But besides that, is there anything that makes buybacks worse than dividends?
Dividends are cleaner and affect the price in well understood ways: you set a date for the elegibility, and if you bought before that you get the dividend, if you buy after you don't.
Stock buybacks are less transparent (you don't buy them all at once).
Dividends also give money to people who have shares.
There is not difference beteeen these two mechanisms in who gets the money.
Which is to say, very little overhead
Like I said, it's the tax treatment that basically stopped growth companies giving dividends. I think that we should change said tax treatment and also make buybacks illegal but that's a bit more controversial.
In any case, for both G and FB, they'd need to do buybacks anyway because of their employee share programs.
Given a certain amount of money, spending it on stock buybacks vs spending it on dividends returns the same amount of money to each HOLDING shareholder.
In one case, they receive a small sum. In the other case, the value of their stock goes up.