I belligerently hate Meta, but it's pretty wild to speculate that a company with 1.9 billion users will just up and die. A slow death on the order of 10-20 years may happen but I doubt React will still be popular by that time no matter what happens with Meta.
> A slow death on the order of 10-20 years may happen
A sibling comment even said,
> Meta's death (if it happened), will be a slow and a long one. Like Oracle or IBM (although IBM is not completely dead).
I think death could happen a lot sooner. Rapidly, even.
Meta is not B2B, but B2C. They won't have ten year contracts, legacy workloads that they can raise costs on, or new businesses to schmooze over a game of golfing with the execs.
Social is fickle. MySpace and Digg died in an afternoon. All of the centuries of dead and forgotten stored content isn't keeping people there. It's connections. And those can come and go easily. Just look at Snapchat and TikTok.
Meta employee compensation is going to begin decreasing both in terms of salary and stock equity. They won't be able to retain good talent, so initiatives will die. Meta is also in a narrative death spiral, and this will eat away at employee morale.
New startups will see blood in the water. They'll come after the Baby Boomers. They'll come after the photographers. Facebook won't have capital to fight battles from every angle.
They have a massive amount of infrastructure to maintain. This will become a giant thorn if they lose employees. How will they weigh keeping the lights on, finishing ongoing migrations, etc. vs fighting new battles to stay alive?
We now realize how little moat they actually have. Facebook really needed a device. They tried to build a handset and failed. Oculus is too little too late.
edit: Facebook ads will cost a lot less as advertisers demand more favorable rates and see diminishing value, perhaps even abandoning the platform for their ad spend.
I would usually argue that there is no way the Facebook/Meta would die (it almost certainly wont) and so the question is redundant.
However because of the way Meta share ownership is structured Zuckerberg has complete control and the board/shareholders cannot eject him. Most (every?) other public company would go through multiple leadership changes over their lifetime as shareholders exert control. Zuckerberg seems to believe he is going to remain in total control forever, so who knows? Maybe one day the fact shareholders have no control will come back to bite him and the the share price will drop through the floor as confidence in him plumes to zero. Frankly maybe the last 48hours could be indicative of that.
In most companies the board would have required the resignation of the CEO after the historically bad results yesterday.
I suppose in some ways shares in Meta aren't really shares in Meta but shares in Zuckerberg himself.
Fascinating. Looking forward to when Zuck hits his mid 40s and ends up self-immolating Meta in the most glorious mid-life crisis the world has ever seen.
[Source: I'm in my 40s and could easily imagine cratering a trillion dollar company I created in a quixotic quest to make the world a better place.]
>In most companies the board would have required the resignation of the CEO after the historically bad results yesterday
That's a strong claim. The stock only dropped 25%, other tech company stocks have dropped as much as 50% in the last few quarters (Snap, DocuSign, etc.) and haven't changed leadership.
1 basic move and they'll likely have 3 more Oculus sales off of me (we already have 1). No Facebook account required, just a typical account that requires no proof of identity or ties to my personal identity in any way. Just like I can sign up for Steam, XBox, Epic, Nintendo, Blizzard, and every other damn service without it. My sister just told me the other day she'd probably get 2 if it weren't for that, she doesn't even game on other platforms. There has to be tons of people holding out because of it. The move was infinitely stupid.
because of the way Meta share ownership is structured Zuckerberg has complete control and the board/shareholders cannot eject him
Tech companies are notoriously bad at succession planning.
Car crash. Plane crash. Heart attack. Stroke. Slippery floor on your super-yacht.
There are a million ways for a CEO's tenure to suddenly and unexpectedly end. Yet the heads of these companies still act like nothing will ever change, even when they're old enough to know better.
Meta's death (if it happened), will be a slow and a long one. Like Oracle or IBM (although IBM is not completely dead). Given the JS ecosystem cycle, React will be replaced by something better much sooner.
> Given the JS ecosystem cycle, React will be replaced by something better much sooner.
