I agree that Facebook could try to be less bloated, however that's not very likely. The history of tech companies is gradual bloat, whether you're talking about Microsoft or Google or Apple.
Visa has a $80 billion market cap, $9b in sales, and $3.6b in profit with a mere 7,500 employees. One of the best ratios of any major company. In fact, it's better than Facebook's current employee to sales ratio (and it's worth pointing out that they're nearly at a $10b sales run rate, and $4b in annual profit).
Visa has around a 40% net margin, that's beyond extraordinary. There's almost zero chance Facebook can be any less bloated than what Visa is already doing.
Discover also has a stellar ratio, 11k employees to $8.5 billion in sales.
Ditto MasterCard, with 6,700 employees and $6.7b in sales.
The only reason these companies have such high margins is because these businesses are unbelievably profitable. Being the guy who takes money from someone, puts some of it in his pocket, and hands the rest to another guy is a very very sweet place to be.
I think Facebook could tack on a payments business with relatively little additional hiring or resources, and maintain far higher than 40% margins. Whether they would try to be that efficient or not is another question.
Most tech companies don't bother with being particularly efficient. Google could have stuck to their search engine and advertising and had > 80% margins if they wanted to.
You're absolutely right, payment processing is incredibly profitable, but I don't see what that has to do with Facebook attempting to be even more efficient than Visa.
Facebook has already shown they're not even as efficient as Visa; despite being so young they're more bloated than Visa already. And that lends credence to the notion that they wouldn't be any better at payment processing than a company that has specialized in that for a very long time and is the best in the world at it.
Certainly a company like Microsoft could have just published Windows and had 90% margins. But no mega company ever does that, so it's not a realistic scenario. They don't do that because they're seeking growth, which is something shareholders always want to see.
Companies that had extremely lucrative margins and dominant positions, that didn't sit still: Cisco, Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Intel, Oracle, Samsung, Nintendo, Sony, Google, and on and on.
I've not aware of any major tech company that has ever just created one extraordinarily profitable product, and then did nothing else but collect their 85% net margin. Facebook isn't likely going to be the first.
