Motorala ROKR vs Apple iPhone?
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Cos enterprise users love to facebook...
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Facebook Recruiting Former Apple iPhone Engineers for Facebook Phone
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Motorala ROKR vs Apple iPhone?
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Cos enterprise users love to facebook...
I feel an intense desire to mock Zuck like so many others here. But. Let's review the top level facts. FaceBook has 900,000,000 "users". Yes that includes only likers too. As I understand it it has about 130m "active users". In addition to that its client Zynga has a vary large number of early adopters and all-in users with a built-in micropayment steady income, which it tenders a portion of to FB.
FB doesn't suck. It's everywhere. Some folks like me try to forsake it as much as possible but it surrounds me. Yes I have a page I claim I rarely use. But once in a while I get an email asking if I want X to be a friend and more often than not I say yes. I see links that intensely interest me so I hit like and it ends up on some page I have looked at once or twice. A couple of people have commented on those link/posts.
Now comes the public offering. SEC literally FORCED them to go public once they had over 500 investors and EVERYONE wanted to be an investor. So as a result of the pain of law FB went public, and delayed it as long as possible. Some IPOs happen sooner into the revenue stage than FB, but FB was a fully baked business with employees, customers, partners, acquisitions, revenues and profits. Its non-public stock was even already trading on private exchanges.
So the reluctant road show and the overzealous refilings ensued. It was probably the most "disclosed" IPO I have ever heard of. The purpose of an IPO is to raise funds for the company. It did that. By all accounts it raised at the top of the range of expectations as far as price at $38 but below the maximum price SEC would allow at a bit under $45. So IPO wise it was actually nominal.
Further many existing owners wanted to cash out a portion of their stock before the lockup started so they added some of their shares to the IPO which increased the float. It also gave them the liquidity they needed to pay huge tax bills on a wildly successful capital gain from a little company from MA/CA. They still have other shares for the most part. BTW a taxable event on an IPO which is merely a shift of privately held to publicly held stock seems like a tax scam to me. To the extent they do not sell they should not be forced to pay tax. It should be an unrealized long term capital gain. But I digress.
Then NASDAQ blew chunks. It had a real psychological and actual market effect on the FB stock. But not the company. Zuck is still being Zuck, doing whatever he wants and disclosing that to investors and SEC. He himself says wait 5 years to see stuff happen. I suggest taking him at his word because for the most part he has done pretty much everything he said he would, so long as you aren't a start-up owner. That was just smart legal wrangling in an amoral way, just as our secular legal system would expect.
The stock price drop makes perfect sense for a company with a PE ratio of 900 or so. Amazon is around 200 so the under 15 of Apple is outside the norm for the comparables.
I have seen a wide range of price estimates by "analysts" (some of which are oft mocked here), but there are professional and accurate ones too, and by aggregating them we can get a better realistic picture. It appears the present value of FB is around $12.50. Stock often trades on forward value. Very often 6 months forward, but with stocks with good visibility like Amazon, a couple years forward. I would expect FB to be volatile but trade at 2 years forward along the way.
Zuck will be Zuck and say what you will, but he and his large and growing team are really doing a lot of forward leaning stuff on a VERY large user base. Massive mindshare, massive accessability, and probably a Google-like interest to stick its fingers in as many pies as possible just to see what sticks.
Hey if you want to get into space, call me. They all do.
I will point out that Steve Jobs and Gates both know and lived the lifestyle that programming has a high multiple of benefit to the company. FB in particular has "hacking" as a central tennet of the company. That bodes well for the future. Forward.
Rocketman
FB doesn't suck. It's everywhere. Some folks like me try to forsake it as much as possible but it surrounds me. Yes I have a page I claim I rarely use. But once in a while I get an email asking if I want X to be a friend and more often than not I say yes. I see links that intensely interest me so I hit like and it ends up on some page I have looked at once or twice. A couple of people have commented on those link/posts.
Now comes the public offering. SEC literally FORCED them to go public once they had over 500 investors and EVERYONE wanted to be an investor. So as a result of the pain of law FB went public, and delayed it as long as possible. Some IPOs happen sooner into the revenue stage than FB, but FB was a fully baked business with employees, customers, partners, acquisitions, revenues and profits. Its non-public stock was even already trading on private exchanges.
So the reluctant road show and the overzealous refilings ensued. It was probably the most "disclosed" IPO I have ever heard of. The purpose of an IPO is to raise funds for the company. It did that. By all accounts it raised at the top of the range of expectations as far as price at $38 but below the maximum price SEC would allow at a bit under $45. So IPO wise it was actually nominal.
Further many existing owners wanted to cash out a portion of their stock before the lockup started so they added some of their shares to the IPO which increased the float. It also gave them the liquidity they needed to pay huge tax bills on a wildly successful capital gain from a little company from MA/CA. They still have other shares for the most part. BTW a taxable event on an IPO which is merely a shift of privately held to publicly held stock seems like a tax scam to me. To the extent they do not sell they should not be forced to pay tax. It should be an unrealized long term capital gain. But I digress.
