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> Facebook’s formidable ad business, along with Alphabet Inc.’s Google, soaked up 99% of the online ad industry’s growth last year, according to Pivotal Research. Does that seem crazy to anyone else?
It's crazy to me in the sense that Snap is apparently <1% of growth in digital advertising.
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It seems like it would be a disaster to break up Facebook. You can't really have more than one social network that everybody uses. Forcing everyone to split off into groups wouldn't work, to put it mildly.
They could be the global distributor for individual companies operating different regions, like a franchise but without regional providers existing under one corporate umbrella. That could open the market to competing distributors and regional operators. Unlikely and less efficient but that could be one way to handle it.
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- Facebook has a massive, $35.5 billion hoard of cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities. It's the third biggest S&P 500 company by this metric that isn't paying a dividend, after Berkshire Hathaway and Alphabet. How many companies in total have more than $35.5B cash/equivalents? Including Apple, for example.
Ignoring debt: Microsoft ($126b), Apple ($256b), Facebook ($35b), Berkshire Hathaway (near $100b), Cisco ($68b), Google ($92b), Oracle ($66b), Softbank (a lot), Amgen ($38b), Ford ($40b), Samsung ($73b), Johnson & Johnson ($39b), GE ($82b) There are a lot of financial entities and the like that have more cash than that of course. It's held under a different financial context than the cash that eg Apple is sitting on.…
Edit: I guess I missed "Ignoring Debt" they have too much debt.
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It seems like it would be a disaster to break up Facebook. You can't really have more than one social network that everybody uses. Forcing everyone to split off into groups wouldn't work, to put it mildly.
>You can't really have more than one social network that everybody uses. Forcing everyone to split off into groups wouldn't work, to put it mildly. Of course you can, you just need to have standardized protocols. You and I can use any email provider we like, your client can use exchange to talk to it's server and mine can use a version of POP from the 80's and it /doesn't matter/ because the servers talk over a stand…
Social networks have been adding lots of features over the years to compete with each other. Realistically I think that fractured platforms would struggle to catch on because each provider would prioritize different features. Since social networking grows in utility superlinearly with the connectivity with your friends, features get less useful and the whole thing stagnates.
Basically: Microsoft Outlook is a social network of the kind you envision. Even Outlook for Mac versus Outlook for Windows is a sharp divide in terms of features! Do you think that people would use social networks if they looked like Outlook?
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Slightly interesting aside, 3.9B for 20,658 employees is ~$188K/employee profit, which is about a 20% drop from a few years ago[1]. I'm not an economist nor statistician. 1. https://www.buzzfeed.com/peterlauria/what-18-of-the-biggest-...
Why is that interesting? Companies should hire more people until marginal profit per new hire is $0 to maximize profits. And that number says nothing about marginal profits.
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- Facebook has a massive, $35.5 billion hoard of cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities. It's the third biggest S&P 500 company by this metric that isn't paying a dividend, after Berkshire Hathaway and Alphabet. How many companies in total have more than $35.5B cash/equivalents? Including Apple, for example.
Ignoring debt: Microsoft ($126b), Apple ($256b), Facebook ($35b), Berkshire Hathaway (near $100b), Cisco ($68b), Google ($92b), Oracle ($66b), Softbank (a lot), Amgen ($38b), Ford ($40b), Samsung ($73b), Johnson & Johnson ($39b), GE ($82b) There are a lot of financial entities and the like that have more cash than that of course. It's held under a different financial context than the cash that eg Apple is sitting on.…
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Ignoring debt: Microsoft ($126b), Apple ($256b), Facebook ($35b), Berkshire Hathaway (near $100b), Cisco ($68b), Google ($92b), Oracle ($66b), Softbank (a lot), Amgen ($38b), Ford ($40b), Samsung ($73b), Johnson & Johnson ($39b), GE ($82b) There are a lot of financial entities and the like that have more cash than that of course. It's held under a different financial context than the cash that eg Apple is sitting on.…
Thank you! Out of curiosity, how did you put together that list? Googling seems to only bring up second-hand lists like https://thenextweb.com/insider/2011/08/22/big-money-the-comp... but I think I'm using the wrong terms. (That's an interesting list too -- for comparison, Apple apparently had $76.2B in 2011.)
http://www.barrons.com/articles/apple-plans-to-sell-lots-of-...
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Ignoring debt: Microsoft ($126b), Apple ($256b), Facebook ($35b), Berkshire Hathaway (near $100b), Cisco ($68b), Google ($92b), Oracle ($66b), Softbank (a lot), Amgen ($38b), Ford ($40b), Samsung ($73b), Johnson & Johnson ($39b), GE ($82b) There are a lot of financial entities and the like that have more cash than that of course. It's held under a different financial context than the cash that eg Apple is sitting on.…
Ford has $40b cash and its market cap is $43b ?? I should buy some. Edit: I guess I missed "Ignoring Debt" they have too much debt.
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It seems like it would be a disaster to break up Facebook. You can't really have more than one social network that everybody uses. Forcing everyone to split off into groups wouldn't work, to put it mildly.
But we could have an open social network that operates outside a single company... building on the foundational principles of the internet. These "social networks" exist because it's still too hard to setup and manage a personal website, and those sites lack the interactiveness of FB. Imagine if everyone had their own 1-click website with glorified RSS feeds, webrtc-based chat, access control, media sharing, and stan…
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It doesn't necessarily need to be broken up, but if you wanted to weaken Facebook you could mandate that they made their APIs open so that social networks that wanted to spring up would be able to automatically show you content from Facebook in their UI.
That's a good one. I'm not sure how enforceable that would be, but in principle that'd be beneficial for competition. There are a multitude of problems, like privacy concerns and the fact that FB would have no incentive to keep the API very up to date or reliable, but I wonder if something like that could work.