“Microsoft, Apple, Google, Oracle, IBM, Yahoo, Netscape and Cisco...”
Most of these companies make real products, like operating systems, hardware, databases, and routers, things that are really needed by large businesses and individuals alike. These things are sold on the basis of price and performance.
What is Facebook? It’s an overgrown college programming project on a LAMP platform (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). I’m sure the code and hardware is likely to be pretty shaky, and eventually they’ll have to spend hundreds of millions fixing it.
Yep, I read an interesting article on its MySQL back end. They're doing stuff with MySQL that it was never, ever, in a million years, designed to do.
So...they'll go public. Then, they'll need to convert (SQL? Oracle? your guess is as good as mine). They'll sink millions (10s? 100s?) into a technology company that's already far past its prime.
And that will be the end of Facebook. Sure, it will still be around (MySpace still is, as is AOL, and others. Heck, Prodigy still likely exists somewhere, as something) but Facebook will no longer be a dominant player. Meanwhile, there will be a lot of money to be made, by the current shareholders and anyone involved in the company's technical conversion.
Those coming to the party late, will pay for all of it.