Facebook has huge promise, but I think it is still too young to tell if it has legs on the order of a century. On the other hand, Google has already shown its ability to hop platforms again and again (Search to E-mail, Web to Mobile, Software to Automotive), and their head-start in artificial intelligence will make them an important force for at least two decades. I would bet Google is the company of this generation that is still around in 2050.
I would have thought that facebook single area of expertise (at this time anyway) makes it a company thats longevity is not guaranteed. When you consider the fact that we are seeing the monopoly that was (and still is to a large extent) Microsoft challenged very seriously on many fronts, and you look at the amount of area's they are involved in, similarily, the longevity of these companies depend on their ability to change their dynamic like IBM.
I agree about Google, but I don't think Facebook is even remotely in the same class. For all I know it could be gone in a couple of years. Apple and Amazon seem like two much more likely candidates, along with Google.
Mind you, back in its infancy you could very much have said the same thing about Google (search? how can you even begin to make money off that?) - and Facebook has been acquiring rather a lot of talented engineers.
Assuming that the core priority is to maintain and optimise their core business to a certain point of stability, they can then look at branching out into other areas that present attractive opportunities.
Of course Google has developed a very specific method to encourage this kind of behaviour (80/20) and Amazon has yet again quite a different process, so it would be very interesting to see how Facebook will go about this in the next few years.
I think there's a strong argument to be made for the case that anything based on social is ephemeral. Facebook may be hiring a lot of engineers, but it is also, really very young, and networks change over time. There's a reason the post office doesn't own telecoms, and there's a reason Ma Bell doesn't own facebook, and didn't own Myspace (aside from the fact that they got trust-busted).
Anyhow, it could well the world's greatest computer engineers, but I doubt even that will allow it to survive the shifting sands of both fashion and technology over the next hundred years. Its not that facebook is bad, just that I very much doubt it'll be plugged into the technology that my children use to communicate in high school, twenty to thirty years from now. It may be telepathy.
Facebook has been acquiring rather a lot of talented engineers.
True, but staying relevant in the field is not an engineering problem, it is a managerial problem. Microsoft had (and still has) a lot of talented engineers, yet they missed out on some great opportunities because of poor managerial decisions. That's why in 2011 they are not as relevant as they were in the 90s.
