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>Look what happened when people "lost trust" in Facebook. Shares are down 4% relative to a year ago. Is the company permanently crippled? Are people revolting and moving to alternate forms of social media? Fewer of the people immediately connected to your local graph are probably using Facebook. But that local loss of users gets completely offset by the new users they grow internationally.

The idea that because things are some way now they will be forever thusly hasn't panned out historically.

Once dominant IT companies are now dust. The same thing can happen to any company, including FB and Google is they piss enough people off.

And that's incremental. Today's annoyances matter.

Once all-mighty 99% of the Desktop Microsoft now has the more lucrative 5% of the desktop eaten by Apple, and is irrelevant on mobile and web services (search, mail). If they had gathered goodwill back then (like they strive to do now) things would have been different.




> The idea that because things are some way now they will be forever thusly hasn't panned out historically.

I'm not refuting (because I don't really know) but questioning this statement.

Technological progress is a confounder, apart from that I think people and organizations behave as they always have. Okay, enslaving and murdering people has become harder - in the "modern" parts of the world at least. The "system" still favors not paying too much attention to the human side, and to do whatever you can get away with regardless of cost to society, I think.


>Technological progress is a confounder, apart from that I think people and organizations behave as they always have

This discussion (and thus the quip about "things being the same forever") is not about human nature, though. It's about consumer choices, and whether Google is really secure long term.




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