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Microsoft to Buy 5% of Facebook Valuing at $10bn
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Tue Sep 25, 2007 10:19 AM
from the wish-i-had-a-billion-dollars dept.
from the wish-i-had-a-billion-dollars dept.
l-ascorbic writes "The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Microsoft is poised to buy 5% of Facebook for $300 million to $500 million, valuing the company at up to $10 billion. Microsoft already handles advertising for the site."
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$10 billion (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, that's one way to get Silverlight adopted... (Score:5, Insightful)
How long till we see some cool new site feature -- or, hell, even an existing, basic feature -- reworked ("enhanced") to require Silverlight?
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Re:Well, that's one way to get Silverlight adopted (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah! And can't a crackhead just admire your car stereo?
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Re:$10 billion (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:$10 billion (Score:5, Insightful)
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The "White Pages" for eMail (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not suggesting that this is a perfect solution but it does help explain the popularity of these sites. It is the reason why I joined Facebook.
Willy
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Earnings are not the same thing as Revenue (Score:3, Informative)
Earnings [wikipedia.org] are not Revenue [wikipedia.org]. Earnings are profit. Revenue is total sales. It's VERY important that you understand the difference. Companies are not valued based on their P/E ratio. The only real use of a P/E ratio is to determine if a stock price is relatively high compared to similar companies. It tells you nothing about how much the company is actually worth. The market capitalization [wikipedia.org] can be important (if the company is publicly traded) but the P/E does not give
This feels like 1999 all over again (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re:This feels like 1999 all over again (Score:5, Insightful)
Repeat after me: BUBBLE
Next month it will be worth ONE HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS, and the month after it'll be worthless.
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Re:This feels like 1999 all over again (Score:5, Funny)
Next month it will be worth ONE HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS, and the month after it'll be worthless.
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Oh, a social bubble. We should call it Bubblr. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:This feels like 1999 all over again (Score:5, Interesting)
We get dick from online. I mean, it's like joke money. Maybe a hundred thousand a month...more on a good month. Retail ads are 20 times that, and classified more still. Actual circulation revenue, including single copy which is pretty expensive compared to a subscription, is well into the millions and that is money that comes in every month, like clockwork. Sure, on Thanksgiving you're pulling in enough ads to double your circulation money, and Christmas too, but then there's the rest of the year.
The problem with newspapers is that the actual process of creating and delivering the paper is a huge time and money sink. Despite that we're still running a solid profit, though as many people point out, it's shrinking. Online is obviously the answer to a prayer...we could afford a HUGE drop in ad revenue and still make a profit if we could close down the print product. But as it stands with online advertising, it's still not profitable enough to think about that.
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Re:This feels like 1999 all over again (Score:5, Interesting)
1) They're stupid. They whore out to doubleclick, etc, just like everyone else instead of doing quality chosen local ads that they could pitch to their local advertisers for better rates. They're slowly overcoming this problem, and ad revenue is increasing.
2) Most newspapers are still working their way into the whole "web" idea. I mean, print media produces more actual web-friendly content than most industries, and, even better, it has a short shelf life, so they have nothing to lose by putting it on line. Do they take advantage of this? No. they put it up for a few days, then take it down.
This is hilariously frustrating if you know anything about the web, because you know that it's not whats there right now that's valuable, it's whats there in total. Newspapers in particular are sources for immense amounts of detailed information about things in their coverage area, and while it's utility is pretty limited in the usual archival forms (e.g. Microfiche) it would be astoundingly useful if they just left the content up to be indexed by search engines. Couple that glut of content with some advertising, and you've got an archive of data that costs very little to host and will bring in ad revenue every time someone finds something relevant in your coverage area.
At some point the big media companies (Gannett, McClatchy, Media General, etc) are going to realize that they're sitting on an informational goldmine and start actively leveraging that information to draw people to their sites. Right now it's all the aggregators (like Slashdot, Digg, Fark, etc) who are picking up the burden of providing the relevant information to the interested parties, because print is stuck in the whole, "Barf up a bunch of content and people will come" mentality. That will eventually change.
