I case of such companies like Facebook there is no point to say that they are dead. In fact there are 2 Facebooks: Facebook as a company and FACEBOOK as a presence in modern culture. The second is much more important, then the first one. For many people FACEBOOK is the way they act on the web and communicate with others. Even if Facebook is not growing any more (or even shrinking) it still the only medium that has a digital picture of relations between 1 billion people and that makes is something more then just a company. Of course if I were 16 now, I would not be on Facebook, because in this age you have a lot of things that you wish to keep in secret. But still Facebook is one of first app we install on a new mobile device.
I do not see any comparison between Fb and Microsoft or Fb and Apple. Facebook do not produce any goods etc. It just mapping relations and other features of people into digital data.
>Of course if I were 16 now, I would not be on Facebook, because in this age you have a lot of things that you wish to keep in secret.
Someone on here the other day made a comment about the whole teenager thing and it was a pretty good one. It was to the affect of: teenagers don't need to be on Facebook yet because they still see all their friends and social circles, that becomes more difficult to manage you as move away for college. So perhaps that's when they may turn to Facebook when they need a more centralized way to do chat, pictures, statuses, etc.
I have a 16 year old sister. She was on Facebook and then deleted her profile. She deleted her profile at about the same time she went from being semi-awkward early teenager still shaking off her Russian accent (we adopted her) and became one of (what I am guessing based on her friends and the things she does) the coolest kids in her school.
She is probably doing lots of things that I don't want to know about. That's cool and Facebook gets in the way of doing that.
Or maybe in fact something completely opposite is the case: relations between teenagers’ social circles are so difficult to map (there is so plenty of inclusions, exclusion, intersections and other Boolean staff) that Facebook is not able to manage it ;-)
Of course I am not an economist at all, but still I see here some paradox. Minimal wedges are paid for the jobs that require low qualifications or in fact no qualifications. So for example if we raise 4$ per hour to 5$ for such jobs, we may reduce the value of 1 dollar. If 1 hour of such job was worth 4$ and now is worth 5$, then now 1$ has less value than it used to have. As a consequence the whole economy may experience inflation. I do not believe in simple solutions to complicated problems. Printing more money do not reduce poverty and rising minimal wedges is for me a little bit like printing money.
It mostly eats into corporate profits first. Then it starts having an effect on inflation.
If you think corporate profits are too low (fwiw they're at record highs right now), and corporations deserve more profit you shouldn't support a raise in the minimum wage.
If you're interested in what happens to prices if the minimum wage is hiked, read here:
"Our analysis of retail prices in 3 catering industries (canteens, restaurants and takeaways) does not indicate that prices in these industries were differentially affected according to their exposure to
the minimum wage. Surprisingly, the only evidence of any price effect is found in the canteen industry where prices rose by a modest 1% in April 1999. "
> Minimal wedges are paid for the jobs that require low qualifications or in fact no qualifications.
Technically, minimal wages are paid where supply of labour greatly exceeds demand for labour. It is theoretically possible to see high skilled jobs pay low wages and low skilled jobs pay high wages, and you do see it happen sometimes, though the reverse is definitely more common.
Photocopiers and books never stopped authors. It's all about the packaging and the full-service offered. A book is nice because it is bound, or comes with extra goodies. If your software is just software, well, step up your sales game.
