practically nonexistent in my suburban area. And restaurants often have more updates/activity on their FB pages than their own standalone websites.
And older people seem to think Nextdoor is a scam since they keep using real people's names on paper mail when they weren't aware that they consented to it after signing up.
Nearly all pro-Facebook ( or more accurately described as non Facebook hostile ) opinion has been downvoted in the past five years. And they were less than 5% of the comments. They are so rare I could nearly count them with my fingers.
>It's still the #1 place to find restaurants, buy/sell used items, neighborhood groups, etc etc etc.
The demographics within HN tends to not use Facebook for those functions. At least there are very little evidence any comments, opinion or votes has shown they do. Not to mention it tends to be US and EUR specific.
So long as I’m keeping my account as a calendar of friends’ events but never (ever) actually use or interact with the platform in other ways, it would seem I’m just an expensive freeloader.
People know there isn’t much point “leaving” Facebook for integrity reasons. They know who I am anyway.
I’m guessing I’m not alone in using their service this way.
I'm not sure how facebook fares in big cities, but back where I'm from - a small rural town, facebook has pretty much replaced everything. It's the de facto digital community place.
Want to get regular updates from local businesses, local government, hobby groups, sports and cultural events? You'll find it on FB. Sure, most of those also have their own dedicated websites or similar, 90% of the most recent info comes to FB first.
Same goes for community groups, public announcements, and what not. Older people (50 and up) are well-established on FB, and have no plans to move anywhere else. So it might be true that FB has become a "boomer platform", but at least those users are very active and very loyal. Many of these older users get all their news and updates via FB.
I'd imagine that this would be the case in similar towns and places.
> I'm not sure how facebook fares in big cities, but back where I'm from - a small rural town, facebook has pretty much replaced everything. It's the de facto digital community place.
I don't think this is a good thing. It means change won't be easy to implement because their customer base relies on it for a certain function, if that function changes too much or goes away, they loose what's left.
My mistake, I didn’t mean it’s the place to discover new restaurants, but it’s the best way to get the latest menu, latest hours, and speak directly with the owners through Messenger. Quite often the FB page is more up-to-date than the websites they own.
Ever since the pandemic I found the hours listed on Google maps for restaurants/business to be often (understandably) incorrect or out of date, and now I usually double check on Instagram or Facebook if there's a page run by the restaurant.
FB is declining in America, but only technically and in terms of user count. It's more than made up for by increasing user monetization and growth in the rest of the world.
Facebook is currently ahead, but I wonder how much of that is perception. There is a lot of media about how Facebook is evil, but that is mostly from a pretty small circle of media and political people, that Facebook is naturally in opposition to. Facebook also owns instagram and whatsapp as well. But everyone over 30 I know uses Facebook, heavily. Instagram is also used very heavily. Amazon has threats from other E-commerce sites, lots of bad press, Governmental attacks, and unionization. Google prints money on search and I don't see enough people swapping to Duckduckgo to bring them down.
Amazon is also kept up by AWS, which who knows if one day that is spun off.
FWIW, I joined HN 14 years ago (wow) and there's never been a time in those 14 years that HN wasn't convinced that facebook's demise was just around the corner.
This is true, but the main reason was that people have been predicting this was that young people don’t want to be on a social network with their parents. This social dynamic prediction has played out, and Facebook did the 100% predictable thing that all rich entrenched players do — they bought the smaller competitors, most famously Instagram.
I fully expect them to continue to be able to monetize their user base, and purchase smaller competitors for a while.
The most recent warning flag for me is their rebranding. Announcing a major pivot to center on Occulus (I’m sorry “the metaverse”.), when VR has been nothing more than niche gaming is very weird and troublesome.
On the bright side, Facebook is a giant ossified megacorp. All that’s going to happen is some division is going to get new signage, and every PM is going to update their slide decks to say “metaverse”, and everyone is going to do what they were already doing.
As an ex-employee, Facebook is many things, but ossified it is not. The internal impact/metric-oriented culture means that new bets are encouraged and rewarded, whereas product teams that are keeping it safe will eventually get disbanded.
FB’s predilection to reorg every six months, isn’t a sign of strength. It’s actually a sign of dysfunction. They’ve just been able to power through by being extraordinarily lucky in the social networking space. It’s tire spinning.
The company hasn’t released a noteworthy product in at least a decade.
I joined HN 12 years ago and I don't remember things that way at all. My impression is that it's extremely rare for anyone to claim that FB's demise is imminent, but it seems like it has become more common for HN posters to comment on FB's decline in recent years. ...but you could say the same thing for Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google as well -- it doesn't seem to be FB specific to me.
MySpace died because it became a minority player in a quickly growing landscape, at a time where alternatives were available.
To simplify, if you have captured over 50 percent of the entire english-speaking Internet population, sure you have a huge network effect behind you. But if that population count is multiplied by 100x and your numbers don't grow alongside that, your network effect is not as strong.
My wife was working there at their peak (and left at just the right time—I like to think that their decline was the inevitable result of her departure). They had such high engagement that they had a hard time selling enough ads to fill all the available ad slots.
Including my ex-account period I have been reading HN for 12 years now, while I agree Facebook has always been unpopular on HN. It was since may be 2015 it became extremely one sided. Even the very rare few who speak up with Facebook financial and user growth are all gone. ( Arguably speaking lots of things on HN have become one sided )
There is this phenomenon I witness time and time again, people confuse what they wish to happen; the decline or death of Facebook with any real facts.
It is like saying Apple is doomed for 10 years and yet Apple is now a 3 trillion company.
Unionization is no threat to Amazon. Their margins and hence their shareholders maybe (briefly), but that's just fine and won't affect their ability to be successful. It'll also push them towards further automation on the medium and long term time horizons.
That would in turn alleviate a lot of the governmental attacks and bad press. I can't think of anyone who hates Amazon the service - they hate Amazon the pee-bottle-broker and tornado-warning-ignorer.
As for other e-commerce sites, they'll probably just buy them, crush them, or if they can't do that - sell them logistics and infrastructure services.
[edit] Consider FedEx vs UPS. FedEx can't hire staffers right now, while UPS, unionized, saw basically zero attrition. FedEx is suffering right now. UPS, crushing it. [1]
The massive labor shortage that’s rocked the U.S. since the pandemic and disrupted long-established employment relationships hasn’t had much impact on UPS, which pays its unionized drivers the highest wages in the industry. That’s helped it maintain a stable workforce and rising profits throughout the current disruptions. Meanwhile, lower-paying, nonunionized FedEx racked up $450 million in extra costs because of labor shortages. And while UPS easily beat earnings expectations and predicted a rising profit margin in the U.S. for the fourth quarter, FedEx signaled that its profit margin will fall further.
I'll never call them perfect, to be sure. They do have counterfeit issues and bait-and-switch reviews. However, I don't hate them for it, and I'm confident they're continuing to improve. JMHO.
>I can't think of anyone who hates Amazon the service
I don't like the destruction of smaller companies. Why go with a smaller company who is going to charge more for the product, quite probably charge for shipping, all while taking longer with the shipping?
> But everyone over 30 I know uses Facebook, heavily
That's an interesting perspective, I was pretty convinced that facebook was almost dead since all of my friends (in France) have almost completely stopper using it. Well most of us are still casually browsing it every once in a while, but it's far less often than it used to be, and worse: we don't have interactions together on that platform. The last remaining usage was events, but since covid basically killed most large-group events for a while, even this usage died off.
I wonder if it's more of a group difference, or maybe it depends from country to country. Where do you live?
Midwestern GenX suburban parent here. Nothing important happens in our subdivision (hundreds of homes) without mention of it in the neighborhood's private Facebook group. Our public school district uses a Facebook page as a primary announcement platform. Kids' sports and social groups are all organized as Facebook groups and pages. You cannot escape Facebook if you're a suburban parent in the US.
In my experience, a lot of people still use Facebook, but in a completely different way than, say, 5 or 10 years ago.
In the past, I would check it many times a day to see what my friends were up to, or to see what events we could go together to. Now what I see is mostly reposts of memes and ragebaits. Part of the reason is probably that we got older and I moved (the latter being the main reason I still use Facebook, to keep in touch with people), but since younger people moved to other networks, that doesn't change much in my opinion.
Also, people die. I already get from time a reminder of the birthday of somebody that I know died. That's creepy as hell and it's only going to get worse.
