3 ms·
The Collateral Damage of Facebook’s Flops
- dredmorbius 5y agoThis has been the criticism leveled at Google for much of the past decade. I'm trying to remember if flavour-of-the-monthism has been endemic to technology going further back. I can think of Apple's Newton, possibly Microsoft's Zune. The age of services seems more prone to the issue in that a given product --- software or hardware --- can persist independent of corporate enthusiasm, and in many cases cult followings emerge around specific artefacts --- devices, vehicles, films, books, long after they've been abandoned by their creators. Even massive flops (the Edsel, New Coke) don't leave their enthusiasts completely stranded. The closest earlier analogue I can think of might be utopian communities, which launch with grand hopes only to, far more often then not, either fizzle quietly, occasionally imploding spectacularly. In a Drinking the Cool-Aid sense, that might actually be fairly apt. With a service that requires hamsters to keep spinning the wheel, not so much.