Steve Ballmer does not understand social networks

The executive director of Microsoft called this madness what is happening around social networks on the Internet. In his opinion, sites like Facebook can disappear like smoke, and very quickly. These are frivolous projects designed for young people. Ballmer is sure that there are no advanced technologies there, and a dozen of any programmers will make such nonsense in a couple of years without problems, or even faster. There is nothing special. It’s totally unclear how Facebook can cost ten billion dollars. According to Ballmer, Facebook is almost no different from the same hosting of free pages Geocities, which was considered very promising in the late 90s, Yahoo was bought for $ 3 billion at the peak of Internet fever, and then sunk into the unknown.



Note that $ 10 billion is the real value of Facebook, with which Microsoft has agreed. As reported, last week Microsoft acquired a small share in this project (seemingly 5% for $ 500 million).



The question is, why did Microsoft buy a stake in the “bubble”? Steve Ballmer explained that this is due to a change in the company's strategy in the online advertising market. From now on, Microsoft will pay more attention to this market. As you know, the global advertising market is ten times the global software market, so working on it in any case should be more profitable.



Independent experts have already expressed themselves in the sense that Steve Ballmer once again proved his complete lack of understanding of the concept of Web 2.0 . The value of social networks is not at all in technology, but in the community, so comparing Facebook with Geocities is generally nonsense.