By Rick Aristotle Munarriz, The Motley Fool

Filed under: Technology, Dell, Facebook, Computer Industry, Entertainment Industry, Internet

It’s been a colorful week in the world of business, from a social network’s accidental hijacking spree to the timely rescue of a fading PC giant, and pink slips being passed out at a colorful animation studio. Here’s a rundown of this week’s biggest wins and loses.

Facebook (FB) — Loser
For a few minutes on Thursday night, a lot of people mistakenly thought that their computers had contracted a virus.

Visitors to many popular Internet websites found those pages redirecting within seconds to a Facebook error page.

What was going on? Well, if a web-surfer was also logged into Facebook — and with more than a billion active users of the social networking website, that’s always a large number of people — and visited a page with a Facebook Connect button (to post on the page or share its contents), they were redirected.

Facebook was savvy enough to fix the problem right away, but if Facebook Connect gives the social media giant the power to hijack external sites when things get buggy, the mishap may lead some webmasters to reconsider incorporating the feature in their pages.

Dell’s (DELL) Shareholders — Winners

After weeks of speculation about a deal, the country’s second largest PC maker is being taken private. There will naturally be some resistance to the $24 billion leveraged buyout. Shareholders will argue that they are being cashed out for far less than what Dell was worth in its prime. In the end, though, Dell is doing its public shareholders a favor.

PC sales have been slipping for nearly two years, and that trend is not going to reverse anytime soon — if it ever does. Casual users continue their migration to smartphones or tablets that do nearly everything that consumers routinely used their desktops and laptops to do.

There will continue to be healthy demand for servers, especially as the global economy picks up, but Dell has been a laggard in the smartphone and tablet markets. It’s probably too late to catch up.

Pandora (P) — Loser

Pandora has been one of the Internet’s fastest growing companies, but the leading music streaming website is showing signs that it may have peaked.

Pandora posted its monthly metrics update this week. If you looked only at the press release, you would probably be impressed. Active listeners rose 38 percent over the past year to 65.6 million in January and listener hours soared 47 percent to 1.39 billion.

However, pull up the prior month’s metrics and Pandora has more active listeners — 67.1 million — and served up the same 1.39 billion hours of audio in December. In other words, usage remained the same but there were fewer listeners.

It would be easy to dismiss this as a seasonal thing. Folks have …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance