Facebook Stock Going Public?

zmaragdus writes "Facebook Inc. converted its existing stock holdings into different classes of stocks (Class A and Class B) designed to give certain shareholders more power than others. This has been typically done in an IPO of a company's stock to give important people (company founders, for instance) more clout in the actions of the company when stock is first offered to the public. While Facebook maintains that it does not plan to offer stock publicly in the near future, this restructuring is one of the critical steps in doing so."

Comments

Re:hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Facebook cleared a profit recently (September) and have a huge user base, I don't see it disappearing anytime soon.

Re:hmm

[eln]

Facebook also has deep flaws, both in technology and management, that present big opportunities for a potential competitor. Facebook makes money now because its userbase has reached a critical mass, and its thought that since everyone uses it, no one will want to move off it. People thought the same thing about MySpace just a few years ago, and now it's widely regarded as the ghetto of the Internet, and people are leaving it in droves. To go back further, Yahoo was the darling of the tech economy before Google showed up.

Make no mistake about it, Facebook is very vulnerable. All it needs is someone with the brains and business model to exploit those vulnerabilities, and it's finished. Facebook may be a smart short-term play, but holding their stock for the long term would be a disaster.