Here's Why Google and Facebook Might Completely Disappear in the Next 5 Years

We think of Google and Facebook as Web gorillas.  They’ll be around forever. Yet, with the rate that the tech world is moving these days, there are good reasons to think both might be gone completely in 5 – 8 years.  Not bankrupt gone, but MySpace gone.  And there’s some academic theory to back up that view, along with casual observations from recent history.

When I was a PhD student 15 years ago, I studied with Don Hambrick who is a scholar known for a career showing the effects of management teams and directors (for good and for ill) on their organizations’ strategies and performance.  One of the central tenets of this school of thought on organizations is that senior teams and directors have an outsized influence on organizational outcomes.  What’s more, their backgrounds (including education and career paths) have a big effect on how they see the world, various competitive situations and the choices they make.

There’s another school of thought which takes the opposite view called population ecology or organizational ecology which put forward that managers don’t really matter all that much.  This view grew out of sociologists who’d taken to study organizations in the 1970s.  They assert that organizational outcomes have much more to do with industry effects than who the CEO is and the choices he or she makes.  They study birth and death rates of populations of organizations, as well as the effects of age, competition and resources in the surrounding environment on an organization’s birth and death rate.  Most of these organizational ecology scholars come out of the University of California at Berkeley.