in einem Interview mit der Business Week: The Web According to Ballmer. Ein sehr spannendes Interview mE…
What do you think about Web 2.0 valuations?
There are hot companies, and there’s everything else. The question is: What’s the value of an eyeball? Take Facebook. If you knew for sure that you were going to have the kind of minutes of eyeball time on the percentage of college students that Facebook has today, for the next 15 years, it’s an easy billion-dollar check to write, even though it doesn’t have a business model that establishes it. If [Facebook founder Mark] Zuckerberg is going to grow older, he’s going to lose his hipness. The site is going to be replaced by Facebook Prime, you know, the guy will be old. Pretty soon, he’ll be 25. It’s not like it’s so sticky. College students churn every four years anyway. If it’s that, it’s not worth anywhere close to a billion.We’re excited about Facebook. We’re selling all the advertising for it. We’re more excited now that we’re selling ads for it than we were before.
These are hits-based phenomena. Don’t you and others have to monetize very rapidly before people shift onto something else?
If they are hits-based, which is the implication I’ve made here, and you pay a lot of money, you’re going to have to move in, milk, and get out. Or, it may turn out that the money is in the infrastructure for these things. What is Google to MySpace? It’s the advertising infrastructure. In some of these things, you’ll have to decide, if you’re the big guys: Do I want to play at the application level or do I merely want to play at the commerce and other platform level in a way that strengthens the rest of my assets and allows me to make money?
Ballmer wie immer kämpferisch und brutal direkt. Daher mag ich den Typen seit jeher.
via O’Reilly
