[Spooky23]

Totally, but look at how smart (and evil) the tobacco companies were. They pivoted between strategies in smart ways.

Once reality started setting in and denial didn't cut it, they acted to protect the shareholders. Phillip Morris bought things like Kraft that they could spin-out later. They settled claims and paid states billions of dollars for healthcare costs a few years before healthcare started going up 30% a year... which capped their liability AND made it politically impossible to put them out of business.

Google seems to at least attempt to do something similar by entering and investing billions into businesses like Cloud, cars, etc. I don't see that with Facebook... Facebook digs in and spouts some nonsense about connecting people, like the capitalist version of Soviet PR people.

[indigochill]

Well, I'm by no means defending Facebook's business, but they did open-source a couple little projects called React, GraphQL, and PyTorch (and a bunch of other lesser-known stuff), so technically it's not _all_ bad. :P

[Arainach]

The point isn't doing good, the point is having multiple viable lines of business. No one does that better than Microsoft - they have, what, a dozen billion dollar products now? Google is trying but has this far been less successful, and Facebook isn't even really trying at all. The closest they have is Oculus, but hardware isn't going to cut it.