The computer software maker's deal with Facebook may prove to be a good investment in the future, but the real value for Microsoft lies in the legitimacy the arrangement lends to its burgeoning online ad business and the potential it offers to play catch-up with rivals the full article is here http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20071103.RDECISION03/TPStory/Business
Facebook is huge and a great marketing tool. Microsoft knows this! I even know this and created groups for all my websites long ago. I have facebook group I can market products too with over 500 members. Microsoft has to own everything so facebook was no surprise, whats next right?
Not much, unless they decide to develop it further. But it's certainly better to have a company butt into Google's buying spree.
Thats why MSN bought it... just so google dont own it anything MSN touches you can expect it to make money thx malcolm
You know that Microsoft owns less than 2% of facebook, right? It's probably one of the worst business decisions Microsoft has ever made. They spent $250 million (valuing facebook at over $10 billion) for less than 2% of a company. That just doesn't make any business sense at all.
$0 they added it to the 'live' network its practicaly worthless IMO. I had an account since they launched with that spinning red .gif image and just finally quit using my acct last year. hotmail = crap and just got worse when MS bought it and started messing with it.
Actually I myself is very curious when Microsoft bought Hotmail, that was a huge amount of money, now $200 million seemed nothing. Anyone knows whats the valuation of Hotmail.now?
btw... I would delete my page, if M$ would buy the whole thing. I prefer Google, but they seem to be not caring about this project at all, they havent intergrated adsense option for the application developers. as facebook pages are password protected, adsense bots cant crawl the page. facebook SHOULD give free pass to adsense bots, thus making app development on facebook more fun. everybody builds apps, but no one earns a penny of these. m$ should first push up their own ad network, create a more valuable community than myspace, before buying a bigger part of fb. their way of community really suck. they dont care about usability, cool tools are always coming from the google bro's... being a pioneer is not easy. they tried the community stuff with myspace... communities are much different than showing statistical data, putting up databases etc. btw, is there ONE tool of M$, which does not have ANY bugs? they seem to be careless of quality, they only care about quantity...
Stocks ;-) Why do you think they purchased a percentage and then pumped it up so much that they had the balls to say it was worth $15 Billion? Easy money in the near future PLUS they get a decent amount of extra traffic to get clicks and more ads on their Search Engine. Hotmail has made PLENTY of money for them and I'm sure it still is. I've gotta believe that they've made their investment back and then some...