In my opinion the only redeeming feature of Facebook at the moment are private groups, but that in my opinion is not enough to sustain a social network, since many are moving to WhatsApp, Telegram and the like.
I deleted Facebook last year. At that point, I had 420 friends, 10 of whom were dead. One of them I discovered was dead while going through the list of all my friends making notes of who they were. This was despite numerous posts on her wall about her death. The damned algorithm didn't bother to show me that bit of news.
Very good point. Facebook has gone from something that I used for enjoyment (2004 through maybe 2016) to something that I resentfully use only to conduct business in my local community. It's still "social" but it's the difference between hanging out with friends vs. running errands at the store, post office, city hall, etc. It has clearly grown in importance by becoming the de facto official online presence of so many entities, so I can't escape it, but I absolutely want to minimize my time spent on that stuff.
I reflexively answered the poll with Facebook because I hate it, but then I realized that I'm probably closer to killing my Netflix account than my Facebook account, and I doubted my answer. Now you've convinced me again that Facebook is most in decline.
No one's posting to their news feed anymore. They're spending all their time commenting on news posts, posting in neighborhood groups, and and buying/selling on Marketplace.
The strongest signal that Facebook will fall is the recently publicized trouble they're having in hiring people. I expect that to have rather strong knock-on effects... 10-15 years down the road. For example if VR turns out to be as big as everyone says and FB/Meta/whatever are only able to put up a weak offering. I tend to agree that they'll be harder to kill than a lot of us wish.
Do they really? It seems to be blown up by media. Talented people are still applying in droves for a job at FB. The competition has definitely increased with good options out there for candidates but hiring trouble is bit preposterous.
I guess I could be wrong, but I remember reading that they were having to give even higher offers than other SV companies. That indicates a real, widespread reluctance to work there.
For me, overwhelmingly the strongest signal is that they appear to be going all in on what is to be a widely used social interaction platform that's more-or-less explicitly banning sex; when that's been a primary or secondary driver for so many new internet/tech platform things.
My thought process on Facebook declining isn't about perception. It's that they are putting a ton of capital into and taking a huge risk on the Metaverse. If it fails it could mean a major decline for Facebook.
Well, as those 30+ year olds get older, marketers are going to give less and less of a shit about them.
Facebook makes most of their money from their ad network that mostly exists on sites that nobody actually needs to visit (Facebook, ig). In addition, Meta is spending a boat load on engineers who don't really want to work there, so they can make a "metaverse" which I'll bet most of them don't give half a shit about. Then they're going to market the hell out of it and at the end of the day I just don't think that many people are going to use it enough to make it all worthwhile.
I could be wrong but I think if Meta isn't careful in how they diversify their focus they could face a real reckoning that has nothing to do with their current political pushback.
Google search is still pretty good, and their ad network is used throughout the internet so I think they're safe.
Amazon will do whatever it takes to keep sales up, so I have faith in them. If nothing else they're a company that seems extremely capable of adapting to changing market conditions.
I love Instagram as well as Pinterest. Two unpopular things on HN. There is no service out there to curate visual culture like these two. Want to build a image collection of vintage receipts!? You got it. These two platforms are truly amazing for this kind of a thing. Also ads on IG are something I'd actually want.
My two cents is that people are dramatically under-weighting the possibility that Zuckerberg is a visionary with his AR/VR plays. I am extremely bullish on FB solely because of that.
I think people will be as wrong about his VR plays as they were about the Instagram acquisition.
Agree with you there. You've got a founder led company making visionary plays that have every appearance of being on the right track. The Quest is not just a tech marvel, it was also the best selling game console this Christmas. The overall vision will take a few more hardware iterations, but has huge potential to replace smartphones, laptops, game consoles and offices. At this very moment there's another comment thread talking about how the web is an SEO spam graveyard and Google is ripe to be disrupted. Those thinking the disrupter is going to be Duck Duck Go are kidding themselves.
VR has been just around the corner for at least 30 years. I remember experiencing my first VR demo in 1997, complete with the gushing marketer convinced that the new age of VR was finally upon us, and this was long after the failed "VR pods" of the early 90s. The argument has always been "The technology is finally real-enough looking and believable! VR is now inevitable!" I argue that VR is not held back by graphic realism, input latency, or lack of content, but the form factor itself. Too few people want to strap something to their face which entirely takes over vision and hearing and then stumble around awkwardly flailing their limbs and hoping they don't run into anything. This fact hasn't changed since the earliest days of the technology.
Unless there will be another communication platform that could capture a good chunk of Facebook's users, Facebook is here to stay. A lot of Facebook features are just very difficult to implement in other platforms nowadays. One example is group messaging. WhatsApp has users from a wide range of age groups and no other platforms could easily compete with that. Communicating with our family, regardless of their age group, is a very crucial part of our culture and Facebook fills that gap. Another example is online selling. Buy-and-sell groups are thriving in Facebook because it's so easy to publish your products and immediately communicate with your potential customers. For example, in the Southeast Asian region, Facebook took a large chunk of users from Carousell, the most popular online selling platform there for years before Facebook released Marketplace. Even for me personally, I've tried to stop using Facebook for several months but in my home country, Facebook is just too integrated in its culture.
Amazon / Google I think will stay strong due to their infrastructure in cloud technology. Amazon has the physical delivery infrastructure as well, which doesn't have a great competitor yet.
Apple is currently doing fine with their devices. I think the health industry will adopt some of their tech soon (like the apple watch) to get some of that sweet, sweet healthcare / insurance money
That leaves the "worst" of the group to either Facebook or Netflix.
I haven't heard much about what Netflix is doing, but things seem to be going generally okay so far.
Facebook has extremely negative news all over the media on seemingly both the tech and political side. For example, malicious targeting of children and their platform being used for fake news / propaganda. On the tech side, I don't have confidence in their current, future, or past projects such as Oculus or their extreme hype around the metaverse.
For these reasons (by default and past/present/future speculation) given the wording on this question, I think Facebook is the obvious "loser."
I believe nobody talking about Netflix is worse than people talking negatively about Facebook. Facebook has far-reaching influence over non-US societies, and are generally capable of living off of just those societies. Netflix, on the other hand, is very quickly losing the content war to the likes of Disney and HBO, plus further losing its bread-and-butter catalog backfill to Hulu. Facebook is going to keep being the popular boogeyman, possibly declining over the next decade. Netflix may truly be gone in 10 years, though.
I voted for FB but yeah I really have no idea. I don't get social media at all. I don't get Twitter or TikTok. I don't get how anyone makes a nickel in advertising. I also don't get crypto. They're worth billions based on network effects for reasons I can't comprehend. I understand the internal logic of how they function and monetize but I can't understand how they get so much engagement.
I have never used any mainstream social media. I do participate in this and a few other online forums. For communicating directly with others online, I use email.
I think they've lost GenZ, though. Boomers and GenX use Facebook, Millennials use Instagram, but GenZ uses TickTock, and unlike with Instagram, it doesn't look like they can just buy it out to reach the next generation.
I would fully expect this trend to continue - each new generational cohort will latch onto a new social network that is separate from the ones their lame parents and older siblings use.
This poses a massive institutional risk to any social network. They either need to aggressively pump out new brands to try and capture that themselves, or buy promising startups, but it wouldn't be too difficult to fail at both of those and just completely skip a generation. A few of those misses added up could be a terminal failure.
... which is owned by FB. Between Instagram securing the audience of the next generation, and Whatsapp gaining huge share as the communication tool of developing world, FB is going to do just fine, even if facebook.com usage totally tanks (also unlikely)
I'm convinced facebook.com usage will completely tank. It is surviving on older people and newer market where it got popular later, but I believe all social websites have the cycle where it's unknown, then popular, then everybody's parents join, then no longer popular, then dead.
As for Whatsapp, it makes no money, and there are plenty of non-monetized instant messengers, so I can't see them making a profit there.
The one thing they still have is Instagram, but it's "reels" haven't beaten tiktok, and it's already filled to exhaustion with ads, so it's a matter of time before it's popularity starts to decline.
As for the multiverse, that will never amount to anything.
Then something else (possibly NOT FB owned) will take over... like another tik tok. Kids don't want to be on the same social as their parents. Its gonna be a revolving door every 5 or 10 years.
I worked at Facebook last year and Google this year. I don't have an insider view of the other companies but some of my closest friends work at all of them except Netflix.
