It’s been a little bit more than a week now that Facebook has filed for an Initial Public Offering. Simply put, Facebook shares will soon flourish – or die.
There is a lot of high-quality writing about the IPO and I will try to make the best resource of opinion about this particular event.
The Bits team put up a truly fascinating selection of interesting bits from Facebook’s filing. My own sub-selection:
Facebook stores more than 100 petabytes (100 quadrillion bytes) of photos and videos, it says. It has built storage and serving technologies, like Haystack, to efficiently serve and store the data.
Facebook cites the growing use of mobile devices as a risk, because it doesn’t get meaningful revenue from the use of its mobile products. Advertising there is a challenge.
Facebook’s Filing: The Highlights (Bits, New York Times)
Jean-Louis Gassée who writes the excellent Monday Note, has some good things and bad things to say about Mark:
Facebook’s success isn’t just a sweet retort to Zuckerberg’s critics, it’s a confirmation of what makes Silicon Valley tick: techies, geeks, and nerds. While the technoïds aren’t always right — far from it — the great ones end up making and running great companies. The establishment bluestockings may roll their eyes at the hoodies and bare feet, but look at what happens when the suits take over. Look at HP, Yahoo!, or Cisco; regard Apple during its dark age.
Facebook: The Revenge of The Nerds (Monday Note)
Edward Aten, writing for GigaOM argues that while every startup wants to be Facebook, in turn, Facebook wants to be every startup:
Over the last couple of years, consumers have been trending towards products with the opposite approach. Simple, stark, and direct sites and apps that do one thing very, very well. We open Instagram because we want to do one easy thing — share a great picture or see our friends pictures. It’s fun. It’s lightweight. It scratches an itch.
What itch is Facebook scratching? Most people I know can’t clearly articulate why they use Facebook. Now that we’ve reassembled our high school physics class, shared every song we listen to, and uploaded every cat video out there, our feeds (we now have two feeds!) have become cluttered news tickers without any focus or context.
Facebook has nothing to fear, except itself (GigaOM)
Little satisfaction, Mark. .
Farhad Manjoo, him again for Slate, asks whether Facebook is a good business or not:
It’s an enormous business built on the theory that it is possible to collect, store, and mine information about everyone’s lives—and to delight both consumers and advertisers in the process. Facebook’s financial disclosures prove that the experiment has paid off handsomely.
But how do we know that this success will continue? Unlike Apple’s or Google’s raw materials—chips and touchscreens, Web pages and videos—Facebook’s main ingredient is ordinary people all over the world. And people are known to be a restive, fickle, crazy, unpredictable bunch. Is it really so wise to invest in us?
Is Facebook Really a Good Business? (Slate)
Allan Sloan, senior editor at Forbes thinks that the Facebook IPO reveals some uncomfortable trutths about the Silicon Valley and Wall Street:
There’s something to be said for being a fossil when it’s time to look at a phenomenon like Facebook’s pending stock offering. The medium is new, the numbers are high, the buzz is huge, but it’s the same old story I’ve seen a million times in four decades of business writing: A hot company is graciously offering the investing public a piece of its action. At a hot high price, of course.
The Facebook IPO: Marketing, hypocrisy, and arrogance (Fortune)
Last but not least, one would be a fool not to consider The Economist’s take on the recent events. They sum up quite well the figures and give a good chronology but they remain sceptical:
Facebook’s greatest asset is the information that its users willingly surrender to it. Turning such data into cash, however, will inevitably raise privacy concerns. Most users don’t realise how much Facebook knows about them. If they start to feel that it is abusing their trust, they will clam up and log out.
A fistful of dollars (The Economist)
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