Venture capitalists are sometimes too focused on short-term futures, but once in a while one finds somebody who is willing to look at the past and predict how it will change the future.

One such person is Dr Eric Jackson, the founder of investment firm Ironfire Capital. Dr Jackson said on CNBC's Squawk on the Street that in five to eight years, Facebook will disappear.

Web, social networking, mobile

His logic is simple. He looks at Web companies as “generations’’, with the first representing portals, the second concerning social networking and the third focusing on making money from the mobile.

And as Dr Jackson rightly points out, no company has successfully managed two generations — witness Microsoft struggling on the Web, Yahoo on social networking and Facebook itself on mobile.

Digital vs mini computers

And this is nothing new. If you want a historic perspective, IBM, the king of the mainframe era, struggled against digital when the mini computers came.

Digital found the going tough in the PC era and many PC vendors are today finding it difficult to cope with the post-PC world and its smart phones and tablets.

Clearly, the IT industry is all about paradigm shifts — and when the shift comes, the companies that drove one wave become irrelevant in the next.

If one takes Dr Jackson’s argument about survival in the mobile space seriously, one wonders — who will win?

Will it be Google with its recently acquired QuickOffice, which makes it more relevant to mobile users who want to edit Microsoft documents on the go?

Will it be Twitter, which was designed with mobiles in mind? Or, forget the usual suspects — will it be some company that is yet to be founded?

balaji.n@thehindu.co.in

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