Facebook or Microsoft: Whose Dominance Will Last Longer?

By coincidence, that Satya Nadella, a forty-six-year-old Indian-American, will succeed Steve Ballmer as its chief executive came on the same day that Facebook celebrated its tenth birthday. The timing prompts a question: Which of these two global behemoths, both the creations of Harvard dropouts, is most likely to be around in another twenty or thirty years?

Facebook looks like the obvious answer. It has exhibited astonishing growth during the past decade, and now has more than seven hundred and fifty million daily active users, which is more than a tenth of the world’s population. More than two-thirds of these daily users—some five hundred and sixty million of them—access Facebook on mobile devices, which, it is widely agreed, represent the future of the technology industry.

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