Facebook, Google Could Fall Apart

Right now, Google and Facebook seem invincible, but in five to eight years they could well be gone, argues Eric Jackson in Forbes. "Not bankrupt gone, but MySpace gone." After all, it's happened to loads of web giants before them. The more you look at the Internet, the more "it seems that your long-term viability as a company is dependent on when you were born," he argues. Just look at Yahoo, now "a shell of its 2000 self."

Jackson thinks we've had essentially three Internet generations, from the initial web pioneers, to the Web 2.0 social revolution, to the current shift to mobile. Web 1.0 companies never really wrapped their heads around social media—"their primary business model … seems to override their expansion into new ways of thinking"—and Facebook, the king of social, is having trouble adapting to mobile. "Google’s 76% market share. Facebook’s 900 million monthly users. They just aren’t as sticky as they seem." (More Facebook stories.)