Facebook’s IPO: What Will Change and What Won’t

Conventional wisdom says that everything changes once a company goes public. Instead of helming your own ship, you now have to kowtow to the voracious Wall Street masters, ever hunting for bigger and better quarterly earnings. You have to play nice with the press, for fear of bad news leading to a short of your stock. And most of all, you have to work really, really, really hard to keep your users happy.

So far, CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his merry band of iconoclasts at Facebook have blithely chartered their own course, doing what they want and whenever they want. Release a feature that has users screaming bloody murder (Beacon? News Feed?) Whatev’s. Get lambasted in the press for letting other websites surface users’ photos on their websites (Instant Personalization)? Tell someone who gives a damn. Get slammed with 20 years’ worth of privacy audits for being a little too carefree with one’s privacy policies? OK, well, yeah that one sucked.

But once they’re a public company, they’re going to buckle down, aren’t they? Keep a closer eye on money coming in than on cool features going out? Try not to rock the boat of public opinion too much? Well,

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