My guess is that none of these will stop growing in the next few years, but Facebook is especially undervalued. They execute on new products faster and better than the others listed, so regardless of current sentiment they are probably not going to fail any time soon.
I chose Netflix because I have the least evidence to suggest they will remain stable, but would say the odds are <10% any of these have a lower market cap in 5 years than they do now.
Having worked at Facebook and seeing where they are headed I think the HN numbers are way off and this poll is mostly "what company does HN hate the most" not which is most likely to decline. Hating FB as a company is fine, and FB as a product is probably likely to decline, but they are as OP mentioned significantly better at shipping new product than any other company listed except Apple. Facebook's biggest challenges are not owning a real platform (platform holders could hurt them) and having lots of serious competitors. These are real problems, but I think their ability to fast follow can put them in #2 for a lot of different categories they care about.
Netflix has a lot of room to grow in new markets, gaming and possibly other types of media. I think they can continue to produce good content and I think some smaller players that are locking content to their own services might return to Netflix in the future (like Microsoft, Sony and EA are now all back on Steam)
I don't think any of these companies is in serious threat of decline, but out of all of them Google seems most stagnant.
The only thing I could think of without cheating and using Google is the Oculus line. I'm not personally convinced there's a huge VR market, but there could be, and Facebook probably has the best product for this market. They aren't competing against the other megacorps listed in that particular market though, so I can't evaluate if they execute faster/better than others.
I know Apple executes pretty well on products, and at a rate that far exceeds my own upgrade cycle.
I bet he means like "Copy stories in instagram!" by "Products". I've heard a lot of social media devs talk about features as products. I'm guessing because that's how product managers see them in those orgs.
I don't find it a very good definition. Implementing a feature is not a new product.
When north of a billion people use you Craigslist feature and your Snapchat copy feature spawns 3 business lines larger than Snapchat itself within each of your platforms, I think it's fair to call them products even if they live under existing products' umbrellas.
Initially voted Google based on a hunch: Google Search is the most likely flagship product of a FAANG to get displaced by a competitor. Unlike, say, Amazon as a hub for products or Facebook as a social network, Google Search is not a natural monopoly -- there's no inherent reason a search engine should maintain dominance if it loses its competitive advantage. The complaints from tech friends ("you can't find anything anymore") that I've heard for years now are starting to come from tech-agnostic family instead. Alternatives are still worse, but it's easy to imagine a breakthrough.
However, this doesn't mean Google/Alphabet itself, with its diverse product suite and huge amount of advertising data, will decline in any meaningful sense; that will happen on a much slower scale.
Google is the dominant search engine essentially everywhere except for China and Russia.
Amazon's marketplace dominance is pretty US/UK specific, and even there, there are plenty of alternatives. Amazon marketplace is actually only available natively in a small handful of countries.
I feel like most people in this thread are grossly overevaluating Amazon's ability to stay relevant. If a competitor pops up with consistently better prices/better products/better marketing then they'll steal users from Amazon and over time dominance is lost.
What exactly does Amazon have that prevents me from stopping the use of it?
Google has excellent quality search results and a ton of products with a huge lock-in to their account ecosystem. Apple has fantastic product quality. Meta has a ridiculous network effect in three of the four products I use it for -- I can't even leave two of them (Whatsapp and FB) despite not even liking them! And Netflix consistently produces and publishes some of my favourite shows.
Amazon has nothing I can't get elsewhere, it's just a bit more consolidated. With the exception of AWS, and as I said upthread, who knows if that will remain the same company.
What is invisible to most consumers about Amazon is that they have a massive footprint across the entire supply chain for a wide and growing range of consumer good categories. Brands have been slowly outsourcing various parts of their production processes to Amazon. Amazon manages these parts of the business much more efficiently, and in a more integrated way, than what brands were doing before so it is both attractive and sticky. Many new brands are purely virtual organizations with almost everything built on top of Amazon's ecosystem -- virtual brands were always a thing, but Amazon has made it nearly frictionless.
Because of this, I expect them to make a ton of money off consumer retail even if their marketplace fades into the background. The brand management business on Amazon has been growing like crazy too, which pretty much assures Amazon will always be taking their dollar.
Another thing is that searching the web is steadily becoming displaced by more structured and localized forms of search, such as videos, nearby restaurants, products, used goods and so on. In some cases keyword search is replaced entirely - by recommendations & personalized simple buttons (gas stations on the way to my destination, the latest episodes of my favorite podcasts, etc etc).
From an ad-pipeline perspective, Google isn't entirely left behind in this new world, they still have YouTube, Google maps, Gmail, etc. However, they missed most of social and e-commerce, which feels irrecoverable at this point.
I think we have out grown FAANG. There are tech companies with moats and great tech that should be included. IE: Microsoft and Shopify. Decline is kinda open ended too, but if we are talking about ability to hire the best talent, I think it's safe to say Facebook/Meta is going to see a decline in talent. Despite their amazing salaries, because of the brand name that's attached to it they won't see as great talent anymore.
Agree with others about Netflix not being appropriate for this list. Their success or failure in the marketplace will have little to do with the factors affecting the others on this list.
FWIW today is my last day at Google (after 10 years), so maybe that's informing what I'm about to write...
I don't have any particular pick from any of this list which is dominant over any other, but...
People keep bringing up Google Search still being leading and dominant... but Ads is Google's revenue source and product ... and that's only partially driven by search traffic. Even without Search, Google would still be the strongest presence in online advertising.
Google's share price is buoyed quarter after quarter by Google coming in with growth in ads revenue quarter after quarter.
I don't think it's controversial to speculate that some day that has to stop. It's just taking a long time to stop. All markets have a saturation.
When it does, that will have some kind of cascading effect on Google as a whole. Engineering retention, vulnerability to competition, etc.
I think a similar kind of dynamic applies to Facebook as well, with some differences around market segment etc.
At least a couple of these companies' success depends on their ability not so much to innovate or produce a better product but to retain the right talent to stop other people from innovating or producing a better product. And to continue to do what they're already doing at scale. A failure to hand out hundreds of thousands in RSUs per engineer every year and an end to siphoning talent straight out of universities and into their payroll.. and all of that will start to crumble.
I don't understand why Netflix is in FAANG at all other than because it makes the acronym work ... they are a single-purpose service with almost no ecosystem impact. They could disappear and 99.9% of people would shrug and switch to a closely equivalent service. Every other "FAANG" is deeply integrated into complex ecosystems with huge economic impact.
Both Reid Hastings and Marc Zuckerberg are very capable business leaders.
It will be interesting to see in what direction Netflix decides to expand or if they will just stay in the movie and series business. I feel like they should have bought CrunchyRoll instead of Sony, that's a missed opportunity imo. But since they're trying some game experiments they might decide to buy some game developers? Or a big music streaming company, that would almost fit better with their business?
Messenger, Whatsapp and Instagram are very sticky. I don't see them disappearing anytime soon. Facebook has a massive image problem though, so who knows how that affects their VR attempts?
I personally think it is wishful thinking. At this facebook is rich enough that even if facebook.com completely imploded they could pivot to another social media platform they own such as instagram, and it is hard to imagine facebook.com imploding completely as it is used across the globe and I can see that even if facebook fell in the english speaking world other regions would still use it.
> I think Netflix could still do fairly well as one of N big players in the streaming space.
I disagree. I play for Netflix and Amazon Prime video (that was a cross-sell). I'm not playing for another.
If everything is one one service, then I'll pay for it. That was the original promise of Netflix. But now everyone wants to play that game.
Two services, maybe I'll pay. N services? Screw that, might as well go back to torrenting. And then, why keep Netflix?
Paying for TV shows is _voluntary_. Consumers are willing to pay, but only up to a point. Jerk them around too much, and the consent goes away - not only will Netflix get only a slice of the pie, but the whole pie will be smaller.
Why the hell does netflix has so many upvotes? i would pay triple their max subscription fee for their content!
For me it has to be Google, yeah FB too for obvious reasons but Google got too big and their products have been showing a detrimental pattern. They will be around but people are using tiktok and friends in lieu of youtube and their main revenue source is ADs via search and I see many good competitors in that space. New apps and enganging services don't really rely on google search. The main spenders are merchants and being able to get virtual foot traffic without Google's help is getting easier by the day.
