Facebook Still Seems On Track To 'Disappear' In 4 Years From Now
To be honest, I’m not sure I’d write it again today.
It had a catchy title and some good substance to my arguments, so it ended up generating a lot of page views. It also came out at a time when the hype over the upcoming Facebook FB +0.31% (FB) IPO was at a fever pitch. Back then, people were saying that Facebook would be the next Google GOOG +0.49%(GOOG) and would certainly surpass $100 billion in market value as soon as it IPO’ed. We don’t seem to recall now but many predicted that Facebook’s stock would go to $60 – 75/share immediately post-IPO.
In reality, it hit the mid-$40s and then dropped like a stone until bottoming out at $17 and now being around $23.
The biggest problem I have with my old post is that I tried to articulate why both Google and Facebook “might” disappear in 5 years. That’s too much for one post. I should have split them up. So, today, I just want to revisit this year-old post and only focus on Facebook. I’ll try to do Google in the next few weeks if I have time (but – long story short – I don’t think Google’s going away any time soon).
The other problem with the post was the use of “disappear” in the headline. Many readers took this to mean that I thought both were going bankrupt. That’s not going to happen clearly. I said in the post that I meant that they would “disappear” in the sense that Yahoo YHOO +1.71% (YHOO) has disappeared. By that I mean that Yahoo is a shadow of its former self in terms of its perceived importance by many. Anyone who reads my stuff knows that I’m long Yahoo and love the company and new CEO Marissa Mayer. I think they can do great things still. But one of the reasons I got so bullish on them is that public market investors completely lost interest in the company and totally discounted the stock over the last 4 years compared to its underlying fundamentals or to its cooler rivals like Facebook.
PEOPLE NOT REALLY GETTING BORED OF
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