Another stupid post about fb and their business without mentioning the fb ad exchange? I'm having trouble understanding how Dalton isn't misinforming his audience.
Read this for why I think fb has a great future in ads.
You can go far in life by following a very successful boss. And there may well be more promotion opportunities / more responsibility available at yahoo under Marissa than staying at Google. Or perhaps they've already made a million or so and own a home; why not take a flyer and see where it goes? I think you massively underestimate personal loyalty to someone who it sounds like went way out of her way to look out for these folks' careers. Because if someone did that for me I'd be loyal.
This would be the only sane way to test this out, worst case your going to get done for defrauding yourself as apposed to something worse. Makes the defence more believable and obvious.
I bet your prediction is wrong. I've expanded on it elsewhere, but fb is sitting on a couple enormous businesses.
1 - they can launch the first serious adsense ($10B/year pre tac) competitor because they see most people move about the internet on fb connect;
2 - the ad exchange (fbx) is brilliant: you can bring your 3rd party data in and run ads on fb properties. This allows everyone to reuse their retargeting / behavioral targeting data and target in a guaranteed brand safe environment. But no data leaves: fb is a data sink.
3 - adding to the above, they have real demographics for brand advertisers, so they can diversify from the dr people.
4 - adding to #2, they're even better positioned for 2nd screen. Tons of people want to connect desktop/laptop display with mobile, but fb doesn't have to do any guessing or prediction: fb knows all the data because of the shared login. Thus they'll monetize mobile better not just because they know dems, but because they can extend online 3rd party data to mobile via fbx. If nothing else, buckets of dirt cheap impressions for your targeting/bt lists.
edit:
5 - how could I forget gambling? Zynga moves into real money gambling / poker (some relevant court cases have apparently been recently decided) and fb continues to collect a 20-30% tax.
.02 from someone who does data analysis / ML and has an undergrad in math:
A math undergrad is a nearly total waste of time. If you want to do data analysis, learn to do data analysis. Real analysis and proofs and abstract algebra and diffeq are fascinating yet utter wastes of time.
If you want to learn useful stuff, take:
applied calc, applied linear algebra, applied probability, applied stats, applied ML. And nothing else. All the skills you build proving stuff are, at best, tangential. And you don't need a bit of it to do things like derive gibbs samplers or EM samplers.
If you can take an activity such as someone interacting with ads, model that as a graphical model, derive a gibbs sampler and implement it, you'll be worlds ahead of even most grad students. Focus on getting there and it should be great for your career. But a math degree is just a shiny distraction.
Oh, and one more thing: if you want to work in a particular area, then a degree in that area may be useful. Eg bio, genetics, chemistry, fluids, optics, etc.
edit2: Please don't think I'm arguing against you getting a math degree. If you want one, get one. Just understand it's probably at least 80% intellectual masturbation instead of job skills. For example, as far as I can see in production machine learning, there is virtually no integration. Oh there are integrals all over the place but none of them are feasible and they'll all have to be numerically evaluated or worked around. So all those integration skills people spend endless hours learning are basically useless because the real world has virtually zero nice integrals. So understanding how to manipulate integrals and how to numerically evaluate them is very valuable, but not well covered in virtually all calc classes.
edit3: consider looking at the community colleges in your state. They often are stupid cheap and offer online courses.
As a physicist this always annoyed me about about maths lectures.
You spend half of your physics degree learning certain classes of integrals when in practice everyone you really need to solve is done numerically.
Yet you get half a class on numerical methods it you're lucky
It's worse than that; it's not just no recurring revenue. Sparrow is stupid cheap. Comparable software such as eudora cost $50 - $100 in the late 90s. Compare to $7 for the mac app or $2.10 for the ios app.
And they're pinched between a platform vendor who wants a good email client on the platform; Google who gives gmail away for free because it's strategically important / they monetize it with ads; and people who are nearly unwilling to spend developer-sustaining amounts of money barring a giant hit, particularly for software requiring ongoing development.