Then NASDAQ blew chunks. It had a real psychological and actual market effect on the FB stock. But not the company. Zuck is still being Zuck, doing whatever he wants and disclosing that to investors and SEC. He himself says wait 5 years to see stuff happen. I suggest taking him at his word because for the most part he has done pretty much everything he said he would, so long as you aren't a start-up owner. That was just smart legal wrangling in an amoral way, just as our secular legal system would expect.
The stock price drop makes perfect sense for a company with a PE ratio of 900 or so. Amazon is around 200 so the under 15 of Apple is outside the norm for the comparables.
I have seen a wide range of price estimates by "analysts" (some of which are oft mocked here), but there are professional and accurate ones too, and by aggregating them we can get a better realistic picture. It appears the present value of FB is around $12.50. Stock often trades on forward value. Very often 6 months forward, but with stocks with good visibility like Amazon, a couple years forward. I would expect FB to be volatile but trade at 2 years forward along the way.
Zuck will be Zuck and say what you will, but he and his large and growing team are really doing a lot of forward leaning stuff on a VERY large user base. Massive mindshare, massive accessability, and probably a Google-like interest to stick its fingers in as many pies as possible just to see what sticks.
Hey if you want to get into space, call me. They all do.
I will point out that Steve Jobs and Gates both know and lived the lifestyle that programming has a high multiple of benefit to the company. FB in particular has "hacking" as a central tennet of the company. That bodes well for the future. Forward.
Rocketman
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Not just an app
Facebook is not just an appnot anymore. Facebook is a platform. What everybody refers to when they say Facebook is an application built on a social platform.
That being said, it's not a mobile device platform. And trying to pretend it is will result in nothing but failed products.
Zuckerberg needs to know his place in the digital ecosystem.
Facebook is not just an appnot anymore. Facebook is a platform. What everybody refers to when they say Facebook is an application built on a social platform.
That being said, it's not a mobile device platform. And trying to pretend it is will result in nothing but failed products.
Zuckerberg needs to know his place in the digital ecosystem.
This was a stupid idea last time they tried it.
Now it just reeks of desperation.
All it's going to take is one decent alternative to FB, a clean UI, a minimal free service and a fancier pay version, not run by an idiot, and Facebook can join the rest of the dotcom dregs at the bottom of the pond.
Now it just reeks of desperation.
All it's going to take is one decent alternative to FB, a clean UI, a minimal free service and a fancier pay version, not run by an idiot, and Facebook can join the rest of the dotcom dregs at the bottom of the pond.
Thank you for the insightful post, I don't see this fact raised hardly at all in any of the discussion about Facebook lately.
They did indeed screw up royally by not putting ads in their app, and furthermore, does anyone remember Facebook's famous mobile conference last year? The one where Zuckerberg said that he didn't consider the iPad to be a mobile device? With that kind of insight at the helm, they're not going to go far.
In truth, Mark Z. is much closer to being a savant than a CEO.
I don't see the immediate benefit of what a FB phone can offer over your typical iPhone, Android, or Windows phone offerings.
However, I'm not going to discount them just yet either. Why? Remember all the ridicule Apple got when they introduced the iPhone? Remember all the criticisms and doubts Google got when they introduced the Nexus One?
However, I'm not going to discount them just yet either. Why? Remember all the ridicule Apple got when they introduced the iPhone? Remember all the criticisms and doubts Google got when they introduced the Nexus One?
Even with android's strong market share, the business case for Android is still muddy - court documents show that since Android was launched until last year, Google's total Android profit was like $500M (that's now gone waaaay down if you count the $12.5B spent on loss making Motorola)
Its not a small amount, but you've got to wonder if they could have been more profitable by partnering with others and focusing on services.
Facebooks problem is that they're not fully capitalising their enormous user base and semantic information. Going in to smartphones a la Google probably isn't a smart move.
It's funny how everyone is sooo shocked by this when Facebook have been in the phone biz for a while. Heck, the "Facebook phone" was released last year, made by HTC and running Android (Facebook could do what to Google with a Facebook phone again ?) :
For a bunch of self-proclaimed tech enthusiasts, you guys sure have bad memories about actual tech outside of Apple.
Um ...... Facebook was never in the game before, just past rumors, that picture your showing is just a dedicated hardware button on a HTC phone.
Facebook's real problem is they seem to have reached their peak at about 700 million users. What's next? How do they hold on to the user base?
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Except that savants always get the right answer. Outside of the initial Facebook concept (which wasn't that original), Mark Zuckerberg doesn't have the strategic wins of a visionary tech CEO.
Shame the stockholders can't get rid of him. I guess they just won't buy Facebook stock.
Zuckerberg is right and wrong about the iPad...it just depends on your definition of mobile device.
If you consider a mobile device to be a cellphone/mobile phone, then I'd agree that the iPad isn't a mobile device. You can't make easily phone calls from an iPad.
If you consider a mobile device to be a computer that is portable. Then sure, an iPad is a mobile device.... but then you'd have to include laptops and notebooks in the same category.
It just depends on your definition.
