In Facebook’s (NASDAQ:FB) S-1, Mark Zuckerberg wrote about the company’s “Hacker Way.” Some of the elements includeed: “Done is better than perfect” and “Move fast and break things.” No doubt, these approaches have been critical for the company’s huge success. But lately, it seems to be getting harder to live up to the ideals.
This is the contention of Nick Bilton, who covers the tech beat at The New York Times. In a Wednesday story, he points out that Facebook has launched few interesting products lately. The reason may be that its development process is slowing down. Keep in mind that its Camera app took over a year to develop (the irony is that Facebook shelled out over $1 billion for a rival app, Instagram). Facebook has also had delays with other Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) iOS apps.
Interestingly enough, some of the company’s top competitors are actually having little problem with innovation. Just look at Google (NASDAQ:GOOG). At its recent developer’s conference, the search giant launched its Nexus 7 tablet, upgraded its Chrome browser (which is No. 1 in market share) and announced a cloud business.
And investors are taking note. Google’s stock is up about 12% over the past three months. As for Facebook, its shares are down about 50%.
While many investors are worrying about the company’s business model — especially the efforts to monetize its huge mobile traffic — they may be missing something more important. That is, Facebook appears to be having trouble coming up with cool technologies.
Tom Taulli runs the InvestorPlace blog IPOPlaybook, a site dedicated to the hottest news and rumors about initial public offerings. He also is the author of “All About Short Selling” and “All About Commodities.” Follow him on Twitter at @ttaulli. As of this writing, he did not own a position in any of the aforementioned securities.
A long-time follower of the IPO scene, back in 1999 Tom started one of the first sites in the space called WebIPO. It was a place where investors got research as well as access to deals for the dot-com boom. Tom also wrote the top-selling book, Investing in IPOs. In it, he covers all the aspects of analyzing an IPO, such as reading the prospectus, detecting the risk factors and understanding some of the arcane regulations. But don’t worry — if that process is too intimidating for you, thankfully Tom will do the legwork for you right here in the IPO Playbook blog.
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