So it has finally happened a floation on the stock market for $38 dollars a share around $100 bn in market capitalisation. You can now have your own piece of the social media company.
I think the companies frank admission that they have yet to move advertising from the PC platform to mobile (where most users access the site from) probably tells all you need to know about their future. In business terms this means they are already yesterdays company. No doubt extremely popular with users, but unless you put adverts in front of them the "free" bit of the social network will not sustain the business.
I think Zuckerberg and Sandberg know this, so the IPO is probably the height of the company. It is still an amazing story of a business grown from its initial venture capital to this point where they have found enough banks to back a floation and presumably found enough people to initially buy the shares. What was it P T Barnum said about the birth rate of suckers - it's clearly true!
As always it is a crying shame that so many talented people are spending their lives working out how to make users click on an advert to drive revenue growth. Maybe we now know what kills off all civilisations, an increasing obsession with trivia rather than true innovation.
The financial press I have read have all said this is not one for your pension fund!
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