Both Google and FB (Alphabet/Meta) are clouded by the arrogance an deep pocket brings where they thing their cash will somehow overcome the law of diminishing returns. Their historical predecessors like AT&T, IBM & Cisco are good examples. You can tell by how they treat their customers. Apple and Amazon know better, they keep their status because they know their deep pockets are always vulnerable and they need to treat their users very well even if they have to treat their employees like shit. I thing google and fb will just keep investing in new companies, lawyers and lobbyists to rhyme with history.
Example: I thing GCP is superior but I would bet on AWS support more than GCP any day! I think android can be customized to provide a better security and private environment but I would bet having a good UX with iOS any day.
I contributed to this. My first thought was that netflix doesn't really have special sauce anymore. They exist in a highly competitive market and lack the back catalog of established media companies. As a result, they end up paying way too much money for both new shows, and established ones.
On the other side of the coin, they can't compete with the volume of free content that is created by YouTube.
It's pretty easy to start a streaming service today, and many specialized streaming services have been successful.
In my person experience, my NF usage has gone to zero, being replaced with YouTube, Nebula, and HBOMax, with the occasional hop onto Prime for the odd rental. And I was as big of a NF diehard as any; I was paying for streaming since they started offering it.
Youtube is uset generated content, can't compete with netflix. I used prime for a while and switched to netflix. I am joyfully overwhelmed by the volume and quality of content on netflix. I don't have to rent or buy anything, it is all just there to watch! If anything I resent Disney for not going all in on netlflix instead of doing Disney+. After a few weeks on prime I ran out of interesting content. With Netflix I am binging multi season shows and I still find new movies and seasons as they get released right after the previous one. And they actually ask for your up/down vote instead of relying in ML like with prime (which is terrible btw)
> Youtube is uset generated content, can't compete with netflix.
Yes, but those many top YouTubers make great videos and were looking for a way to transition to paid content. I feel, if Netflix leadership had the right chops, they would have seen an opportunity here and spent a tiny fraction of their massive content budget to court some of these creators and have them make expanded videos for Netflix. Instead, these creators banded together and made their own streaming platform which receives free advertisement on YouTube.
Amazon and Facebook are by far the largest competitors in the area, and Google and Apple have more stable ecosystems since its users cannot easily move between Android and iOS.
There's nothing like that for Netflix: its amount of unique subscribers is within the same order of magnitude as Amazon Prime Video and Disney+, and as long as you aren't halfway through a series unsubscribing is easy.
I think Netflix is one underwhelming season of content during an economic crisis away from failing.
I cancelled my Netflix sub as they continued raising the price while lowering the quality of content. There is no reason to carry a Netflix sub year round. I pay for one month and catch up on anything they made worth watching (not that much), and then check in next year.
I don't know about that, I pay for mediocre content on Sling for a lot more than NF and NF had been doing a lot of content outside of the US (spain, turkey, korea, etc...) if anything I think a downturn will force people to just netflix+internet.
Voted for Facebook. The “Meta” rebranding reeks of desperation. They have only maintained growth by purchasing competitors and their main platform is dying. As others have said, each generation wants to differentiate itself from the previous one, so social media networks wax and wane as time goes on. Facebook bought IG and WhatsApp, but regulators are waking up and are likely to prevent their next attempt to purchase a big competitor. VR is going to remain a smaller market than social media, no potential to get bigger than the video games console market because it is primarily used for video games and will stay that way.
Amazon, Apple, and Google are each well-entrenched and also have a good bit of cash and patents available to pivot or crush competitors if necessary. Plus if broken up (e.g. by gov't antitrust regs, etc.) each would have multiple sustainable businesses that could survive independently of the main company.
Netflix will buy/be bought. Much like cell phone carriers, ISPs, and CATV companies, consolidation will leave only a few heavy hitters. Netflix would be a nice addition to Peacock or Paramount+ and would give each a sense of legitimacy.
Meanwhile, Facebook has made many enemies on all sides; they're synonymous with tracking users, fake news, and old folks. I can't think of anyone who doesn't use Facebook somewhat begrudgingly. Also, does anyone actually like FB/Meta? Or Zuckerberg, the defacto face of the company? Facebook is one or two gaffes away from where Myspace is today.
I think many people underestimate how much of a foothold Facebook has outside of the USA with Whatsapp and Instagram.
Especially in countries without net neutrality, social networks may be included in your phone plan even when real internet isn't -- forcing many local businesses to interact with their customers over instagram, whatsapp or facebook messenger. (Having a website is pointless if most of your customers cannot reach it).
Facebook (Meta) the company is a lot more than Facebook the social media network.
Meta owns WhatsApp and Instagram, two of the biggest social networks, that are ubiquitous with younger generations. It does not matter that Facebook is associated with old people, because Facebook also owns the places where all the young people are at.
Amazon is the only one on that list that has actively reached out to me, it's also the only one I'd never interview at given what I've heard about working conditions there. Some places seem to keep everything on fire all the time and have big expectations on engineers personal time to keep the fires from consuming the business, Amazon is like that from what I've heard.
Really depends on your team, and your manager. I'm actually having a pretty good time (in Europe) - there's absolutely no expectation to work overtime/weekends.
I’ve never had a a job where that isn’t true. Every interview I’ve done, the hiring manager is in the last round of interviewing. Usually the format is
Recruiter phone screen -> engineer technical interview -> on-site with manager and engineers
Fair enough. My point is it's high effort for a roll of the dice. Having a general reputation as a nice place to work goes a long way in my willingness to interview as I feel more confidant that I won't land on one of the bad teams at the end.
I've heard that too, but the way they backload RSUs feels kind of risky. You kinda have to tough it out 3+ years or take the loss if you need to move on earlier.
1. Netflix (~50% chance) - I feel it's only bundled with the rest of FAANG to make it sound better. In any case, HBO/Disney/Apple/whoever producing a cultural phenomenon like "Game of Thrones" would be enough for Netflix to lose the lead. Netflix wants to game viewers based on big data, but I feel like that will only lead to more and more generic stuff being produced.
2. Facebook (~25% chance) - It has pissed off multiple governments and other tech giants. Younger generations don't really care about it, and older people are starting to understand that it thrives on outrage.
3. Google (~10% chance) - Most of their services are slowly becoming worse, but I feel there's at least another decade before disruption time.
4. Apple (~1% chance) - Even if they need to allow additional app stores by law, I don't see that significantly impacting their bottom line. iPhone/iPad/Watch are the device to own in their categories, and the latest crop of Macbooks have been absolutely stellar. Additionally, they have by far the most devout userbase out of any big tech company. If anything can hurt Apple, that's the NIH syndrome, but it's more of a long-term concern.
5. Amazon (0% chance) - Yeah, not happening. Amazon is synonymous with online retail in a time when online retail is what keeps the world going. And AWS is only going to grow, even if it somehow manages to fall behind Azure. Labor unions will certainly show up, but so will automation.
The emotional favoritism in these poll results is laughable so far. Everyone and their cousin on HN loves to shit on Facebook, so lo and behold, it gets the worst ranking, followed by Google. Apple, despite a number of very consumer-hostile choices, is barely considered a potential failure. I would assume that those voting would choose based on a rational analysis derived from their personal knowledge of tech trends, instead of simple personal dislikes. Oops..
Apple has a loyal customer base and is designing some of the most amazing silicon to come out of Silicon Valley.
Meanwhile, Facebook's greatest strength is quickly copying or buying their promising new competitors. Somehow that seems like the strategy of company trying to prevent hemorrhaging. And it doesn't seem likely to scale long term now that they're on government radar.
The poll should be phrased as: Which FAANG would you short-sell relative to long positions on the others to maximize return in 5 years? Then at least we can measure performance, otherwise there isn't really a right or wrong answer we can evaluate.
I don't think people will stop using the Google search bar. I don't think people will stop binging shows on Netflix. I don't think people will stop ordering crap on Amazon. I don't think people who use iphones and macbooks will stop buying iphones and macbooks.
Hard for me to see how it wouldn't be FB/meta. They're betting the farm on something unproven / creating new habits / maintaining habits that seem to be waning.
Decline doesn’t require people to stop using Google search. It just requires a lack of growth, and Google isn’t really doing much of anything innovative. At least FB sees stagnation as a threat and is responding accordingly, Google seems to have its head so far up it’s own bureaucracy that it can’t execute effectively anymore.
Facebook has a history of getting first or buying into new social spaces. Gaming and facebook will be important going forward. I would bet in them getting bigger.
The cloud computing fad could go away and Amazon would still be the #1 retailer.
Google, Microsoft will get bigger probably more government contract related.
