富比士網站上發布了一篇大膽的文章，預言 Google、Facebook 或許將在 5-8 年內消失！發文者畢業於哥倫比亞商學研究所博士班，現任某投資公司的創辦人及經理人。該文章發布之後，已經獲得 3000 個以上的讚，在 twitter 被轉推超過 2000 次，在 LinkedIn 也被分享了 2000 次以上。該作者觀察科技產業生態，大膽做出一個假設：網路公司存活時間的長短，視乎於這些公司「創立的時期」。怎麼說呢？在對企業組織所作的學術研究中，有這麼一種理論，就是企業的領導者或管理團隊，他們的出生背景、教育程度、職場經歷，對於企業的整體表現會有決定性的影響。 從消費者的角度來看，人類世代交替，每一代之間都存在著獨特的差異性，每一代對於世界社會的感知都有所不同，這些不同的認知，都會影響到消費決策及其他無以數計的行為習慣。簡而言之，在科技世代的交疊中，上一代的決策者，將無法體會新一代消費者的想法，當然也就無法掌握新世代的消費市場。 作者將網路世代分為三個時期：Web 1.0 時期（1994-2001），此時期誕生的代表公司如：Yahoo、Google、Amazon 等；Web 2.0 或稱社群網路時期（2002-2009），有：Facebook、LinkedIn、Groupon 等；以及目前的行動化時期（2010- 現今），代表公司如 Instagram 等。 Web 1.0 時代成功的網路公司，相當擅長於聚集網路上繁雜的資訊，並以類似入口網站的方式呈現，如 Google 非常善於組織搜尋資訊，Amazon 非常善於處理購物資訊等。Web 2.0 興起時，新一代的網站則注重於使用者間的互動與關聯，如 MySpace 建立於對音樂有熱情的用戶間，Facebook 著重於大學生，LinkedIn 則著重於商務人士。 然而在 Web 1.0 時期成功的網路公司，在 Web 2.0 時代是否有亮眼的成績呢？彷彿從未看到 Amazon 專注於經營社群，Google 雖然投注大筆經費在社群網站，但如今也未到舉足輕重的地位。 誕生於 2010 年之後的網路公司，開始有非常不一樣的觀點。這些竄起的新星如 Instagram，將智慧型手機當成主要的發展平台，他們甚至不會想建立網站，他們假設他們的用戶，將無時無刻使用 App 來取代上網行為。 不會再有 Web 3.0 的世代發生了，因為 Web 已經死亡。 Web 1.0 及 Web 2.0 時期誕生的企業，會無法適應新人類的思考型態。Facebook 雖然即將公開募股，市值上看 1400 億美元，但是它在行動市場並未獲利，而在手機、平板上也只是提供類似桌面程式的使用體驗。Facebook 去年獲利僅 37 億美元，而今年第一季與去年第四季相較，獲利速度是在下降中。「Facebook 根本不知道該如何從行動市場獲利。」作者如此斷言。 就算這些「老」公司無法搞懂新一代消費者的想法，又何以見得會在 5-8 年內消失？對於科技產業的進化速度，作者以蘋果執行長庫克上個月才發表的數據說明。蘋果的 iPad 創下在 2 年內銷售 6700 萬台的佳績，當初 Mac 電腦花了 24 年才賣到這個數量，iPod 花了 5 年，而 iPhone 花了 3 年，銷售時間上驚人的縮短，顯示市場生態的變化是越來越快速。 雖然這些網路巨頭眼前並沒有迫切的危機，不過當某天出現新的手機搜尋服務、購物服務或社群服務時，用戶會不會立刻掉頭就走？這個速度有多快？ 這些大企業似乎也感受到了競爭壓力，各自展開策略，如 Facebook 買下 Instagram、Google 買下 Motorola 等，但作者認為從生態學來看，世代間的差異無法避免；從歷史角度來看，Web 1.0 的企業也尚未在 Web 2.0 成功過。他認為，再過 5-8 年，這些網路公司就算沒有消失，大概也只會剩下空殼吧。 Here's Why Google and Facebook MightCompletely Disappear in the Next 5 Years... Eric Jackson, Contributor, Forbes 4/30/2012 We think of Google and Facebook as Webgorillas. They’ll be around forever.Yet, with the rate that the tech world is moving these days, there are goodreasons to think both might be gone completely in 5 – 8 years. Not bankrupt gone, but MySpace gone. And there’s some academic theory to back upthat view, along with casual observations from recent history. When I was a PhD student 15 years ago, Istudied with Don Hambrick who is a scholar known for a career showing theeffects of management teams and directors (for good and for ill) on theirorganizations’ strategies and performance. One of the central tenets of this school of thought on organizations isthat senior teams and directors have an outsized influence on organizationaloutcomes. What’s more, their backgrounds(including education and career paths) have a big effect on how they see theworld, various competitive situations and the choices they make. There’s another school of thought whichtakes the opposite view called population ecology or organizational ecologywhich put forward that managers don’t really matter all that much. This view grew out of sociologists who’dtaken to study organizations in the 1970s. They assert that organizational outcomes have much more to do with industryeffects than who the CEO is and the choices he or she makes. They study birth and death rates ofpopulations of organizations, as well as the effects of age, competition andresources in the surrounding environment on an organization’s birth and deathrate. Most of these organizationalecology scholars come out of the Universityof California at Berkeley. As a graduate student, I didn’t have muchtime for this ecology line of thinking. I believed in the power of the individual executive to overcome allchallenges in the external environment. We can always point to dynamic CEOs as case studies, even though thesociologists would say those are the equivalent of celebrating the smarts oflottery winners. As I age and watch what’s happening in theworld of technology and mobile, I can’t stop thinking of these ecologiststhough. More and more in tech, it seems that yourlong-term viability as a company is dependent on when you were born. Think of the differences betweengenerations and when we talk about how the Baby Boomers behave differently fromGen X’ers and additional differences with the Millennials. Each generation is perceived to see the worldin a very unique way that translates into their buying decisions and countlessother habits. In the tech world, we’ve really had 3generations: Web 1.0 (companies founded from 1994 – 2001, including Netscape, Yahoo!