I realize there is a bit of snark in that comment but the interesting bit is known as COGS. Part of the "value" of a business is the rate at which it can make money, and the server business is limited in its rate by how many machines you can build and the price you can sell them for. Most internet businesses (like Snapchat) are limited only by the amount of money you can extract from users and the number of users you can sign up. While the sunk costs of hosting servers and infrastructure is non-zero, the marginal cost of an additional customer is tiny compared to the marginal revenue they could generate.
This is the fundamental way in which the information economy is different than the goods economy. And that makes comparing a business in one, with a business in the other, invalid.
Not only that, but nobody forked over billions for Snapchat. The company took investment at a price that suggests we can extrapolate a total valuation in the billions, but nothing like that amount of money has actually changed hands. Lenovo is putting up $2 billion in cash for this deal.
Again, that's not cash on the barrel head. That's a rumor. Was it $3 billion in Facebook stock? Was it $1 billion plus a performance bonus? Would Snapchat continue to operate independently, or was it a huge acquihire?
We know what IBM's server business is worth. Snapchat's valuation is just speculation.
Well this estimate http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/19/how-many-users-does-snapcha... is that snapchat probably has at least 10M users. So let's say you wanted a 10% return on your $3B value, you would have to generate $30 in net income per user per year ($300M). If you charge a 'membership' fee of $3/month [1] that gives you $360M a year, leaving $60M/year (or $5M / month "burn" rate).
So would people pay that? I don't know. But it would be the sort of math you would go through evaluating that deal.
To evaluate the server deal you have to look at how many units you think you are going to ship, what your COGS are on them, and your gross margin. You can't really give someone 'free server' for a year because you have money sunk into building it and shipping it.
Further your revenue probably doesn't change if 100 people use a server or 1000 people do.
My point remains that it is not possible to compare 'goods' economy companies with 'info' economy companies.
[1] [Edit: added the RPM rates] Conversely, in advertising terms with 400M snaps per day you would need a RPM of $2.50 to generate $360M/year in revenues.
I highly doubt SnapChat's audience of majority less than 18-year-old population (with most in their early teens) are going to pay $30 a year for a way to send auto-deleting pictures to each other. Especially when there are numerous other free multimedia messaging apps. Getting even 1% of that audience to pay would be impressive.
An RPM of $2.50 is also equally unrealistic for an audience of the mostly non-credit-card holding teen demographic, even more so when they're looking at the autoexpiring content for mere seconds before moving onto reply. Not only that but I'd bet a lot of those snaps per day come from a small subset of the 10M users.
So lets say you take it as a given that snapchat is mostly teens. They look at their snapchats, there is a way to know they have seen them. Lets say you are the GAP and you want to get the latest "look" out there, so you pay SnapChat $.05 every time Snapchat shows a Snap of someone in the "look". Snapchat has to show 50 "Gap" snaps in every 1,000 to make $2.50 per thousand. Typical user will see them on one in 20 'snaps', if the average really is 30 snaps looked at in a day, that is one per day.
I'm not saying you are wrong, what I'm saying is that I can imagine how they would make it profitable should they need to.
What I read out of your comment is that though comparing both kinds of companies is invalid, valuations on information economy companies is at present nonsensical at best.
This is the fundamental way in which the information economy is different than the goods economy. And that makes comparing a business in one, with a business in the other, invalid.