Netflix is in the worst poor position. There costs for high end production are extremely high because they have to overpay for top talent. So they take years to continue a series or cancel successful ones because actors want raises. The availability of fresh existing shows keeps going down while costs go up.
I don't see how Netflix will hold ground. Streaming tech is now a commodity, not a moat. 2-3 years ago I would have said Netflix is the streaming sub to have. Hard to say that now. Disney, HBO and Amazon also have great original content and huge catalogues that could sustain a family as the only sub. Apple is growing a small but quality catalogue, and bundling within the ubiquitous iCloud package. Amazon has a massive bought-in base being that they bundled it with Prime shipping. There are countless other legacy network subs and content re-packagings to choose from.
So I don't see Netflix as particular a leader in content, scale, or value.
Their best (only?) post-streaming tech innovation is the collaborative filtering. A way of finding something passable to watch that is better that channel flipping broadcast TV. Now there is so much great content that people just go straight to the show with the buzz.
If there is one promising area they lead now I'd say it's internationalized content like Squid Game and Money Heist, but I'm not convinced this is big enough moat.
Facebook because of monetized-ads model and backlash against social media in general.
Google also because of monetized-ads model and declining quality of search results.
Amazon and Apple are relatively safe IMO.
Amazon is the most at risk from unionization and regulation, potentially breaking up their business verticals. But motivation to do this seems to have subsided after last years congressional hearings.
Apple is really only at risk if people start questioning shelling out thousands for the "shiny new thing".
Yeah fake reviews is a good point, but Amazon isn't primarily a product review company so i don't see it as an apples to apples existential threat like poor quality search is for Google.
Also, Amazon could easily reel in 3rd party sellers and impose quality control. It's an unused lever in their toolbox. They've decided that exchanging brand quality for higher free cash flow is a better trade off for the time being.
I quit facebook (as a user, never worked for them). I may drop Netflix. I've been mad at apple ever since I bought a powerbook that crapped out within a year and a few months, just outside the warranty (I never bought the extended, it was Mac, they never break), and was told I'd have to pay $350 to fix it (I didn't damage it in any way, it was just a turkey of a product), but I'm still using an iPhone. Amazon prime remains immensely popular in my household both for movies and tv shows and ordering gifts, books and groceries, and while I'd like to to use it less, I don't see that happening. I use Firefox and duckduckgo as much as I can, but still use gmail, google docs, search, and google cloudplatform and AI notebooks - the latter extensively.
No idea if my own personal preferences or needs have anything to do with overall appeal or decline.
I worked for Sun Microsystems once, late 90s-2001. A lot of people figured the dot com thing would take a tumble, but felt good about Sun's prospects (as workers and as an investment) because Sun made real tangible things, servers and workstations.
Amazon, at the time, was a bookstore with a "dot com" tacked on to the end.
Apple hadn't yet released OS X and was often accused of coasting on good looks and being pretty.
There was no facebook and wouldn't be for a few more years... there was "the globe", friendster, a few of those. When I was at Sun, I sat in an office that is now facebook.
Google was around, though a lot of people were saying search was no longer a differentiator, and that the important thing for a search engine was to become a portal and be "sticky", and be a bit more like a content provider, entertainment hub, and so forth.
The people who thought Sun was a good bet made perfect sense - in retrospect, they had it wrong, and some people accurately pointed this out at the time... but you could make a reasonable case for Sun.
I do not understand why Facebook ranks at the top when they have near monopoly in internet social networking industry. Twitter, Snapchat and TikTok combined do not have market cap even close to FB plus FB has plenty of space and time to further monetize Instagram and WhatsApp. TikTok is only real competition to FB so far. I voted for Netflix; too much competition and original content is expensive to make.
I think the argument might be different opinions on the value of social networking.
Personally, I think "social networking" has value, but trying to use Facebook is a net negative for me, so I don't get any value out of it at all! On the other hand, I get some value out of SnapChat and TikTok, for as little as I do use them.
That doesn't mean one of them will "win" and overtake Facebook for social networking purposes, but it does mean there is competition, and the original open question of how valuable social networking of the sort Facebook provides will remain into the future.
Facebook's business model seems to me the most fragile one. They rely a lot on automated moderation and are seriously understaffed in the "human moderator" segment.
It is likely that various countries will push Facebook around and force it to somehow respect local laws regarding freedom of speech or criminalization of hate speech. This needs a lot of human moderators whose aggregated compensation might sink the company, unless it starts charging the users.
But charging the users turns them into customers and makes them way more assertive against their business partners in disputes. Yet another source of extra costs.
Ok. So FB ends up getting the top spot, which needs to be discounted by the utter hate for the company on HN. (They're called Meta btw) :)
But, surprisingly Netflix seems to ending up on second place. I think that's shortsighted and not taking into account how deeply they're integrated into the film production industry by now.
It's one thing to build a streaming platform and acquire some customers. It's a whole different game to do this and create great content.
PS: My bet is google. Just look at their deteriorating search results and the missing other revenue streams.
I think the problem with Netflix is there's a ceiling. Disney (which owns, like, all the IP out there... not to mention theme parks, sports and countless other things) is worth $288bn and Netflix is somehow worth $291bn!?
Sure, Netflix has some decent movies out there... but do you really think their catalogue even begins to touch Disney? Either Disney is undervalued (probably true) or Netflix is overvalued (definitely true), and Netflix doesn't currently seem to have significant momentum.
Disney owns/co-owns ESPN, Hulu, ABC, Fox, A&E, The History Channel, Lifetime, Vice, 20th Century Fox, 21st Century Fox, Touchstone, Lucasfilm, Searchlight, National Geographic, FX, FXX... the list goes on.
It's worth remembering that Disney's single largest revenue source is... ESPN. Not its animated movies, other film IPs, other TV series, theme parks, or merchandising, but ESPN.
My armchair/couch analysis says that I see way more new, worthwhile content appear on a regular basis on Netflix than on Disney+. Disney does have arguably better content, and the theme parks are certainly a whole different market from Netflix's limited content and content delivery market, though. Disney+ seems to get much less frequent "new" content.
EDIT: Although, I forgot they own Hulu. We use Hulu about as much as Netflix :) They get content at a good pace.
On a related note, I genuinely think that Meta/FB will be one of the first companies that goes through a Big Oil kind of a break-up within the next decade. Most likely will involve the de-merger of Instagram/WhatsApp from FB and maybe Oculus. Its just a privacy nightmare at this point.
As of this post, scores are 748 FB, 28 AMZN, 29 AAPL, 262 NFLX, 128 GOOG
"Decline" is also not defined. I am interpreting it as "lose a significant amount of users", not as a question to predict their stock price.
I voted Amazon, and given the scores, I feel compelled to explain why.
- AWS is a massive beast within Amazon, and it seems increasingly likely that it'll be spun up into its own company
- Beyond its other attempts at diversifying, Amazon-the-marketplace is garnering worse and worse reputation. Unless they severely change their ways, other players will catch up. Amazon's huge sell to customers used to be its product reliability and customer support. Both of these have suffered tremendously.
- Covid accelerated a lot of the online trends which makes me think Amazon is past its peak.
I could elaborate but it's getting late. FB the website will likely decline in the coming years, but MZ has shown an astounding capacity of staying ahead of trends and buying winners (Instagram, Whatsapp, Oculus). Netflix I do find likely to decline but not as much as Amazon, and most of all Netflix still has lots of potential for growth. Google seems Too Big To Fail, at best my gut says they will stagnate. And apple I just don't know enough about but they seem very safe.
But its Facebook for sure. If it wasn't for buying Instagram they would circling the drain right now.
Google is the king of search and ads.
Apple is the premium product company and now chip maker.
Netflix is in a saturated market but have proven they can make original content.
Amazon runs the vast majority of the internet on its servers, let alone retail sales.
It's interesting... Apple was originally founded in 1976, about a year after Microsoft. But we often hear about and think about FAANG, like with this poll. What sets Microsoft apart from this group?
They are "older" though, being older than Apple is more a measure of how long they've been successful. Microsoft and Apple often battle for larger market capitalization. They both deliver software and hardware, and the two of the most popular operating systems in use (Windows, Android, iOS). Microsoft is arguably more B2B, while Apple has a more recognized consumer brand.
Microsoft is infamous for messing up on the consumer end, and Windows 11 feels like a repeat of this. On the other hand, they are still doing well with their Xbox division. But are they omitted from this poll because of the assumption that their core business... selling to other businesses, will carry them on indefinitely?
