Marketo's costs for enterprise level service requires a long term bet. The company I work for has invested millions in Salesforce integration but 8 months later I've received 1 lead which was dead wrong.
Our industry doesn't lend itself well to social marketing so that may be part of it, but I wonder how many businesses will actually see a return from using Marketo. Executives stuck in the sunk cost fallacy will keep them going for a few years even in their worst accounts. Their market presence is so recent that their retention rate has nowhere to go but down.
Facebook could have branched off into a few profitable models with their vast network. As you mentioned, dating would have been one avenue. Match.com may not have flashy revenue numbers but their profit margin is impressive.
They could have also been LinkedIn before LinkedIn really took off. People tried to use FB in that manner but the real value of LN is in the features they offer to businesses (recruiting, sales, etc). Again, they had this enourmous network but didn't think to add value to it.
They could have gone after Craigslist, especially in the realm of real estate where CL wants to make sure any searching is as painful as possible.
I also feel like they dropped the ball in regards to business marketing. Plenty of small businesses can't afford a real website, FB could have been a powerful platform for finding the kinds of small businesses that are buried by other sources. They know where you live, they could know what your network likes, and they could have offered cheap, professional looking pages that get the businesses close to you on board.
Their network has so much hidden potential but they've done nothing to dig it up. Use among my network is declining but not long ago it was the hub of the internet for many of my friends. They had the eyes and mindshare to get a billion people to at least try a new service. Add the power of all those connections and they could have deprecated half of the underpopulated, poorly designed, or poorly managed sites like Yelp.
The problem is that you'd have such a huge supply of available cars between 8-6pm M-F that you'd never be able to turn a profit if driverless cars became commonplace.
The parking lot at my office complex has more capacity than my city's entire public transit and taxi system combined. Releasing that into the market just means razor thin profits with the risk that someone will trash your car.
Taxis are incredibly expensive compared to a car on a per mile basis. $1.00 is considered pretty cheap for a taxi while owning a Honda Civic averages out after all costs to around $0.35 per mile if you drive 15k per year. Now spread the registration, property tax, depreciation, and maintenance among 5 people and that cost is down to $0.17 per mile for 75k miles per year. I got these numbers from Kelley Blue Book if you're interested.
So in the end, you can run a 100% margin on top of the overhead of the car itself and still make fiscal sense for consumers.
Wouldn't that location be those distant lots that are always empty now? That real estate is mostly wasted today because nobody wants to walk 2-3 miles and transportation options are either slow, expensive, or unavailable. You call your car right when the show lets out (maybe you can even set an alarm 10 minutes before its over if you're a good planner) and it's there after a comparatively short wait. Even overly congested airports like JFK have abandoned lots within a 10 minute drive.
I also don't see the point about traffic jams. How would they be any worse than a parking garage hemorrhaging visitors at the end of every event like we have today? I can't see the situation being anything but improved by having the cars already out on the side of the main road ready to head in the right direction.
Keeping current margins would mean 1000% profit margins since the actual cost of ownership is surprisingly low. The cabby's cut, down time, and the medallion's costs (both up front and in supply restriction) make up the vast majority of fare today.
A Honda Civic's total cost-per-mile (with depreciation) is $0.17 if you're driving 75k/year which is pretty low for a taxi. Even though Civics aren't big cars, the lack of a driver and controls means you can have 2 rows of seats facing each other with a ton of leg room.
Our industry doesn't lend itself well to social marketing so that may be part of it, but I wonder how many businesses will actually see a return from using Marketo. Executives stuck in the sunk cost fallacy will keep them going for a few years even in their worst accounts. Their market presence is so recent that their retention rate has nowhere to go but down.