The JS ecosystem cycle has slowed way down. React is 9 years old now. Vue is 8 years old. Svelte, the new kid on the block, is 5 years old.
If React is halfway dead, and I doubt that given how much $$ is being invested in new React apps today, then that is still another 9 years of React.
I do agree that Meta will be around for longer than 9 years though! :)
The other thing people don't realize is that React Native is huge. It has been ported all over the place, the basic idea of "universal UI primitives that you write native backings for" is a pretty good one, and JSX is a really nice templating language.
I'm not a fan of quite a few things about React, but its design is solid enough that it isn't going anywhere.
> Meta's death (if it happened), will be a slow and a long one.
Exactly, there's no way Meta will suddenly disappear and go poof, barring some kind of extreme government action or bizarre corpora-cidal action by its controlling shareholder Mark Zuckerberg.
In the event that Meta were to dissolve, liquidate their assets, and return the money to the shareholders, I suspect we would quickly see the establishment of the React Foundation or something akin to that under the mantle of some other open source software foundation.
Either that or it will be forgotten like KnockoutJS was (and for the same reasons).
React is the jQuery of the modern web. It's open-source; it's very popular; it won't die immediately if Meta were to fall; but maybe we will one day grow out of it.
And they aren’t the only one. And countless other companies depend on React “non-fundamentally” at this point.
React is Java now. At most it could start a gradual multi-decade decline (I don’t think this will happen, but it’s imaginable), but I’d bet consultants will still be getting paid to maintain/fix legacy React apps 40 years from now.
They could (and probably should consider) going the Ionic route and building some generic layer that allows them to integrate with Angular, Vue, and future frontend frameworks.
If Meta dies the economy will follow. Meta isnt going anywhere. If Oracle is employees massive amount of people Meta will for a long time to come. Look past one quarters earning reports.
The US economy would barely notice if Facebook vanished over the course of the next few years.
It's a modest blip in the $23 trillion US economy and its economic presence would be absorbed by others relatively quickly. Other platforms would gobble up their ad dollars, other platforms would be born or step in to pick up the eyeball attention. Other marketplaces would absorb their local listings.
Ten years out people would barely remember Facebook ever mattered at all. It'd be like a 45 year old remembering the dominance of Atari in their youth, or IBM ruling over the PC industry for 15 minutes, or AOL's good ten year run in the early days of the consumer Internet.
Nobody really gives a shit about eg Instagram or TikTok. They don't really matter. Oh a trinket vanished, here comes the next trinket. The world didn't stop with AOL, MySpace, Flickr, Friendster, ICQ, AIM, Geocities and 327 other services that nobody cares about today; and it won't stop whenever Facebook gets around to dying (regardless of the difference in scale, that doesn't matter much per capita - you don't have 3,000 friends on Facebook in reality, you have 13). People care more about sitcoms than they do these toy services, and their beloved sitcoms go away all the time, replaced by the next distraction device. Most or all of these social networks will rot and die eventually, who cares. On with the next.
And I say that as someone entirely without any of the comical rage that most of HN has regarding Facebook. It's simply obvious Facebook isn't that important.
Can you expand on this? I see a company that produces net-negative societal value going through a process of price discovery. Facebook/Meta offer nothing beyond a shrinking user base to advertisers.
I don't think "Meta" will die, but "Facebook" might... Meta being the parent company, Facebook being a sub company... As long as Meta keeps something running (I am going to guess that Facebook Infrastructure might be spun out and used as a separate entity) they may have other stuff as a post Facebook project... This whole "Metaverse" thing is one of those that might end up replacing Facebook... then again, both could die and something else takes over... [Edit] Doesn't directly answer your question... but if internal dev still need React, they will keep it around...
Think of all the technologies that we use today that were invented at companies that no longer exist, or are no longer relevant. E.g. Java was invented at Sun, C at Bell Labs. Why would it be different?
You can already (and perhaps should) use preact today, a much better React clone. With 2 lines of webpack config, it can even be a complete drop-in replacement with no code changes.
