BloomTrends

Facebook makes about 1/10th of Google’s revenues even though they have 2x the pageviews. Some estimates put Google’s search revenues per pageviews at 100-200x Facebook’s.

- Facebook’s business model - Chris Dixon

The company’s core competency is a process it uses for entering and consuming existing industries. After it enters a market, it rides off the innovations of its competitors, uses its existing brand power and sheer size to tackle a large surface area at the bottom of the market, and then, finally, it develops a valuable platform on top of the new market. As the platform grows, it slowly squeezes out the existing players.

- Steve Ballmer’s Microsoft by Dustin Curtis

In the long term, we expect that, just as in the credit card space, all of these mobile payment competitors will eventually find a way to shake hands, interoperate, and make life easier on the consumer.

- The mobile payments mess: no one’s winning, but we’re all losing | The Verge

If you put a sales guy in charge of the company,” Andreessen continued, “they’ll optimize for the next quarter. Finance guys will optimize the financials.” The company’s founder will optimize the products—and will often have the vision necessary to drive the company’s future innovation. As for the nuts-and-bolts skills necessary to lead a company, those can be learned.

- The Maturation of Mark Zuckerberg — New York Magazine

These companies give away a ton of value, a public good, with free products like Google search, that transforms cultures,” Mr. Hoffman says. “The easy thing to say is, ‘If you try to regulate us, you’ll do more harm than good, you’re not good social architects.’ I’m not endorsing that, but I understand it.

- Don’t Be Evil but Don’t Miss the Tech Train - NYTimes.com