- Facebook has a number of old, less efficient datacenters running older, less efficient servers. By replacing this old infrastructure with their own self-built datacenters in Prineville, OR, Forest City, NC, and Lulea, Sweden they are actually over time decreasing their total cost to operate the site, and riding moore's law to more efficient and powerful server systems. This actually saves the company money to operate the service, as well as streamlining and standardizing their production infrastructure for more ability to "move fast".
Of course it "affect the ability of the company to operate day to day". Not to mention morale of the team (and the monetary value of the company stock the own), it does affect it; good read here [1]
as of your second point, I agree with it and see the value now.
[1] http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080918053426AA...
But jokes aside, don't you think with the way the users' numbers are going, the way the stock is plunging, the way that judges deny settling of privacy related issues, don't you think that Facebook should immediately pause all this type of projects and get back to drawing board?? you know, figure out how to increase revenue before possibly filling out the last pixel of white space with overwhelmingly irrelevant, boring and/or spammy ads??