THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: Among the more colourful details of Facebook's 150-page S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission is a letter from founder Mark Zuckerberg setting out the social network's "mission".
He also sheds light on an arguably tougher goal – to force a change in the behaviour and expectations of publicly listed companies. Mr Zuckerberg is nothing if not ambitious.
"We've always cared primarily about our social mission, the services we're building and the people who use them. This is a different approach for a public company to take," he wrote. "We don't wake up in the morning with the primary goal of making money."
It sounds like a nice philosophy – and a brave attempt to ward off the short-termism that inevitably comes with a life lived on the public market – but in Facebook's brave new world of quarterly reporting, corporate governance procedures and a real-time trial by share price, Mr Zuckerberg might be forced to rewrite his priorities. » | Katherine Rushton, Media, telecoms and technology editor | Thursday, February 02, 2012
