John Paczkowski

Recent Posts by John Paczkowski

Microsoft CEO: Zuckerburbs Aren't All They're Cracked Up to Be

ballmerfist.jpgFor someone considering taking a stake in Facebook that could value it at $10 billion, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer doesn’t seem to think very much of the social-networking site.

In an interview with the Times Online, Ballmer didn’t seem so sure Zuckerburbia deserves the jaw-dropping valuation given it. “There can’t be any more deep technology in Facebook than what dozens of people could write in a couple of years,” he said, noting that GeoCities, a community site acquired by Yahoo for $3 billion in 1999, offered much of what Facebook offers today. “I think these things are going to have some legs, and yet there’s a … faddish nature about anything that appeals to younger people.”

And that’s a truism worth noting. Before Facebook, there was TheGlobe.Com and before Mark Zuckerberg there was–shudder–Stephan Paternot.


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Knowledge for my generation was at the center of the human quest. It is going the way of the recording industry. It is a term that won’t survive the generation.

— David Weinberger, researcher at Harvard’s Berkman Center for the Internet and Society, from a lecture last Wednesday at the University of California at Berkeley’s School of Information