Shaky Dot.Com Status?

It was precisely a month ago that the New York Times published the amazing news that Microsoft would invest $240 million for a 1.6 percent stake in Facebook. According to the article, that figure put the value of the three-year-old social networking site at $15 billion.

The “astronomical valuation for Facebook” according to the Times article was “evidence that Microsoft executives believed they could not afford to lose out on the deal. Google appears to be building a dominant position in the race to serve advertisements online. Fearing it might lose control over the next generation of computer users, Microsoft has been trying to match and in some cases block Google’s plans, even if that effort is costly.”

To a former superintendent, that risk seemed nothing short of incredible. It also reminded me of the enormous difference between education and the business world. Such risk tasking is simply not part of the education culture and perhaps there in lies one of education’s issues.

As to the numbers, the $240 million gamble would have funded the small school district where I first served as principal/superintendent for more than 25 years. As to the larger district where I finished my career, the number would have still funded the district for about a dozen years.

Then today I picked up the Boston Globe to read the “The Internet Bubble, It Might Pop Again,” by Scott Kirsner. The writer reviews a plethora of arguments for and against such a dot.com bust happening again. He also just so happens to mention the Google IPO in 2004 and the recent Microsoft purchase last month as possible bookends of a bubble.

I was left further shaking my head in wonderment of it all; amazed at the risk, the amounts of money involved and the varied viewpoints.

There are those out there who say schools should be run more like a business and that the position of school superintendent should be more in line with that of a corporate CEO. Such an analogy certainly seems enormously far-fetched when placed amidst Kirsner’s discussion and the Microsoft deal with Facebook.