[1]Facebook Lenses:

    Back when Stratechery started I wrote in [2]the very first post that
    one of the topics I looked forward to exploring was "Why Wall Street
    is not completely insane"; I was thinking at the time about Apple, a
    company that, especially at that time, was regularly posting
    eye-popping revenue and profit numbers that did not necessarily lead
    to corresponding increases in the stock price, much to the
    consternation of Apple shareholders. The underlying point should be
    an obvious one: a stock price is about future earnings, not already
    realized ones; that the iPhone maker had just had a great quarter
    was an important signal about the future, but not a determinant
    factor, and that those pointing to the past to complain about a
    price predicated on the future were missing the point.

    Of course that is exactly what I did in that tweet.

  (Via [3]Stratechery by Ben Thompson)

  Ben has a long write-up on the Facebook financial news and how one can
  look at the data:

    To be clear, I agreed with the Apple-investor sentiment all along:
    several of my early articles - [4]Apple the Black Swan, [5]Two
    Bears, and especially [6]What Clayton Christensen Got Wrong - were
    about making the case that Apple's business was far more sustainable
    with much deeper moats than most people realized, and it was that
    sustainability and defensibility that mattered more than any one
    quarter's results.

    The question is if a similar case can be made for Facebook:
    certainly my tweet taken literally was naive for the exact reasons
    those Apple investor complaints missed the point five years ago;
    what about the sentiment, though? Just how good of a business is
    Facebook?

    As with many such things, it all depends on what lens you use to
    examine the question.

  He looks at Facebook using several different "lenses": finances,
  products, ad infrastructure, multiplying moats, and reason for being
  (Facebook's Raison D'être). While I follow his various lines of
  thinking, I think Ben spends a little too much effort on linking back
  to things he already said and not enough on expanding upon those
  thoughts. This is most apparent in his moats lens which needs fleshing
  out (it feels half-baked).

  As it stands it's a useful exercise in understanding a company's
  financial and business drivers. Obviously, any discussion of Facebook
  will include security and privacy (and GDPR and …). Too often
  professionals in our industry fail to consider these things fully which
  leads us to the cyber security startup VC and blockchain bubbles we're
  in.
  Also on:

  [7]Twitter
    __________________________________________________________________

  My original entry is here: [8]Facebook Lenses ←. It posted Tue, 31 Jul
  2018 14:27:03 +0000.
  Filed under: tech,

References

  1. https://stratechery.com/2018/facebook-lenses/
  2. https://stratechery.com/2013/welcome-to-stratechery/
  3. https://stratechery.com/
  4. https://stratechery.com/2013/apple-the-black-swan/
  5. https://stratechery.com/2013/two-bears/
  6. https://stratechery.com/2013/clayton-christensen-got-wrong/
  7. https://twitter.com/TokyoGringo/status/1024301306851287040
  8. https://www.prjorgensen.com/?p=1360