Facebook's Googly IPO delivers on Sun man's vision
History may record Scott McNealy as a straight-dealing leader of a major Silicon Valley tech company. In 2006, the grinning chief executive and co-founder of Sun Microsystems stunned journalists attending one of his company’s events by calling online consumer privacy a red herring. ”You have zero privacy anyway,” he said bluntly …
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"Our business is subject to complex and evolving US and foreign laws and regulations regarding privacy, data protection, and other matters."
...not to mention evolving US and foreign laws and regulations regarding secrecy, pervasive surveillance, terrorist hunting and other matters.
agreed
but you missed Copyright, Getty Images springs to mind.
Mcnealy
Was also famously quoted as saying, "remember your first shot of heroin is free" referring to Microsoft.
How right he was because the modern analogy is Facebook and Google.
lest we forget
Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask.
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How’d you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don’t know why.
Zuck: They “trust me”
Zuck: Dumb fucks.
http://venturebeat.com/2010/05/13/zuckerberg-dumb-fucks/
Not just data volume
They also have to be a bit worried about the actual value of the datasets.
How many different users, how many changes to preferences etc, the effectiveness of identifying more sepecific preferences in targetting - eventually all these things will be profiled by the advertisers.
I can't see the value holding - it gets more expensive to be more specifically targetted and the information is less reliable. There will come a point at which the drill down is no longer worth it and then it all just goes back to trending - although in much smaller groups. There may be value in assessing individuals strength of affiliation to trend groups but once the mass data input is over FB could be in real danger of being of very little value to advertisers.
It was earlier
The comment was actually made in 1999. I also heard him say around 2000 that 'the company that has the largest quantity of identities and credit card numbers in their directory will win' - Looks like Apple + Amazon have proved him right on this one too for now...
More importantly, are you gonna continue to use that psuedo-emo bird's picture(s) to illustrate every story on the IPO?
I'm not complaining, just asking...
Time to get busy..
.. with that nice article I had in mind. Privacy might become somewhat of a painful topic over the next few weeks..
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