HN Books @HNBooksMonth

Take a look at Jim Collins’ How the Mighty Fall. https://www.amazon.com/How-Mighty-Fall-Companies-Never/dp/09...

How the Mighty Fall [1] is the book by Jim Collins that I'll never forget.

The lessons within remain top of mind as a key mental check that has stuck with me over the years. The book begins with a study on hubris and how your blindspots are like a cancer of mind that remain undetected while working to kill you long before their effects are known.

See Jim Collins' 2009 interview w/ Charlie Rose to get the gist and understand the context for how the book came to be: https://charlierose.com/videos/22502 [video]

[1] https://www.jimcollins.com/books/how-the-mighty-fall.html

How The Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In, by Jim Collins https://www.amazon.com/How-Mighty-Fall-Companies-Never/dp/09...

Facebook won't be "killed". It probably won't disappear in an instant. But it may most likely fade away in time due to a confluence of many factors, not just one: 1. early adopters growing up, 2. decreasing marginal utility, 3. failure to directly align revenue with consumers, 4. lack of vision, 5. corporatism, 6. solipsism, 7. something better coming along.

See: "How the Mighty Fall" by Jim Collins (http://www.amazon.com/How-Mighty-Fall-Companies-Never/dp/097...).

⬐ joe_the_user

IF (big if) Facebook's profitability is only illusionary[1], then Facebook could die in an instant. If Facebook's profits only come through churning advertisers, FB could die if the growth that pulled in those advertisers stopped.

It costs real money to keep Facebook's servers running and Facebook's employees working. If a market shift revealed Facebook as a money-sink "as far as the eye can see", then the folks other than Zuckerberg who control that money will want to use it for something else.

One might ask what magic does FB really have for profitability that Myspace didn't have? I'd like to hear how this magic will come from more users in and of itself.

[1] http://blog.jperla.com/facebook-is-a-ponzi-scheme-0

⬐ tocomment

Somewhat OT, but what's the difference between solipsism and solopism? I seem to get the same search results for both.

Just two different spellings of the same thing?

⬐ None

None

⬐ w1ntermute

Somewhat OT, but what's the difference between solipsism and solopism?

Solopism is a misspelling: http://omploader.org/vNHJtZA

⬐ petervandijck

How would decreasing marginal utility apply? (Trying to understand the concept)

⬐ jorangreef

Facebook gives you utility the first time you use it. It gets better as you figure it out and your friends join. So your marginal utility is increasing. But then after a while, all things being equal (i.e. Facebook makes no upgrades), your marginal utility must at some point start to decrease in accordance with the law of diminishing returns. It's like eating an ice cream. Maybe you have another ice cream and then another but at some point you're going to get sick. In Facebook's case, there's only so much Facebooking you can do before you start getting bored. Unless Facebook manage to keep launching new features, improving things to counteract this. And doing that is no easy task. As your user base grows, your software has to become even more and more addictive to compensate. I think there's more a problem with diminishing marginal utility with Facebook than there is with Amazon or Google or Apple or maybe even Twitter since the latter seem to serve a more direct, simpler, more basic need.

⬐ rokhayakebe

Man I doubt some people get tired of Facebook. I see some users who have more updates in one day than I did the entire year. I am not joking btw.

⬐ kilian

Unless you get bored with your friends, I don't know if this much applies apart from the facebook apps.

⬐ detst

I think there's a big difference between being bored with your friends and being bored with Facebook. I'm bored of Facebook. It's sole use for me at this point is to track down people I can't find otherwise (e.g. people I haven't talked to in a long time)