[arockwell]

What's wrong with the metaphor? How would you have described the problem differently?

I thought it was a really good description of the situation Facebook is in. People have speculated for years about all of the different ways they could produce insane revenue/profits (the hot dog -> caviar machine), but their current revenue (the hot dogs) is very lackluster.

[RobAley]

I think the issue is that metaphors work best when they are about real situations. The idea of a metaphor (usually) is to help a person understand one situation by mapping their knowledge of another, more familiar, situation to the first. No one is familiar with the problem of turning hot dogs into caviar, because no one is trying to do it. If anything, the actual problem is more familiar to those on HN than the metaphor.