Schrödinger's Apple because China's inevitable re-unification with Taiwan will take the U.S.-China cold-war to the next level ( assuming that there's not an actual short, hot war, which, IMO, the U.S. would loose unless it used its nukes), the box will be opened and Tim Cook will be forced to choose whether Apple's loyalties with the U.S. or China. We could even see a rogue Apple China de-merge itself somewhat like happened with ARM [0].
Facebook (the app) is already in decline. WhatsApp has been next to impossible to monetize. Oculus/the Metaverse is an ambitious plan but ultimately pretty hard to pull off. If/when users start getting bored of Instagram, Meta will start to see warning bells. Their future lies in being able to acquire the next "big thing" in the social space, but with increased antitrust scrutiny I don't know if that will be possible either.
They seem to be having tech talent issues as well. In that regard, the repeat AWS outages, plus the state of the Amazon catalog could be seen canaries in the coalmine.
Amazon, Google and Netflix seem to be happy where they are and don't seem to be innovating much; more interested in collecting rents on existing properties. Apple keeps doing what they've been doing for the last 20 years (successfully). Facebook is trying to pitch this Meta thing, which to me sounds like a desperation play and doesn't sound that interesting, but I'm not hip with whatever is going on in social media.
>Amazon... seem to be happy where they are and don't seem to be innovating much
If you're just looking at the consumer end of it, maybe. but over the last couple years amazon has become one of if not the largest logistics company in the world, and across the full line from supplier to last-mile delivery. it's not sexy innovation like a new iPhone is, but they've been developing a huge moat and as long as customers want quick delivery of their online purchases, amazon is a long ways in front of any competitor.
All the complaints about review fraud or inventory commingling are small-potatoes compared to the ability to do next-day delivery of millions of different SKUs to a large portion of the planet.
Amazon might not be innovator in consumer electrics. But they enter the markets with very good price point. Ofc, margins are lower, but they can make lot up with volume and breadth...
The Metaverse play is just a further development of Oculus, which has gained traction afaik. Will it result in a paradigm shift in computing? Probably not but I can see the fanbase/use cases for oculus growing and justifying the investment.
The fascinating aspect of this is what happens when Apple launches its VR / AR hardware. At that point there is going to be an absolutely tremendous hype and re-orienting of the tech view of AR/VR and people will look for the obvious "number 2" which will default to Meta as the only viable player for mass market.
So it means Meta has the chance to be the Android to Apple's iPhone in the VR/AR space. The main challenge to me looks like that nobody can match Apple's silicon for this kind of application so Meta simply won't be able to compete in the same league as far as on-device computing power. Then, philisophically, I don't think Zuckerberg will be able to stomache opening up the Oculus/Quest ecosystem to become the open "yin" to Apple's closed ecosystem "yang". I don't think offering a second ecosystem that is just as closed is going to cut it if they want to get anywhere near what Apple's market share will be. So there's a strong risk this turns out more like Apple Watch vs Android Wear rather than iPhone vs Android.
Whatever happens, it will be pretty interesting to observe.
I think trust in Amazon is beginning to decline, at least in my limited circle. I've recently have had several packages from Amazon UK go missing followed by difficulties sorting it out, alongside other issues. I'm no longer sure I would trust them with high value purchases, and certainly would be wary of buying anything for consumption from them given the number of fake products floating around.
Did this missing packages thing happen around the holidays? I bet there was a spike in craziness due to Christmas/the new year. So I don't think that kind of issue shakes my trust in them very much.
Bummer, I suspect that biased the poll quite a bit. Facebook had an early lead when I first commented. It's on everyone's mind from recent news, so it was going to lean Facebook regardless I'm guessing.
Apple is my vote. It's very easy to be a tech professional who uses a lot of tech in my free time and never rely on, interact with, or even think about Apple products beyond users that may be using them. Therefore, it's easy for me to imagine a world where Apple just doesn't exist, and not because some unknown competitor rises up. However, I don't think that is particularly likely.
I think you underestimate their ecosystem lockin for those who are bought in already. That alone will keep them going for decades unless antitrust intervenes.
Apple's real vulnerability in my view is that most of their value arises from extraordinarily high margins which in turn are driven by perception / fashion. They run the risk that losing that fashion shine at any point will rapidly cause a catastrophic loss of marketshare. Staying perpetually in fashion with young people is notoriously difficult - their default is to orient away from whatever their parents did and do something else. It's very hard too look cool copying Mom and Dad.
> Apple's real vulnerability in my view is that most of their value arises from extraordinarily high margins which in turn are driven by perception / fashion.
Well put. The iPhone is going on 15 years old. Once-hip iPhone users are becoming parents to children and teenagers that are getting their first devices. The iPhone will go the way of the Blackberry in the next 5-10 years and Apple will need to reinvent itself (again, without Jobs) in this time or see a rapid decline.
This is an interesting point. Besides making a few $1 purchases of songs or podcasts with iTunes (which I haven't done since 2018), I've never been an Apple customer. It hasn't taken any special effort to avoid them, either. But I'm struck by two things in Apple's favor:
(1) I keep hearing fantastic things about their new M1 processors and laptops, and it actually has me slightly interested in Apple for the first time in my life, so that's impressive.
(2) Just the extreme loyalty among people who are Apple customers.
Both 1) and 2) are testaments to the effectiveness of Apple's marketing/propaganda, which has historically been their strength. Steve Jobs was a marketing genius.
The M1 may be a nice processor, but do people actually need a nicer processor? Before the M1, were iPhone users really going "gee I really could use more cores"?
Sure, faster tech is always better, but I'm of the position that the M1 craze is >95% marketing propaganda and <5% genuine "this is a qualitative and necessary improvement to my user experience".
Apple enthusiasts definitely want to believe that Apple is constantly innovating and ahead of the game. And there are a lot of them, notably on HN.
Facebook seems the most likely but that’s only if what they’re trying to do with Meta fails. Google on the other hand seems to have entirely lost their ability to innovate and it’s not clear to me that they’re even trying to do anything of significance at all. So I’m a bit torn. But I’m going with Google because I’m the long run I think a lack of effort is probably the worst thing to have
I have not been impressed by Apple, Google and Facebook during the last 4-5 years.
All of these companies are extremely rich and powerful, but they won't disrupt themselves.
They barely compete in practice, they are happy to live in a stable ecosystem they own.
They won't be displaced easily, but they will, at some point, in the mean time technology in their space is unlikely to progress as quickly as it could.
Amazon, Apple (3T MCAP!), and Google for all their faults and frustrations are highly diversified and incredibly wealthy to stagnate themselves into a decline. And I'd argue they each have the collective brainpower to know the criticality of innovation to a company's survival.
"Teenage users of the Facebook app in the US had declined by 13 percent since 2019 and were projected to drop 45 percent over the next two years, driving an overall decline in daily users in the company’s most lucrative ad market."[0]
Sounds pretty dire to me. Dire enough to prompt the rebranding and pivot into Meta. They'd be my first choice. Netflix, 2nd, is just content (with some great tech under the hood), but just content paid for by a monthly subscription.
I'd say in terms of relevancy, either facebook or netflix:
- Netflix already feels like an outlier in that list because they're not as technically focused as any of the other ones listed. They feel more like a media company these days, not a tech company, and as time goes on there's less and less differentiating them from any other media company/streaming service.
- If Metaverse doesn't pan out for them, I don't see either FB or Insta having a revival in popularity in the coming years. The only family I have still under 20 have deleted or abandoned FB, and I don't see the younger generation bothering with the "keep up with family" social network, and Insta keeps getting its lunch eaten with all its competitors. It feels like Insta is going to get a competitor at some point that will take its main offering (photographic status updates, basically) and then it'll suffer the same fate of irrelevancy.
PE ratios are only meaningful for comparing companies with no revenue growth, which is well-understood by investors. For companies with insanely high revenue growth, like Amazon, a PE ratio is essentially meaningless because that growth is financed with earnings. The fact that Amazon is only trading at 3.7x revenue is a strong argument that it is underpriced given its revenue growth, not overpriced.
FB is the obvious one, but they see the writing on the wall and are making plans. I think google is the one that has been complacent but doesn't realize it, so its the one most likely to fail. Its also the only one without effective competition, which is all the more reason it will be taken by surprise.