Criticizing Zuckerberg for his insight (or lack thereof) doesn't make sense to me... considering how that same insight helped make FB into what it is today.
The real issue is likely that Zuckerberg and team are seeing an ultra fast shift to mobile from it's users.
Well, the shift wasn't as ultrafast as the media myth is making it out to be.
I don't understand why there are there so many excuses for this allegedly smart CEO who was completely blindsided and caught flat-footed by the mobile revolution. That's a lot of grading on a curve for the leader of a multi-billion dollar company, is it not? Especially because I can think of at least one company in particular that figured this out as early as 2007-- they even went as far as changing their legal name to signal the shift!
As I said in my previous post, even last year Zuckerberg was quoted as not being in touch at all with mobile as the future of computing, and then just in the last month or two, all of a sudden it's this "rapid movement to mobile" in 2012? Yeah, right.
Yep, I'm never buying this phone. It looks like a repeat of the Google PC: A regular device (laptop in Google's case) can do everything that it can and is cheaper.
Plus, I don't use Facebook. It's a waste of time. So is their stock. I would short them, but you aren't even allowed to short FB at this point.
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Yeah, I don't really understand what Google is even trying to do... Did they want people to get sucked into their services and use their PC? Because we all know how THAT went.
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My friends never believed me before and still don't believe me. It was funny watching people get excited about the IPO only to have it crash very predictably.
So when are they going to release the Twitter smart phone? I think Amazon better market their own phone too before it's too late!
People seem to like to ignore this point. How does Facebook make more money without being able to continue to explode in its user base? Increased advertising?
So there will be another (like this http://bit.ly/K2oMdh) copy of iPhone?
Exactly. Just use the Facebook app. The iPhone is the perfect example of a well-rounded phone that works well with other stuff. I can't imagine a Facebook phone being well-rounded. I'll bet it can't even do email (because they want you to use Facebook).
The last thing I will do is put my bank account number anywhere on the Facebook phone.
I thought it would be dead by now, but instead I know more and more people using it.
Facebook is up to something like 900 million users worldwide.
Considering how unintuitive their app UIs often are, it's astonishing.
Doesn't matter how much they directly make off it. Android has been priceless as far as publicizing the Google name and keeping their search engine as a smartphone standard (instead of Bing or something else).
When the iPhone came out, it only had a handful of native apps that Apple wrote. People loved it.
Yeah! Facebook has nowhere to go but down. Increasing advertising will just annoy users. They could hold on to their current user base, but I can say right now that people will still leave it. They are getting tired of FB. Everyone in my grade used to use Facebook, and now a lot of them have closed their accounts or just subsided in their activity on it.
I think more and more old people are using it, and less young people are using it. My mom uses FB more than anyone I know. Of course, this is not sustainable. I'll be glad to see Facebook go; it's been very annoying. I think I'd like it way more if you could send files or do video/audio/screensharing in the FB chat. AIM is still the best chat service surprisingly.
The real issue is likely that Zuckerberg and team are seeing an ultra fast shift to mobile from it's users. Increasing, let alone just sustaining it's existing advertising revenue while maintaining minimal ad interference is going to be a major challenge with the smaller screen. Building a phone would allow them to monetize outside the Facebook applications. Unless it's something truly revolutionary, I would imagine a Facebook phone would be met with poor sales and flop. This just looks like a strategic move fueled out of fear of becoming irrelevant.
Also, there is no reason why Apple couldn't deliver a deeply integrated ad-free social model to help complete the iOS user-experience for the hundreds of millions of iPhones and iPads worldwide; detrimentally steering people away from Facebook and accelerating the irrelevance of the social-network. I have no doubt that this is not one of, if not, the biggest fear that the Facebook leadership has.
Google is already doing that with Google+, and I don't know anyone who seriously uses it. This should work in theory though. Maybe Android users are not the kind of people who use social networking?
My friend, a big Google fan, has a Plus account, and he doesn't touch it. Another friend just made one because he hates Facebook, and he doesn't use it. I made one just to check it out (it was nice), but I deleted it when it kept telling me about their new privacy policy every second.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying FB isn't sustainable. Honestly, they make enough money to be complacent. Facebook is still the best social network in the business. I don't feel that it is dying, I'm just saying it doesn't have a lot of up to go.
Yeah man, Facebook is terrified of Ping. At least people remember Google+ and rip on it. Nobody even remembers that Ping exists.
WebOS had some very nice features that came from ex-Apple employees who weren't allowed to implement them on the iPhone. Card metaphor, notification shade, etc.
Makes me wonder if this new batch of ex-Apple employees has some cool new ideas to offer, or if they'll go the traditional route.
Another question I have is, will data plan costs get in the way of an FB oriented phone? Doesn't FB have ideas about constantly streaming video to friends and family, and such?
Makes me wonder if this new batch of ex-Apple employees has some cool new ideas to offer, or if they'll go the traditional route.
Another question I have is, will data plan costs get in the way of an FB oriented phone? Doesn't FB have ideas about constantly streaming video to friends and family, and such?