Facebook to File for IPO Next Week

That's not a piece of cake. Buying a company is not just buying its assets —employees, database, source code etc, but also acquiring its culture and it is really hard to sustain a culture. There should be a reason behind why Apple buys Facebook. Does it want user base, for what? Does it want employees or the project idea? Not that simple as many of you already know.

Well, now we get to see their financials. This hasn't been an encouraging step for other recent IPOs, like Groupon, and at least their business model involves people actually paying them. Unless Facebook's profitability is much better, the other shoe's going to drop and things might get pretty rough.

If they file next week then mid-April would be reasonable for the IPO to take place

Well, honestly I think that buying Facebook shares right now is a high risk move. While it is possible maybe to forecast some ups and downs in the immediate following days, if the evaluation actually goes to 100 billions it'd look scary to me.

I'm not saying that Facebook is dying or that it's gonna die anytime soon, but I am not able to foresee any significant growth.

The article compared, with sort of negative terms, Facebook's IPO to Google's, saying that google didn't even impress that much when it went public.

But we all know here, that Wall Street made a mistake with Google, since now their shares now are worth 5 times as much as they were at the opening.

So, my question is, how can Facebook ever be worth half a trillion dollars? What should the company do to get evaluated 5 times as much as it is now?

At least with the number of users, it seems to me that they can't be too far from their natural limits.

Facebook is a company certainly with great minds and ideas, but after all it's a website, and I'm not sure people will want to stick around for so much longer on just a website. It seems unfeasible to me that people will stop using the rest of internet, just doing everything on Facebook.

Sure, they can improve a million things (like a real search in Facebook posts, or ways of sharing more complicated things, or better off site integration (which is already pretty good though), but at the same time they can't just open too much, or people will just start migrating. Yet, if they stay too close, people will get bored and start migrating anyways.

Sure, they can start having actual physical products and increase their presence on different markets, but there are lots of tradeoffs for that too. People won't eventually be happy to have a anything-Facebook.

So, maybe I'm wrong, but I tend to believe that this might be one of the highest points that Facebook can reach. I'm sure it can still grow, but I can't expect a growth of orders of magnitudes, it just seems unreasonable.

Maybe it's just that I got bored of Facebook's social life a long time ago and ended up spending very little time on it, almost using it as an email server for certain friends. But I certainly don't think that things like timeline can do this huge difference. To me, timeline is just another improvement (maybe) to avoid people to get bored after a while. One of the constant and frequent improvements and changes that every feature/product has to do to feel alive, but can anyone see any change that could make this company much bigger than what it already is?

If I were Zuckerberg I would probably sell a bunch of my shares and buy a bunch of companies, without necessarily integrating them into Facebook, you never know...

Wall Street Journal says it's likely going to be Morgan Stanley leading the IPO.