Totally agree. Considering companies like BMW and Toyota are only worth 20 billion I fail to see how Facebook (even with the hype) can be considered so valuable. I know which one I would rather own if offered the choice.
Which would I want to run for the next 20 years? A BMW or a Toyota.
Facebook has the potential to be a database of every human in the world with extensive metadata about those people's friends, interests, and a minute-by-minute record of their every activity and action in the virtual and real world.
How much would advertisers pay for access to that anonymized data? How many services can leverage it to build transformative, long-term businesses? How many more "arab springs" will the world see as even more connect and share the human experience with each other in richer, more meaningful ways?
Facebook in 2011 is small beans compared to the effect it could have on our species over the next hundred years. Pretending that there's no long term value in that platform is short sighted.
If you replace Facebook with 'the internet', I'll go along with that. You're way too confident in this single company. Facebook is well positioned in the internet, but they're not everything and never will be.
Hmmm... I was under impression that Tech companies work at best for 15-20 years and some other company with newer/better technology beats them.