The app store for ios has exerted massive negative price pressure on apps, including creating a norm of free or $1 apps. I know it's basic psychology, but it still amazes me that tons of people using a $200 phone that costs on the order of $80/mo to use bitch endlessly in reviews and negatively rate apps for charging the ginormous price of $3. Or something equally out of line. This is exacerbated by shitty discovery in the app store. There's massive returns to being on the top app in category X list, and that's very difficult to do at higher prices. Plus you can't create paid upgrades without creating a new product in the app store, forcing you to start from zero with marketing and list rank. I predict the mac app store will likewise exert downward price pressure on app prices.
Sparrow is really really cheap. A generation ago I used eudora, which cost $50 to $100, for email. So between the mid to late 90s and 2012, the price fell something like 80 to 90 percent to $10 for the mac program. The above is worsened by the rise of decent free email clients since it diminishes the audience.
If you do the math, you have to sell a fuckton of $2.10 cent apps to afford salaries for good developers: say four people at $200k/year fully loaded (salary, health insurance, ss, medicare, office space, internet, diet coke, coffee, macbooks). That's 380k sales just to tread water. And we didn't deduct marketing expenses which are probably significant: you'll have someone fulltime doing seo / sem / banging on blogs and reviewers to get organic / etc. Plus, again, Apple has created a norm where apps get updated forever for free. So that $2.10 is close to being a lifetime value for a user. That means you probably can't use sem for user acquisition: a wildly optimistic 10 percent clickthrough and purchase rate (an order of magnitude high for most things) and 20 cents per click (also wildly cheap) puts you at $2.00.
I presume Apple does this because of classic economics: increase demand by decreasing the price of complements. But if developers can't get paid, users can't have nice things. And I'm not an ios or mac dev, but looking at the interactions in their apps, they seem super custom. That means you have to go to the bottom of frameworks, increasing development costs.
I'm puzzled by the psychology too. It seems counter-intuitive that people who pay a relatively large amount for the device + monthly contract would balk at paying an additional relatively small amount for an app which increases the utility of the device.
I'm not 100% satisfied with any of my explanations. Here's a few ideas I've been pondering: the $80/month can be thought of as a subscription fee for the apps that come with the device. So I'm paying $80/month to use Phone, Mail, YouTube, Maps etc. The amount of time I can use my iOS device is limited by time spent at work, with family etc. Therefore adding new apps into the mix reduces the time I spend with the default apps. For example I might download a game and spend a month playing that and ignore the YouTube app. But now my "monthly subscription" for the YouTube app has been wasted. Say I use 10 of the default apps regularly. That's $8/month for each app. Ignoring YouTube app for one month means $8 down the drain.
So when I'm deciding to buy your $3 app I'm subconsciously wondering if it's worth $11. And that's if I only use it for a month. What if your app is really great and I use it and ignore YouTube app for 10 months? Then I'm paying $3 + 10 * $8 for your app.
Now take into account $200 for the device + $80/month is a lot for most people. And it's a lot relative to the free basic flip phone + $30/month w/o a contract we all had in the not too distant past. Now it's clear why free throw-away apps are the easiest to download. Free implies no additional upfront cost in addition to the arm + leg I'm already paying. Throw-away app implies I won't ignore the other $8/month apps I'm already subscribed to for too long.
It's just a theory and I'd like to hear some counter-arguments. If it's true it could have interesting implications on tweaking value and price of apps with the goal of maximizing revenue.
Worse yet, say someone looked at sparrow dying and wanted to clone it, because it looks like there's a business there. Now they'll be pinched by people being cheap as shit on the upside and google migrating some of the best features into their presumably free iphone client on the low side. So I think google has now poisoned the well for better gmail clients on mac/ios.
Remember that msft sold Avenue A/Razorfish [1] to Publicis for $530mm, plus IIRC something on the order of a billion dollars of guaranteed purchases of msft display inventory ([2] mentions but doesn't know the amount), though I could be way off on that. So msft probably got $1B back from the $6B purchase, so I don't understand how they can write down more than $5B. Anyway, it means the aQuantive purchase was 16% less shitty than everyone reports =P
Read this for why I think fb has a great future in ads.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4279900