(YHOO), AOL (AOL), Google (GOOG), Amazon (AMZN) and eBay (EBAY)), Web2.0 or Social (companies founded from 2002 – 2009, including Facebook (FB),LinkedIn (LNKD), and Groupon (GRPN)), and now Mobile (from 2010 – present, including Instagram). With each succeeding generation in tech, itseems the prior generation can’t quite wrap its head around the subtle changesthat the next generation brings. Web 1.0companies did a great job of aggregating data and presenting it in an easy todigest portal fashion. Google did a goodjob organizing the chaos of the Web better than AltaVista, Excite, Lycos andall the other search engines that preceded it. Amazon did a great job of centralizing the chaos of e-commerce shoppingand putting all you needed in one place. When Web 2.0 companies began to emerge,they seemed to gravitate to the importance of social connections. MySpace built a network of people with apassion for music initially. Facebookgot college students. LinkedIn got thewhite collar professionals. Digg,Reddit, and StumbleUpon showed how users could generate content themselves andmake the overall community more valuable. Yet, Web 1.0 companies never really seemedto be able to grasp the importance of building a social community and tappinginto the backgrounds of those users. Even when it seems painfully obvious to everyone, there just doesn’tseem to be the capacity of these older companies to shift to a newparadigm. Why has Amazon done so littlein social? And Google? Even as they pour billions at the problem,their primary business model which made them successful in the first placeseems to override their expansion into some new way of thinking. Social companies born since 2010 have avery different view of the world. Thesecompanies – and Instagram is the most topical example at the moment – view themobile smartphone as the primary (and oftentimes exclusive) platform for theirapplication. They don’t even think oflaunching via a web site. They assume,over time, people will use their mobile applications almost entirely instead ofwebsites. We will never have Web 3.0, because theWeb’s dead. Web 1.0 and 2.0 companies still seem unsurehow to adapt to this new paradigm. Facebook is the triumphant winner of social companies. It will go public in a few weeks and probablyhit $140 billion in market capitalization. Yet, it loses money in mobile and has rather simple iPhone and iPadversions of its desktop experience. Itis just trying to figure out how to make money on the web – as it only had $3.7billion in revenues in 2011 and its revenues actually decelerated in Q1 of thisyear relative to Q4 of last year. It hasno idea how it will make money in mobile. The failed history of Web 1.0 companiesadapting to the world of social suggests that Facebook will be as woeful atadapting to social as Google has been with its “ghost town” Google+ initiativelast year. The organizational ecologists talked aboutthe “liability of obsolescence” which is a growing mismatch between anorganization’s inherent product strategy and its operating environment overtime. This probably is a goodexplanation for what we’re seeing in the tech world today. Are companies like Google, Amazon, andYahoo! obsolete? They’re stillgrowing. They still have enormousaudiences. They also have very talentedmanagers. But with each new paradigm shift (first tosocial, now to mobile, and next to whatever else), the older generations getincreasingly out of touch and likely closer to their significant decline. What’s more, the tech world in which we livein seems to be speeding up. Tim Cook hadan interesting line about the velocity of change in his earnings call lastweek: through the last quarter, I should say, which is just 2 years after weshipped the initial iPad, we’ve sold 67 million. And to put that in some context,it took us 24 years to sell that many Macs and 5 years for that many iPods andover 3 years for that many iPhones. And we were extremely happy with thetrajectory on all of those products. And so I think iPad, it’s a profoundproduct. Yahoo is already a shell of its 2000self. There is increasing chatter(including from me) about how Google’s facing a painful multiple contraction,once its desktop search business (still accounting for the vast majority of itsrevenues and profits) starts to fall off a cliff as users dramatically droptraditional search for new