🟢 The year the GAFAM could disappear. Episode 5, Facebook
In this series of five articles, I will discuss each of the current GAFAMs as 2023 might be the year their reign of supremacy on our life, work, and social connection comes to an end.
We started a few weeks ago to discuss if this could be the end of times for "tech" as we knew it. Since then, we discussed Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and last week (as a special episode), the ChatGPT lightning strike. In this series, I kept Facebook last as I already broadly discussed the company's future through their bet on the Metaverse (whatever it is and what they think it will be).
Let's briefly go back to it and then understand how and why Facebook might be checkmate for the foreseeable future and what it entails...
Episode 5, Facebook
The unbearable weight of the Metaverse
In a nutshell, the all-in bet on just one product with zero proven market remotely capable of sustaining their footprint is beyond any business rationale.
This 83,500 employees business serving 2.9 billion users and generating $118B of yearly income is simply going all in on... a single idea. This is beyond a rookie mistake or a strategic mishap. It's about thinking you had a religious revelation and you're Noha 2.0, going all in, building an ark in the middle of the desert. - Meta is not shedding value because their metaverse sucks, Oct. 2022
In case you are a firm believer in the Metaverse (which I wouldn't dare to dispute as it would be a discussion about religion, not the physics of business), I would still say that Facebook wouldn't stand a chance against Microsoft, as the only beachhead would be in B2B. A market that Facebook is genetically ill-equipped to address. Then again, as Microsoft shut down its whole Metaverse team just a few days ago, this is another loud and clear signal that this market is a dead-end.