Ideally a foundation of sorts would spin up to take over managing the project. There's more than enough companies with big pockets deeply invested in the React ecosystem.
Interestingly we’re at the peak it seems. However none have shown any crazy adoption yet. Svelte seemed like it would be really popular but when pandemic hit I stopped hearing about it as much. Hopefully WASM will take over.
Vue is as old as React and seems like it’s relegated to being in Reacts shadow
React has far too much investment from major companies to die. If something happened to Meta (metaverse doesn't work out and they are chopped up and sold off for parts), React would most likely be spun off into a Apache style foundation (ie. "The React Foundation")
My bet: Microsoft would hire them wholesale. They’ve positioned themselves at the center of web development, they’ve embraced JS and React already, and yet they don’t have a front-end framework of their own because they missed the boat.
React is a core part of WordPress, which runs >40% of all sites on the internet, so that alone should be enough to keep it supported for the foreseeable future with or without Meta's engineers.
don't take the adjustment in share price lead you to believe that something is fundamentally out of order with fb's businesses. they're still well positioned and are an essential service for many people worldwide. they seem to have been able to monetize fairly well, too. where do you get the idea that they are going to 'die?'
parkingrift|4 years ago
echelon|4 years ago
A sibling comment even said,
> Meta's death (if it happened), will be a slow and a long one. Like Oracle or IBM (although IBM is not completely dead).
I think death could happen a lot sooner. Rapidly, even.
Meta is not B2B, but B2C. They won't have ten year contracts, legacy workloads that they can raise costs on, or new businesses to schmooze over a game of golfing with the execs.
Social is fickle. MySpace and Digg died in an afternoon. All of the centuries of dead and forgotten stored content isn't keeping people there. It's connections. And those can come and go easily. Just look at Snapchat and TikTok.
Meta employee compensation is going to begin decreasing both in terms of salary and stock equity. They won't be able to retain good talent, so initiatives will die. Meta is also in a narrative death spiral, and this will eat away at employee morale.
New startups will see blood in the water. They'll come after the Baby Boomers. They'll come after the photographers. Facebook won't have capital to fight battles from every angle.
They have a massive amount of infrastructure to maintain. This will become a giant thorn if they lose employees. How will they weigh keeping the lights on, finishing ongoing migrations, etc. vs fighting new battles to stay alive?
We now realize how little moat they actually have. Facebook really needed a device. They tried to build a handset and failed. Oculus is too little too late.
edit: Facebook ads will cost a lot less as advertisers demand more favorable rates and see diminishing value, perhaps even abandoning the platform for their ad spend.
chaosharmonic|4 years ago
turnsout|4 years ago
davidandgoliath|4 years ago
fargo|4 years ago
https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...
samwillis|4 years ago
However because of the way Meta share ownership is structured Zuckerberg has complete control and the board/shareholders cannot eject him. Most (every?) other public company would go through multiple leadership changes over their lifetime as shareholders exert control. Zuckerberg seems to believe he is going to remain in total control forever, so who knows? Maybe one day the fact shareholders have no control will come back to bite him and the the share price will drop through the floor as confidence in him plumes to zero. Frankly maybe the last 48hours could be indicative of that.
In most companies the board would have required the resignation of the CEO after the historically bad results yesterday.
I suppose in some ways shares in Meta aren't really shares in Meta but shares in Zuckerberg himself.
ryandvm|4 years ago
[Source: I'm in my 40s and could easily imagine cratering a trillion dollar company I created in a quixotic quest to make the world a better place.]
mcast|4 years ago
That's a strong claim. The stock only dropped 25%, other tech company stocks have dropped as much as 50% in the last few quarters (Snap, DocuSign, etc.) and haven't changed leadership.
kgwxd|4 years ago
reaperducer|4 years ago
Tech companies are notoriously bad at succession planning.
Car crash. Plane crash. Heart attack. Stroke. Slippery floor on your super-yacht.
There are a million ways for a CEO's tenure to suddenly and unexpectedly end. Yet the heads of these companies still act like nothing will ever change, even when they're old enough to know better.