3) They still think in the back of their minds that if they put together a really good online component, they'll kill their bread and butter print product. This is, at heart, stupid. People thought television would kill print too. We still don't have a good portable disposable medium that will take up the slack, and moreover, there are a lot of people who are just wedded to the idea of the physical paper. That's going to be the case for decades to come, and that's a conservative estimate.
This means that they don't put enough real resources into online. I could give you numbers that would make you laugh your ass off, I mean seriously embarrassing. The people who are doing it are reporters, but not the good reporters...You get Peter Principle crap, so the reporters that end up doing it are people who can be spared to do it, and they have no special training, and no technical competence, and all too often, no fricking IDEA of what they should be doing...Just a very limited idea of what the hell the web is about.
Again it's just incompetence, and industrial blindness. Random example. You pay a professional photographer a daily wage. You send him out to cover a fire, a little league game, and a miss toddler usa pageant. He takes (conservatively) 500 photos. Of those 500 photos, maybe 4 make it into the paper, some probably in black and white. The rest are discarded. On the off chance that any picture will be used in the paper, the photojournalist has secured (in advance) the names of the people in it.
Can you imagine the kind of photo galleries you could create with that sort of information? Cheap to host, simple to index, throw some ads on it...Profit!
Print will die, but the content will live on. They need to transition that content to a digital forum, and then show the world what they really collect. The sheer volume of information has to be trimmed down to fit in the available space...What if there was no space limitation? Take every newspaper website, and, instead of making some ephemeral short term shallow content, make it like the tip of an iceberg, provide what you pay to collect already, and let people dig through it.
Sigh.
This is obviously and old and polished rant. You can guess how seriously they take my opinions...I'm just a techie after all...What do I know about newspapers? =P
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that would make $ 294 / user! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:that would make $ 294 / user! (Score:5, Funny)
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Noooooo!!!! (Score:5, Funny)
Hopefully not (Score:5, Funny)
In any case, register your complaint by joining this group
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=6197556554 [facebook.com]
Everyone knows that joining a group on Facebook can move mountains and change the world...
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Scrabble (Score:5, Funny)
Actually, this input from Microsoft might help to fix the problems that Scrabulous seems to suffer every day... right, gang?? As you can see, I only use Facebook for Scrabble. There must be a group for me.
I can't wait to see pictures (Score:4, Funny)
How many real users? (Score:5, Interesting)
As for the number of users, I wonder how many of them actually USE facebook, vs simply having registered in order to see someone elses crap. I know a lot of people who've been roped into 'signing' up to these sights in order to see their cousins christmas pictures, or to rsvp to a wedding shower where the idiot hosting it sent out the invitations via facebook.
So far: I don't have a facebook profile; I don't want a facebook profile; and I'm dreading the day where I have to get a facebook profile because I need to see someone elses effing facebook crap. I just know that sooner or later an important client is going to send me a facebook invitation that I'll -have- to register on the site to properly respond to...
I hate social^H^H^H^H^H^H viral networking sites.
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They must have asked Rupert Murdoch's advice (Score:5, Funny)
I'm sure Steve Ballmer discussed this with Rupert Murdoch over drinks.
"So how are profits from your MySpace purchase, Rupe?"
"Oh, well ..." said Murdoch, looking nervous. "Actually, great. Great! It's going to be worth billions real soon now." He laughed icily at his own irony.
"Really? Because we were thinking of buying a stake in Facebook at Microsoft."
"Oh, you should totally do it," said Murdoch, grinning wildly.
"Yeah, we thought the developers would love using it on a sort-of group connection to MSDN."
"Do it! There's nowhere for these social sites to go but up."
"And we're thinking of extending the Welcome to the Social campaign to include it."
