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Comment by Alex3917 | Hacker News Reader

The problem with Facebook is that their valuation was too high. Now in order to justify their hundreds of millions of dollars they've taken they are going to have to keep upping the ante in terms of selling personal data and implementing crazy marketing schemes. This will ultimately be their undoing. It wouldn't surprise me if Zuck's new investors won't let him cash out until he hits certain numbers, so now he's pretty much stuck going for broke.

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The hundreds of millions they took from Microsoft should not be thought of as a venture capital investment. It isn't made by people that are engineering a 5x + ROI and that maneuvered for the power to prevent Facebook from exiting with anything less. As I understand it, it was largely an advertising deal.

I think Beacon is a lot like the news/mini feeds. Both were radical ideas that faced heavy privacy opposition. Facebook rode out the wave once and seemed to be planning to do it again, but I think they miscalculated on one thing: since Beacon is openly commercial, Facebook looks more evil than misguided. I think there's a new idea behind Beacon that is plainly good: aggregating stuff about your friends that's happening in the general internet. (Paul Buchheit's new company is doing this.) The right move would have been to release that function with no commercial facet, and work that in later when this idea is no longer new.

I have another theory on Facebook's massive valuation, or at least an adjunct to. Facebook is pretty much headed to an IPO and the IPO valuation will be far less than the Microsoft valuation. This will create a false sense of value driving the stock price up.

What's in it for Microsoft? I'm guessing Facebook is an important part of their online advertising plan, and they are going to get preferential treatment and power in excess of their share.

At least thats how it might play out, the root cause could still well be Zuckerberg's arrogance.

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