Netflix, each media holder is looking to monetize and create their own streaming platform. Netflix was first, but does not hold rights to Disney, NBC, etc -
For primary markets, USA and such it will have more and more competition but in other parts of the world they'll be able to still license content until more mature infrastructure develops - netflix is #2 to CDN/cohosting in the world, right behind facebook.
Disney plus though, really getting up there with creative content and it's massive legacy of IP.
Google - Adtech, no problems there unfortunately, just more crappy internet.
Apple - iPhones/Macbook and it's ecosystem is alive and well though revenue stream of app store could change in the future.
Amazon - Infrastructure as a service, way better than Google, no problem here. Storefront is a minor part of it's business.
I voted Google because I don't believe it's special anymore. It's become IBM and Microsoft, with just enough forward momentum to find the rare 10x engineer here and there.
The others still have interesting tech that will unfold in disruptive ways, and that will be the big talent magnet for future engineers.
Netflix will have the most competitively difficult path forward, with massive and aggressive competitors swarming in from all sides. You've got the recently-awoken content giants (Disney+, Paramount+, HBO Max, Hulu, etc), and then you've got new players like Apple and Amazon with deep, deep pockets.
Google can take a lot of criticism for being relatively complacent and without much visible innovation lately, but they'll coast on Google Workspaces (G Suite), search/advertising, and their OS marketshare just like Microsoft did for decades. They have ample time to make and correct mistakes. I've also noticed that whatever products their intense focus is on often see rapid, high quality improvements (like when Google Meet development accelerated after the pandemic started).
Facebook could go either way. It owns Instagram, of course, and I think they know the social media business well. WhatsApp will never go anywhere, it's entrenched. They're big enough to copy novel new social media ideas quickly. A highlight is that they truly are a leader in VR, and the Oculus Quest is clearly a hit in that category. If VR and AR truly become big businesses (skeptical on that but we'll see), Facebook will be growing.
I can't see Amazon declining due to their dominance as a logistics company for everything. They can become truly awful any everyone will just keep using Amazon.com and AWS.
I don't know if this is a bold prediction, a safe prediction, or just one that will get me accused of being a fanboy, but in this list think Apple is the least likely player to decline in the years ahead. They have shown time and time again that they have good management in place that has a long-term vision in mind. A lot of people say that Steve Jobs was the greatest and Apple isn't the same anymore, but they've taken advantage of every possible high margin business with their newest products in the post-Steve Jobs era. Apple Watch with its accessory ecosystem (like $400 Hermes watch bands), headphones and audio, and all the subscription services.
> WhatsApp will never go anywhere, it's entrenched. They're big enough to copy novel new social media ideas quickly.
Whilst it hasn’t yet exploded in user growth, I’d disagree with this. Signal and telegram and others have outmaneuvered WhatsApp on features several times now (eg signal had gifs and emoji reactions, not sure if whatsapp even does yet?)
Once you get over the network effect hurdle (no small feat), the switch is frictionless.
The leading indicator I'd use to analyze how strong these companies will be in a decade is: how much of their bull market zeitgeist is based around nebulous technology ideas that don't exist, and that investors really don't understand. Its the "hope" factor; if investors are bullish on promises about future tech, it means they aren't bullish about their current tech; and history is the best indicator of the future.
The three big zeitgeists right now are: AR/VR, Metaverse, and Crypto. By this measure:
Amazon is very strong. This is a company that achieved unreal fulfillment numbers during a world-stopping global pandemic that brought their peers to their knees. Yet they only control single-digit percentages of US commerce. They're a company that doesn't just make empty promises about next-gen tech like drone delivery or same-day fulfillment or "supply chain hardening"; they deliver (literally) and are deploying this tech today.
Google is strong. Google is the ghost in the information machine. Ten years ago everyone was so concerned about how competitors could disrupt their control in search, maps, video, etc. No one has. If they have eyes, they will find a way to monetize it. Combine that with their slow but methodical push into B2B, between Workspace & Cloud, and I'm not concerned about them.
Netflix is stable. Piracy will be an issue as these platforms shard more and more good content between different subscriptions, but I also think its a self-fixing problem. We're in a period of striation, and we'll soon enter a period of coalescing; Netflix & Disney+ are very well positioned to survive and continue to do well.
Apple is weak. iPhone is flat. Mac is flat. iPad is flat. Their biggest wins over the past decade have been on the accessory side (Watch & AirPods). AR can either be a "metaverse platform", which will stumble to see "next-iPhone success" because Apple doesn't play well with other children and loves their gardens, or it could be "another accessory", which will also stumble because that's not a trillion dollar business.
Facebook is very weak. The metaverse stuff will probably pay off to some degree, but their biggest gain will be on the hardware side. They just won't be able to produce the same kind of open digital universe that video-game native competitors in this space (like Epic) have spent years preparing for. They aren't a video game company, and that's the skillset this takes.
I guess I should expect to see FB at #1 given this is HN, but even with the negative bias, it’s surprising to see people discount the success of Oculus so easily.
Quest was one of the best selling holiday gifts this year, and the companion app even hit #1 in the iOS App Store (over IG, TikTok, etc.)[1]. FB the app may be slowing growth, but AR/VR seems poised to be the next major computing platform - and mainstream adoption shares this sentiment. It’s fine to wish for the company’s demise, but arguing that they’re ready to fail seems foolish.
I was trying to decide which of these I am hoping will decline, but realized the answer is actually all of them - even the one I work for.
Netflix is the only one I consider "innocent" however their market segment as a whole deserves a kicking for pushing us back towards the cable TV model.
I have historically been very anti Apple but the M1 is impressive, as is their attitude to privacy. Not such a good look on the working culture front though.
Google and Amazon are both toxic to some extent, while being so good as to be indispensable to a majority of their customers. For Google that is B2C, for Amazon (and Microsoft, who deserve inclusion here), that is B2B. On balance I expect stasis for all 3.
Having Facebook decline all the way out of existence would give me hope for humanity, but I don't see it happening.
I’ve never had as many issues with F/OSS projects than I’ve had with Google’s open source projects. Whenever I need a bug fixed I tell my girlfriend “I’m about to be treated like I’m dumb in a bug tracker.” It’s usually basic functionality that was documented years ago but never actually functioned properly. The fix is usually done behind closed doors by a Google employee in 1-n months and tossed back over the wall. Very little space for a non-Googler to contribute and employee maintainers seem to leave often.
The documentation structure used across projects is non-sensical as well. No next/prev, just “related” links. They actually brag about the doc process in their software engineering book.
Google and Facebook. One of these days people will understand that ads are a huge driver of overconsumption and therefore climate change. Since Google's and FB's businessmodels depend almost completely on ads, it is clear who has to go first.
I think Apple and Amazon are the only 2 that won't decline. I'm a little on the fence with Google because of phones and maps, but that's kind of all they have going on.
Ok, I'm also probably wrong about Facebook, but I so want to be right! :-)
Everyone here loves to hate on Facebook, but they're not going anywhere. They have successfully metastasized out into the web in a way that irreversible. Instagram is still the hottest thing around, and will be for the foreseeable future.
Of this list, Netflix is the only obvious one that will see serious user loss. They had a great thing going for about 10 years until the pandemic knocked every Hollywood exec upside the head to realize that streaming is no longer optional. Netflix has been reduced almost entirely to their own content at this point as every other producer is running their own service now. And Netflix original content is... spotty at best.
Has to be Netflix as I really don't know what their core competency is right now. They produce some content but they sell subs via content from others. They don't have a larger business to fund the slide into the abyss, IMO.
Honest question, do you really think that if Facebook disappeared tomorrow anything would change? Considering the complaints about Facebook plague every other social website including Twitter, Reddit, and YouTube. That's also assuming another social media site won't rise up to fill that same role (maybe an existing one)?
Would one tobacco company disappearing reduce cancer rates? No, but it's a start.
Every social media company that optimizes for "engagement" (which means addictiveness and the promotion of polarizing and triggering content) is part of the problem but Facebook is probably the largest player here.
These companies are making billions off the collective lobotomization of humanity.
Does FB have anything of interest? They missed the platform train. They don't provide infrastructure. And they didn't buy the next big thing before it got there.
All I see is a huge bet on the yet undefined metaverse and declining interest in their current products. I wouldn't predict a quick death, but a drawn out descent in to obscurity.
And to broaden the question: I don't know where Twitter is off to. It is a miserable place but it fills a well defined niche and there's no competition. While I see Microsoft outlasting humanity. There is no way they'll go down before everything else does first.