MuffinFlavored|4 years ago
How is it structured at a quick brief high level? Just the common "he owns 50.1% of the company in terms of # shares?"
jonathan-adly|4 years ago
com2kid|4 years ago
The JS ecosystem cycle has slowed way down. React is 9 years old now. Vue is 8 years old. Svelte, the new kid on the block, is 5 years old.
If React is halfway dead, and I doubt that given how much $$ is being invested in new React apps today, then that is still another 9 years of React.
I do agree that Meta will be around for longer than 9 years though! :)
The other thing people don't realize is that React Native is huge. It has been ported all over the place, the basic idea of "universal UI primitives that you write native backings for" is a pretty good one, and JSX is a really nice templating language.
I'm not a fan of quite a few things about React, but its design is solid enough that it isn't going anywhere.
tablespoon|4 years ago
Exactly, there's no way Meta will suddenly disappear and go poof, barring some kind of extreme government action or bizarre corpora-cidal action by its controlling shareholder Mark Zuckerberg.
pessimizer|4 years ago
sleepybrett|4 years ago
mikece|4 years ago
Either that or it will be forgotten like KnockoutJS was (and for the same reasons).
azangru|4 years ago
williamstein|4 years ago
brundolf|4 years ago
React is Java now. At most it could start a gradual multi-decade decline (I don’t think this will happen, but it’s imaginable), but I’d bet consultants will still be getting paid to maintain/fix legacy React apps 40 years from now.
pier25|4 years ago
Rich Harris is now working at Vercel. On the last Svelte Summit, Steph Dietz (a Vercel dev rel) literally said "Svelte is the future of web dev".
leerob|4 years ago
cyral|4 years ago
WorldMaker|4 years ago
AlwaysRock|4 years ago
adventured|4 years ago
It's a modest blip in the $23 trillion US economy and its economic presence would be absorbed by others relatively quickly. Other platforms would gobble up their ad dollars, other platforms would be born or step in to pick up the eyeball attention. Other marketplaces would absorb their local listings.
Ten years out people would barely remember Facebook ever mattered at all. It'd be like a 45 year old remembering the dominance of Atari in their youth, or IBM ruling over the PC industry for 15 minutes, or AOL's good ten year run in the early days of the consumer Internet.
Nobody really gives a shit about eg Instagram or TikTok. They don't really matter. Oh a trinket vanished, here comes the next trinket. The world didn't stop with AOL, MySpace, Flickr, Friendster, ICQ, AIM, Geocities and 327 other services that nobody cares about today; and it won't stop whenever Facebook gets around to dying (regardless of the difference in scale, that doesn't matter much per capita - you don't have 3,000 friends on Facebook in reality, you have 13). People care more about sitcoms than they do these toy services, and their beloved sitcoms go away all the time, replaced by the next distraction device. Most or all of these social networks will rot and die eventually, who cares. On with the next.
And I say that as someone entirely without any of the comical rage that most of HN has regarding Facebook. It's simply obvious Facebook isn't that important.
willturman|4 years ago
Can you expand on this? I see a company that produces net-negative societal value going through a process of price discovery. Facebook/Meta offer nothing beyond a shrinking user base to advertisers.
nightski|4 years ago
tiernano|4 years ago
jstx1|4 years ago
mikewarot|4 years ago
The second life clone is going to fail. Facebook will go right on making profit.
React is open source, and seems to have zero dependence on Facebook from my perspective.
diego|4 years ago
srgpqt|4 years ago
have_faith|4 years ago
tjpnz|4 years ago
antoniuschan99|4 years ago
Vue is as old as React and seems like it’s relegated to being in Reacts shadow
_fat_santa|4 years ago
pier25|4 years ago
I'm sure the React team would quickly find funding.
brundolf|4 years ago
emteycz|4 years ago
vlunkr|4 years ago
claudiulodro|4 years ago
remyduke|4 years ago
skinnymuch|4 years ago
Tarucho|4 years ago
accountLost|4 years ago
kody|4 years ago