But Murdoch was laughing to hard to hear the rest.
buy people (Score:5, Interesting)
Facebook is nicely done (Score:3, Insightful)
Its what users who aren't children want. That is one of the reasons it got so many users. Well, that and the network effect. But niceness certianly helps. Of course, Microsoft knows nothing about making an application low key and pleasant to use.
Facebook is the future (Score:3, Insightful)
Facebook also has that supercool Newsfeed feature which aggregates the latest activities on friends, family and associates, and manages to connect people who haven't seen each other in twenty years. Admit it, it's like nothing we've ever seen before (Myspace shouldn't even be in the same category).
I'm not a Facebook fanboy (alright, maybe I am), but I marvel at how well its connecting people in meaningful ways. It's a social universe within the internet. It's going to be bigger than money, because of it's worth and usefulness to you and I.
I don't like Microsoft one ioda, but they made a smart move here.
doesn't support standard email address (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem is that I use 'plus addressing' (eg me+facebook@home.com) and their email validation scripts has a bug that claims it is invalid. It's not uncommon for validation scripts to have this bug, but most web sites are happy to find the bug and fix it. Not so with facebook - my impression is that they're just a little bit arrogant. So be it.
Yeah, I could not use plus addressing, or use some other account, but it hasn't got to the point where I want to bother yet. It's still annoying though.
Re:wow (Score:5, Informative)
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Sure you will. Right after you meet that lass in a pub that wants to be your "friend...."
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Even with the mod PHP processes are hogs. However, no licensing costs. The
Re:wow (Score:5, Funny)
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They'll be replaced with
Oh, and kiss goodbye to the mail account that you've registered with Facebook. Spam ahoy...
Re:wow (Score:4, Interesting)
Flash on Mac isn't all that hot either. Adobe's more or less been shitting all over the platform ever since Apple started directly competing with them. A single Youtube video can easily suck up 80% of the CPU cycles on a modern Core Duo machine.
As long as the number of competitors remains small (ie. 2), I think that Silverlight will actually boost the quality of web applications on ALL platforms.
Java's had its time, and frankly, while it's found niches in other fields, it sucks for web applets. Java applets need to disappear into the ether, resting alongside VRML. (Facebook IS in a pickle, because at the moment, Java probably is the best solution for multiple photo uploads...)
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Flash on Mac isn't all that hot either. Adobe's more or less been shitting all over the platform ever since Apple started directly competing with them. A single Youtube video can easily suck up 80% of the CPU cycles on a modern Core Duo machine.
You do know about the official Mac OS X-native FaceBook Exporter for iPhoto [facebook.com], don't you? It's th
20002 called. (Score:3, Interesting)
Just because the people implementing the technology suck doesn't mean the technology itself does.
Re:20002 called. (Score:5, Informative)
1. They are saving a ton on storage and bandwidth by doing this.
2. They are saving a ton of Sally's bandwidth by doing so (since she has 800 pictures of her and her friends drunk on Facebook).
3. They are saving a ton of Sally's stalker's bandwidth (who would inevitably download all of her photos in hi-res).
3. UI: Users can easily browse to and check off which photos to upload, with thumbnail previews, which is much nicer than any other non-Java upload system out there.
They do, however, have a HTML form fall-back in case you don't want to use Java. But frankly, it is the most convenient, transparent, and well-designed Java applet I've ever run into. In fact, I'd hypothesize that Facebook's photo system is a success precisely because of the Java applet.
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How are you gentlemen? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:wow (Score:4, Insightful)
there's no way facebook is worth 10billion. they dont' produce anything.
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It really looks like another bubble, but I can't help but wonder how long this could go on. After all, most of the people throwing the money around are already rooted deeply into the ground and wouldn't suffer too much if their investments went bust.
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Well...your money won't be because the evil Jew bankers have it all and they are using it to bring in the New World Order.
Note to Mods: That was supposed to be funny.
Seriously though, you (the parent) might actually have a reputation to tarnish unlike the prospective puchasers of Facebook (Microsoft and Yahoo)...
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