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It’s nice for Facebook that it just managed to raise another
$200 million. But what does it say that the investor in question paid a third
less for its stake than Microsoft did for its piece of the social networking
company two years ago? Or that Facebook had to venture as far as Moscow
to draw up sufficient interest for this go-around?
Yes, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg claims the company was
approached by many other firms. But none evidently was willing to pony up as
much as Digital Sky.
That suggests to me that the recent hoopla over all the potential
new deal-making in tech land and elsewhere remains just that. Consider along these lines the speculation that Broadcom’s hostile bid of $9.25 per share for Emulex is just the opening round in a bidding war, largely because of the appeal of the latter’s Fiber Channel
over Ethernet technology.
Our own research finds that demand for FCoE may be a long
way from materializing. And while the question we asked was admittedly phrased
in loaded fashion, the quarterly results that H-P reported last week were
nothing to write home about, either, and according to this analysis reflect the dismal
state of current spending on technology. And as goes investment, so go deals, at least in the long run.
I don’t mean to throw too much cold water on the optimism we
keep hearing about the imminent end of the Great Recession. But a healthy dose
of skepticism about such happy talk is warranted, if only to put the economy on a firmer footing
going forward. To do otherwise is to indulge in wishful thinking and ultimately to try to inflate
yet another asset bubble, and we’ve had at least one too many of those
recently.
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