ways of getting information they want in a mobileworld. Is Amazon destined todecline? There seem to be no signs of ittoday and people will still need to buy stuff in a mobile world, but the newmobile platform will certainly open the possibilities for new entrants thatAmazon can’t even imagine today. Facebook is also probably facing a toughroad ahead as this shift to mobile happens. As Hamish McKenzie said last week, “I suspect that Facebook will try toaddress that issue by breaking up its various featuresinto separate apps or HTML5 sites: one for messaging, one for the news feed,one for photos, and, perhaps, one for an address book. But that fragments the coreproduct, probably to its detriment.” Considering how long Facebook dragged itsfeet to get into mobile in the first place, the data suggests they will beexactly as slow to change as Google was to social. Does the Instagram acquisition change that? Notreally, in my view. It shows they’rereally fearful of being displaced by a mobile upstart. However, why would bolting on a mobile app toa Web 2.0 platform (and a very good one at that) change any of the underlyingdynamics we’re discussing here? I doubt it. What about Apple? Where does it fit in to this classificationscheme? Apple is really a hardware company, so it’sdifficult to put it into a bucket related to web apps. It certainly seemed very Web 1.0 with its Ping social application. Yet it’s succeeded in mobile from making the best hardware and softwareecosystem for apps to proliferate on. Insome ways, as long as it has a successful iOS platform, it doesn’t care whichWeb 1.0, 2.0 and mobile companies fail or succeed on top of it. Maybe that’s why so many non-mobile companiesseem to want to emulate Apple. Googlebought Motorola Mobility (MMI) to get into the hardware business. Facebook and Baidu (BIDU) are rumored to belaunching their own mobile OS. The bottom line is that the next 5 – 8years could be incredibly dynamic. It’spossible that both Google and Facebook could be shells of their current selves– or gone entirely. They will have all the money in the worldto try and adapt to the shift to mobile but history suggests they won’t be ableto successfully do it. I often hearGoogle bulls point to the market share of Android or Eric Schmidt’s hypothesisthat Google could one day charge all Android subscribers $10 a month forvalue-added services as proof of future profits. Yet, where are all the great social successstories by Web 1.0 companies? I imaginewe’ll see as many great examples of social companies jumping horses mid-race tobecome great mobile companies. It’s a lot easier to start asking Siri forinformation instead of typing search terms into a box compared to thousands ofenterprises ceasing to upgrade to the next version of Windows. Google’s 76% market share. Facebook’s 900 million monthly users. They just aren’t as sticky as they seem. And does anyone think the pace of change isgoing to increase in the next 5 years versus the last? That we’re going to see fewer innovations,fewer start-ups trying more stuff on cheaper and more powerful processingpower? In all likelihood, we could havean entirely new way of gathering information and interacting with ads in a newmobile world than what we’re currently used to today. The Googles and Facebooks of tomorrow mightnot even exist today. And several Web1.0 and 2.0 companies might be completely wiped off the map by then. Fortunes will be made by those who adapt toand invest in this complete greenfield. Those who own the future are going to bethe ones who create it. It’s all up forgrabs. Web monopolies are not as stickyas the monopolies of old.
ZouXiaohui18:40:19 http://www.linkedin.com/pub/xiaohui-zou-%E9%82%B9%E6%99%93%E8%BE%89/37/46/158 邹晓辉 Xiaohui Zou Sponsor at China-US Cooperation Project: Searle Research of Bilingual Information Processing China Higher Education Current Sponsor at China-US Cooperation Project: Searle Research of Bilingual Information Processing Researcher at China University of Geosciences (Beijing) Past Vice-chairman of Academic Council at CHED2010 Education UC Berkeley Harvard University Beijing University Jilin University Radio and Television University (Guizhou) Guizhou University Telecommunications School under Fifth Engineering Bureau at the Ministry of Railway
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