For Facebook it's not necessarily about staying competitive and continually releasing new things like Apple (although it certainly wouldn't hurt), it's about finding new revenue streams apart from advertising. Almost the entirety of Facebook's revenue is dependent on advertising, and the amount that companies are willing to pay for online advertising is decreasing every quarter.
By choosing to release more shares than initially thought, they've created a lot of grief for both Morgan Stanley and its customers. Some customers put in orders for almost 5 times as many shares as they wanted, being under the impression that as with most big offerings, they would only receive a fraction of their actual order. Now that there were enough shares to satisfy these orders, someone may be stuck with $200,000 worth of shares when they really wanted $40,000. If they can't come up with the money there will probably be legal action involved.
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Discontented suburbanite since 1994
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