Commentary

J. Nicholas Hoover
Senior Editor, InformationWeek  

What Microsoft Could Do With Facebook

Microsoft's reportedly in talks to invest somewhere between $300 and $500 million for a stake in Facebook. Here's what Microsoft could do with it.

Microsoft's reportedly in talks to invest somewhere between $300 and $500 million for a stake in Facebook. Here's what Microsoft could do with it.

  • Create Microsoft applications to run on Facebook's F8 platform. Live Messenger for Facebook? Live Calendar for Facebook? The possibilities are endless, and Facebook apps for the most part are relatively simple. Microsoft's Popfly mash-up tool already works with Facebook and Microsoft has a Facebook Developer Toolkit for Visual Studio.

  • Create interoperable ties between Facebook and Windows Live Spaces or even SharePoint. Open social networks may be the future, and Microsoft doesn't seem to be getting much if any traction with Windows Live Spaces just yet. Why not give it a boost by opening Live Spaces users up to a huge group of people with whom to connect?

    More Windows Insights

    White Papers

    More >>

    Reports

    More >>

    Webcasts

    More >>

  • Secure Facebook as an advertising customer. Forever. Microsoft already has a deal to syndicate ads at Facebook through 2009. Turning Facebook into Facebo-soft should get the company some additional advertising perks, like locking in Facebook's millions of users as advertising customers in perpetuity.

  • Keep a close eye on a potentially scrappy competitor. Facebook certainly is trendy these days, and Microsoft would clearly like a piece of that, whether the investment potential is real or not. I'm not saying Facebook is anything more than a competitive rounding error to Microsoft right now, but by moving some Redmond spies down to Facebook's Palo Alto office, Microsoft will be better able to understand and dissect the Facebook phenomenon and stalk talent.

  • Sit on it and block other competitors. Yahoo offered Facebook $1 billion a while ago, and Google also is rumored to be a suitor. These are Microsoft's real online competitors, and a Facebook investment could be a preemptive move by Microsoft just to keep its competitors grimy little hands off.
  • Anything else?


    Related Reading




    Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

    Single tags

    These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

    <br> Defines a single line break

    <hr> Defines a horizontal line

    Matching tags

    These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

    <a> Defines an anchor

    <b> Defines bold text

    <big> Defines big text

    <blockquote> Defines a long quotation

    <caption> Defines a table caption

    <cite> Defines a citation

    <code> Defines computer code text

    <em> Defines emphasized text

    <fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

    <h1> This is heading 1

    <h2> This is heading 2

    <h3> This is heading 3

    <h4> This is heading 4

    <h5> This is heading 5

    <h6> This is heading 6

    <i> Defines italic text

    <p> Defines a paragraph

    <pre> Defines preformatted text

    <q> Defines a short quotation

    <samp> Defines sample computer code text

    <small> Defines small text

    <span> Defines a section in a document

    <s> Defines strikethrough text

    <strike> Defines strikethrough text

    <strong> Defines strong text

    <sub> Defines subscripted text

    <sup> Defines superscripted text

    <u> Defines underlined text

    InformationWeek encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, InformationWeek moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing/SPAM. InformationWeek further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

    Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.
    T-Shirt Giveaway T-Shirt Giveaway: Each week we're selecting one great comment from our readers. The author of the comment will receive an InformaitonWeek Community t-shirt. So get posting!
    Subscribe to RSS

    Resource Links