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Would Steve Jobs Have Fired Mark Zuckerberg?

This article is more than 10 years old.

Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Last week's debate about whether Tim Cook was doing a good job at Apple - or needed the bullet - struck me as a serious waste of energy.

Cook sits on top of a great company that's taking some necessary but giant steps sideways and, as a result, is stumbling here and there.

Over at Facebook Mark Zuckerberg is sitting on top of a company that has just lifted a huge amount of money from investors and overseen a dramatic share price drop, with an acknowledged weakness in a fundamental element of its business.

In addition to that, we now find out, courtesy of Bloomberg, that Facebook tried to fudge the assessment of how it might monetize its mobile user base.

The result is:

Facebook went forward pricing the IPO at $38 a share. That was 107 times trailing 12-month earnings, making it more expensive than 99 percent of all companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index at the time. The SEC has no say in setting IPO prices.

Once called the IPO of the century, Facebook has dropped 45 percent through Oct. 5. That’s the worst offer-to-date performance of any U.S. IPO raising at least $1.5 billion since 2007....

My interest in this is not who should run Facebook or Apple. It's more in how the social web formulates and shapes an important news item or indeed creates one that should never have existed.

Did we waste a whole load of time discussing Tim Cook when, in fact, it was more legitimate to put Zuckerberg under scrutiny, along with the people who put him in an impregnable position (we've kind of known something wasn't right about Facebook dating back to the days before the IPO).

What astonishes me about Facebook is that the breach of trust seems transparently obvious.

So how do we go about improving the interaction between the  reader's interests, the socialization of news, and the writing of news stories, so we get the right focus?

Follow me on Twitter @haydn1701