Playing devil's advocate, what happens when the trust doesn't become restored?
The company loses ad revenue?
Developers flee in mass droves to...Yahoo and Microsoft?
Look what happened when people "lost trust" in Facebook. Shares are down 4% relative to a year ago. Is the company permanently crippled? Are people revolting and moving to alternate forms of social media? Fewer of the people immediately connected to your local graph are probably using Facebook. But that local loss of users gets completely offset by the new users they grow internationally.
Ultimately, these companies are beholden to their boards and shareholders.
Unless Inbox users clicked enough ads to make a dent in revenue, the organization has every reason to deprioritze competing products, and continue down the path of creating free A/B tests, and then merging the winner into a hybrid/better product.
Take a look at Fuchsia.
Or Dart and Flutter.
Or Hangouts and Talk.
An easy heuristic here might be, "Lose trust in the few in order to benefit the many." It sounds really sad, but it is the reality numerous companies live by.
Facebook is in trouble man, I am amazed the outcry of general public. Its all circumstantial evidence but the amount of people in my circle who are talking about leaving, creating fake profiles and getting their kids pictures of the platform is profound.
Edit:
IMO.
Teenagers have abandoned Facebook in favour of other social media platforms such as Snapchat and Instagram, according to a study from the Pew Research Center.
Just 51% of US individuals aged 13 to 17 say they use Facebook – a dramatic plunge from the 71% who said they used the social network in Pew’s previous study in 2015, when it was the dominant online platform.
In this year’s study reported Facebook use was, according to Pew, “notably lower” than the percentage of teens who said they used YouTube (85%), Instagram (72%) or Snapchat (69%). In the previous study, just 52% of teens said they used Instagram, while 41% said they used Snapchat.
Considering Facebook owns Instagram this sounds like great news for Facebook. Facebook the company owning the product teens are using instead of Facebook the product seems like a good long term strategy.
Yeah, not so great news for Facebook the company I'm afraid.
Being a social media user is age-independent, whereas one's teens is something they grow out of.
So, not only existing teens grow out of being teens (and eventually Snapchat users), but new teens won't necessarily grow into it to replace them.
Unlike older people, who value utility and what they already know more, new teens are just entering the social media field (and thus are more open to whatever might come next), and they are all about what's cool (so when a service loses it's cool it abandoned MySpace-like fast).
Good point. To that, I'd add that Facebook needs "cool" users. Grandmas may use Facebook a ton and be very loyal, but they're not a cool, inspiring user group others want to follow and emulate.
No tech company of this size dies overnight. And they might be diversified enough to be fine for a very long time (WhatsApp, Instagram) but these are very real problems for facebook.
>Look what happened when people "lost trust" in Facebook. Shares are down 4% relative to a year ago. Is the company permanently crippled? Are people revolting and moving to alternate forms of social media? Fewer of the people immediately connected to your local graph are probably using Facebook. But that local loss of users gets completely offset by the new users they grow internationally.
The idea that because things are some way now they will be forever thusly hasn't panned out historically.
Once dominant IT companies are now dust. The same thing can happen to any company, including FB and Google is they piss enough people off.
And that's incremental. Today's annoyances matter.
Once all-mighty 99% of the Desktop Microsoft now has the more lucrative 5% of the desktop eaten by Apple, and is irrelevant on mobile and web services (search, mail). If they had gathered goodwill back then (like they strive to do now) things would have been different.
> The idea that because things are some way now they will be forever thusly hasn't panned out historically.
I'm not refuting (because I don't really know) but questioning this statement.
Technological progress is a confounder, apart from that I think people and organizations behave as they always have. Okay, enslaving and murdering people has become harder - in the "modern" parts of the world at least. The "system" still favors not paying too much attention to the human side, and to do whatever you can get away with regardless of cost to society, I think.
>Technological progress is a confounder, apart from that I think people and organizations behave as they always have
This discussion (and thus the quip about "things being the same forever") is not about human nature, though. It's about consumer choices, and whether Google is really secure long term.
Eh. I just refuse to work on stuff involving Google APIs unless I really have no other choice. It's not as annoying to set up as, say AWS, but it's much less predictable. Not worth it. A focused alternative is usually more responsive. Though sometimes they get acquired so there really is no winning.
Google has brought Diane Green to run their cloud business. How many major clients have they signed up? Google has a huge Cash cow in ads. Otherwise all these cracks would be much more visible.
Playing devil's advocate, what happens when the trust doesn't become restored?
The company loses ad revenue?
Developers flee in mass droves to...Yahoo and Microsoft?
Look what happened when people "lost trust" in Facebook. Shares are down 4% relative to a year ago. Is the company permanently crippled? Are people revolting and moving to alternate forms of social media? Fewer of the people immediately connected to your local graph are probably using Facebook. But that local loss of users gets completely offset by the new users they grow internationally.
Ultimately, these companies are beholden to their boards and shareholders.
Unless Inbox users clicked enough ads to make a dent in revenue, the organization has every reason to deprioritze competing products, and continue down the path of creating free A/B tests, and then merging the winner into a hybrid/better product.
Take a look at Fuchsia.
Or Dart and Flutter.
Or Hangouts and Talk.
An easy heuristic here might be, "Lose trust in the few in order to benefit the many." It sounds really sad, but it is the reality numerous companies live by.