Daily Archives: May 20, 2012

The truth about Facebook

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My take on the Facebook IPO. From this morning’s Observer

There are two classes of share – A and B. Each class B share carries 10 times the voting rights of its class A counterpart. Zuck owns 27.1% of the class B shares outright and the company’s pre-IPO filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission revealed agreements with other owners of class B shares to assign their voting rights to him. The net result is that he has voting control over at least 57.1% of the class B shares. In other words, he’s omnipotent.

This would be a problem even if Zuck had the brains of Einstein and the wisdom of Solomon. But, alas, he doesn’t. He is undoubtedly a smart and talented guy, but he also happens to have a megalomaniacal obsession – that everything has to be social, ie public. And if you’re a Facebook user and don’t like that – well, tough.

So we now have another powerful media company with a shareholding structure that renders its charismatic, single-minded founder immune from shareholder pressure. Remind you of anyone? Hint: it begins with “News”.

Taming the email monster

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This morning’s Observer column.

Email has become the central communications channel of all modern organisations, to the point where none of them could now function without it. But there’s increasing evidence – both anecdotal and empirical – that it has become dysfunctional. It eats into people’s working and thinking time, for example, distracts them from doing “real” work and generates guilt feelings that ratchet up stress levels to unsustainable levels.

In the old world of desktop PCs, you could at least leave it behind when you left the office. But the advent of the smartphone changed all that. Email has now infiltrated leisure time, family time – even sleep time. It’s become a monster that’s destroying our lives.

Deep down, most of us know this. But we daren’t talk about it out loud, for fear of seeming inadequate…