Facebook is the new AOL

The 90s are back. They’re back in fashion, they’re back in music, and they are most certainly back in technology. In a way this makes sense; the top end of the Millennial generation was just entering high school in the 90s, and now they’re into the workplace and armed with spending power, so it’s easy to appeal directly to their nostalgia. Look, here’s Salt-n-Pepa shilling for Geico!

But um, hey everybody: the 90s were a decade of excess and mistakes and excessive mistakes. The rollicking good times of the 90s ended with the dot-com collapse of the early 2000s, the memories of which continue to shape the industry today [..]

Just think about it for a minute. Of course Facebook is the new AOL. Facebook is the beginning and the end of the internet for a huge number of normal people, a combination of primary service provider (user profiles, messaging, photo sharing) and 90s-style portal to the wider web. Facebook has its own IM platform, Messenger, just like AOL had AOL Instant Messenger. Then it went and bought WhatsApp, the messaging platform more popular internationally, just like AOL bought ICQ [..]

And Facebook’s core business of selling ads into the News Feed is the same combination of incredibly vulnerable and apocalypse-proof as AOL’s dial-up business: it will continue minting money for as long as the parents and grandparents of the world start their day with Facebook, and it will stop growing the second all of their kids move on to something better [..]

Apple is the new Sony [..]

Qualcomm is the new Intel [..]

---

Hilarious post. I dont think Google is the new Microsoft, but the rest is A+. And.. Microsoft itself does so many other things nowadays.. like gaming. So maybe Microsoft is the new … Atari? Hey, why stop at 90s, we could go back to 80s!.

Fun post.