With everyone and their mom talking about the “valuation” of Facebook lately, I can’t help but wonder if anyone really knows what they’re talking about — Facebook included.
Facebook is valuable, to be sure, but it seems like their outlandish “valuation” has less to do with Facebook, and more to do with people talking about Facebook’s value.
Reminds me of what a paranoid Gates said about Netscape way back when:
“There was a belief that they were the exciting thing, they were the coming company. You’d go to their developer conferences, go to Marc Andreessen’s press conferences, read the article about what flavor of pizza he ordered. That phenomenon was getting developers to pay a lot of attention to the Netscape browser. Expectations are a form of first-class truth: If people believe it, it’s true.”