Have they done any monetization on WhatsApp yet? Which is ~2 billion users. They could literally add a few billion in revenue by showing a single text ad once per day or similar. That's not counting the fact that instagram is still basically in hyper-growth mode globally and facebook (the webpage/app) is still growing in every market except the US.
Agree that (very) long term they'll need the VR/AR market to take off and capture a significant portion of that to stay on top of the digital ad business along with Google.
Amazon is its own shopping search engine. It won't suffer much even if Google blocks it.
Apple has its own ecosystem and cult. It's safe for the time being.
Google owns advertising, the major mobile OS and search. Anyway all of them could be offered separately in a better way. Advertising and search are easier to overturn than Android.
Facebook is hated but is owns messaging outside Apple's boundary. Network effects protect them but network effects could destroy it as quickly as they built FB's lead.
Netflix can be overturned by any competitor with a cheaper plan.
I don't see any of these companies flat-out failing ever, but it does seem like they've gone the way of IBM. In the Fortune 500 but not quite as innovative as they were at their peak.
I feel like every generation has had their list of companies to be "lifers" at. There was Bell Labs, HP, IBM in a past generation. Then there was Google and Apple in a newer generation. Then there was Netflix, Facebook, AWS, etc. Right now, there are none! Who will start the next one, and avoid it becoming one from my list?
googles only money maker is search and their results suck. i dont care if they are "diversivied" the only product that mattered is search and people are starting to get off it.
Interesting that most here are not counting the cloud businesses of Amazon / Google, but these are important because they are getting built into the foundations of a generation of companies computing infrastructure. It may not be super visible at the moment but this revenue is going to be very durable because the cost of shifting tech stacks is enormous.
Interesting that Microsoft has missed out on being a FAANG (is this just because we cant make the acronym work?) .... they are much more significant than Netflix
That's because they've near enough enveloped the future. Chrome is underrated in importance, every other mobile device is based on Android, and YouTube, after almost 20 years, is still state of the art.
Thinking of things this way, Netflix is the odd one out and most likely to fail, because I reluctantly engage with products from those other brands everyday. And I suspect everyone else does too.
Anyone can make a YouTube replacement now. They just own search for video and provide a consistent interface. Hosting and delivering and playing video files is a solved problem.
Ignoring KPI and financial results I'd say Netflix because its core business is not as diverse as the others ? Unless they pivot their core business to a video CDN.
Apple and Amazon are still churning out products and tech advancement at breakneck speeds, especially given their size.
Google and Facebook are definitely stagnating and burning money on expanding (unsuccessfully) outside of the advertising duopoly they have.
Netflix is in the unfortunate position of battling against the established and increasingly technically competent entertainment industry and the technically competent and better funded tech industry.
I see Facebook as the one most likely to struggle because, at least in the UK, Facebook the site is disliked by tons of people and is now mostly used day to day by older people. I don’t know anyone that is my age that actively posts on it anymore. Most people only keep it to keep in touch with older family who don’t use anything else. On the other hand, Instagram is very popular and so is WhatsApp.
Amazon (Cloud and Shopping), Apple (Hardware), Google (Search, Apps, Cloud) and Microsoft (Cloud, Apps) will be fine. Amazon, Apple and Google will be more regulated but will stabilize like Microsoft. I do not see a growth model for Facebook. Selling ads with regulators all over the world fighting against you is nothing sustainable. And Netflix .. I mean .. look at their catalogue.
Google seems like the obvious choice. They rely on people continuing to use search in its current form. I don't see how that survives the next ten years. It's too obviously ripe for replacement. It's not at all a stretch to say search is for the most part a waste of time if you're going to type a phrase into a text entry box and read the results.
I realize Facebook isn’t very popular right now, but all I see usually is people talking about how bad Facebook is, while the browse their Instagram and talk on messenger.
Not saying you can’t hate the company for what it is, but seems like so many people are calling for the end of Facebook while being it’s most dedicated users.
Netflix is the odd duck here in that being a content company, they don't have a repeatable business model.
They depend on hits and one hit does not guarantee a follow up hit.
Like any film production company or games company, if they start repeatedly investing into big budget content that bombs, they will rapidly run into trouble.
I thought that Netflix would suffer from their apparent focus on "quantity of shows" over "quality of shows", but it seems to have not hurt them much so far. There are still some good Netflix exclusive shows, but there's some really terrible ones to wade through.
Anyone who thinks facebook (i.e. meta) is going to drop can buy put options. the $150 put 2 years out is selling for $5 so if you buy 100 for $50K - When the stock falls you will have enough money to buy a house
From a user utility / user-friendliness / product quality point of view, all of them have already declined, and will likely continue to do so. At the same time all of them will likely continue to grow, although with diminishing returns.
The biggest recent change is that Amazon has thrown away it's reputation for being a reliable customer service focused marketplace in favor of being a marketplace for (too often substandard if not outright fraudulent) third party partners.
Hard not to see Facebook declining as they bleed their younger audience. Part of me wants to see a new AR paradigm with lightweight glasses and a fully augmented reality but it seems fuzzy/far away with lots of ways to get it wrong.
My bet is that Whatsapp and Instagram will be separated from Facebook, but Meta will have many times bigger role in the company's future, so I wouldn't call a declination here.
Google in turn will be split into smaller segments.
Facebook if antitrust actually does its job properly (notably, give back Whatsapp to Brian Acton and Jan Koum, don't require a log-in to view public Instagram photos, and don't tie the Oculus to Facebook accounts)
Could Netflix become the next Time Warner?
Could Facebook become the next Yahoo?
Could Amazon become the next Sears?
Could Apple become the next Kodak?
Google is fine: it already is the new IBM.
This is the first time I've participated in a poll, and I wish I could vote before seeing the results. Not that dang and friends aren't busy enough — just mentioning for the future.
Is this in any way inspired by Chamath Palihapitiya advice to short a FAANG that you think will decline and go long the one you think will do best (to hedge against major market moves)
I wonder if “all of the above” is too crazy? All of these companies have reached a stage in their corporate life where innovation is expected to stop or at least slow down.
I expect Apple will increasingly become the target of anti-trust and since they are so strongly focused on anti-competitive practices, it will impact them the most.
im going netflix. the sheer amount of services the other companies provide is staggering compared to netflix. The streaming space is very crowded, and netflix has the most expensive pricing while shifting to being dependent on shows they create vs a catalog of others.
I don't think people who are voting for netflix hate it. It's just the smaller of the bunch and the one which faces most competition. So, it's a reasonable guess.
If we see any decline, which is unlikely, it would probably be facebook or netflix in my opinion. Tiktok is bigger than facebook right now and they have a very bad reputation. Maybe they will make it big with the metaverse thing, but it's a huge gamble.
I don't think they hate netflix, it's just that there are so many competitors to netflix at this point that it is hard to afford/use all of them and this amount of competition might hurt netflix in the long run.
Their content is seemingly getting worse. And with everyone entering the market likely not going to get better. So inhouse content is one thing, but many people want most of movies and so on from one place.
I'd say Netflix as it stands today. Not enough differentiation, and their catalog continues to skew more and more towards Netflix Originals which constitute a pretty "mixed bag" IMO. If they continue to drop more and more "external" content, which more often makes up the stuff I go in wanting to see, I could see cancelling their service.
OTOH, if they keep producing enough of their own content, that is good enough, they might keep me around. For example, if they come out with another show as good as, say, Bojack Horseman, every so often then I would likely keep my subscription.
Honestly apple is the only company in this list which has any deep respect in the world. So I think they will survive. The rest are just here for the time being.
Out of THOSE? Facebook hands down. The others are also playing fast and loose with the truth and are no angels, but only Facebook is really actively hated.
However, I do predict that they will change in significant ways in the next decade.
* Apple is one Supreme Court ruling away from ending their App Store monopoly that could disrupt the entire world, since it would also affect all other digital marketplaces.
* Amazon is about to enter a decade of unionization all over the world.
* Google and Facebook both lost a key ability to micro-target on their ad platforms so they are both reinventing themselves to drive revenue from other sources, hardware being the biggest moats they can invest in.
* Netflix has some of the worlds brightest minds in data science and they've built up a war-chest of understanding viewing habits. They've also gobbled up a lot of key Hollywood players in the last few years, so I expect some huge cultural changes ahead as these creatives start to take more leadership roles in the company.