Should Microsoft buy Ailing Facebook?
No matter how Facebook tries to position itself to earn its living someday, it runs afoul of its users. Thus, Facebook is a classic example of a company that loses money on every sale, but “makes it up in volume.”
The things Facebook must do to turn itself into the big moneymaker that venture capital funding demands will, I predict, turn it into just another MySpace clone–in the sense that MySpace is run for the benefit of advertisers, not its users. Which is why many adults who started on MySpace moved to Facebook in the first place.
Facebook already has credibility problems stemming from the types of advertisers it mostly attracts. How is it that every Facebook ad seems to be promoting a dubious scheme of some sort?
Microsoft does not need for Facebook the make the huge profits its current financing requires. Microsoft could buy Facebook and just run nice, low-impact Microsoft advertising and do just fine. Alternatively, it could accept advertisers very selectively and, over time, create an environment that users might actually accept.
This is a case where I trust Microsoft, in its kludgey “be all things to all people” way, to do a better job of looking after me than a bunch of Facebook folks still infected with start-up fever and expecting Googlesque returns.
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