Microsoft Exec Confirms Facebook Acquisition Attempt

Microsoft apparently tried to acquire Facebook for $15 billion--and Mark Zuckerberg told them no.

"We tried to acquire Facebook," Fritz Lanman, Microsoft's senior director of Corporate Strategy and Acquisitions, told an audience Dec. 9 at the Le Web '10 conference (as reported by TechCrunch). "Facebook had a lot of similarities to Microsoft back in the day."

According to David Kirkpatrick's "The Facebook Effect," Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer visited Zuckerberg in Palo Alto, Calif., where he made the $15 billion offer. But Zuckerberg wanted to keep control of his project. And what's that compared to enough money to buy a medium-sized country?

Microsoft did invest in Facebook, however, to the tune of $240 million. That was good for a 1.6 percent stake in the social network, which has collaborated with Redmond on a number of initiatives over the past few months.

In October, Microsoft and Facebook announced a deeper partnership centered on a set of new social-search features accessible via Bing and Facebook's Web results. One feature, Liked Results, displays Websites and links "liked" by a Facebook user's friends. That's paired with Facebook Profile Search, which leverages a user's Facebook connections to deliver more relevant results.

"We think it's time for a real, robust, persistent social signal," Satya Nadella, senior vice president of Microsoft's Online Services Division, wrote in an Oct. 13 posting on the Bing Community blog. "Facebook has led a transformation of the Internet already. It has reached and passed 500 million members, and the amount of content created inside Facebook each day is staggering."

The following day, Microsoft announced updates to its Docs.com online applications platform, which allows Facebook users to create and share Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. The new features included .PDF support, full-text search, user-generated templates, and drag-and-drop Silverlight document uploading.

Such collaborations with Facebook, of course, give Microsoft access to a massive brand and a built-in audience, both of which are vital as it seeks to battle Google Docs and similar cloud-based productivity platforms. For Facebook, collaboration with Microsoft on a project like Docs.com allows the social network to expand its utility to users in new ways.

http://www.microsoft-watch.com/content/corporate/facebook_exec_confirms_facebook_acquisition_attempt.html

Yahoo's Bartz Says Facebook Is Larger Competitor Than Google

Yahoo! Inc. Chief Executive Officer Carol Bartz said social networking leader Facebook Inc. has emerged as a bigger rival than Google Inc., owner of the biggest Web-search engine.

“Our greatest competitor probably is Facebook, more so than Google,” Bartz said at a presentation in New York yesterday. “They’re a hot site, but there’s room for more than one of anything.”

Bartz said her company once weighed buying privately held Facebook for about $1 billion and that her acquisition strategy is to focus on companies that bring users, content, engineers and advertising technology. Yahoo is adding features to keep from losing Web surfers to sites such as Facebook and Twitter Inc. that make it easier to interact with friends.

The second-year CEO has cut costs, pared extraneous products and focused Yahoo on news, sports and other content. She also struck a partnership that lets Microsoft Corp. handle the mechanics of Web search, while Yahoo oversees advertising sales. She’s been less successful reviving growth and keeping pace with newer, faster-growing Web companies.

As Facebook’s user base has surged past 500 million, its value has risen to more than $40 billion, according to private- share trading site SharesPost Inc. Yahoo, based in Sunnyvale, California, has a market capitalization of $22.1 billion.

Asked for her thoughts on whether Yahoo should go private, Bartz said she has no plans to do so. She also said Yahoo will remain useful to users because of its ability to personalize and organize content from the Web’s 240 million sites.

“For the most part, people pretty much want this curated for them,” she said.

Yahoo rose 61 cents, or 3.7 percent, to $16.94 yesterday on the Nasdaq Stock Market. The shares are little changed this year before today.

To contact the reporter on this story: Brian Womack in San Francisco at bwomack1@bloomberg.net; Douglas MacMillan in San Francisco at dmacmillan3@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Tom Giles at tgiles5@bloomberg.net

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-08/yahoo-ceo-has-no-plans-to-go-private-sees-buying-content-users.html

Kinect is hacker-friendly, and that's a good thing, Microsoft says

Kinect, the new motion-sensing peripheral, is easy prey for hackers. According to reports in several outlets, including the UK Telegraph, a range of "amateurs and professionals" have repurposed the device to run all sorts of cool programs, including "a Star Wars-style light sabre simulator" and "a shadow puppet that takes the movements of a user's arm and projects them as a bird." (More here.)

Sounds ominous, right? Well, not so fast. Responding to queries about the hacks, Microsoft has said that it intentionally made the Kinect open-source – and that it welcomes the additions to the Kinect universe.

"What has happened is someone wrote an open-source driver for PCs that essentially opens the USB connection, which we didn't protect by design, and reads the inputs from the sensor," Microsoft's Alex Kipman recently told NPR, according to Ars Technica. "The sensor ... has eyes and ears, and that's a whole bunch of, you know, noise that someone needs to take and turn into signal."

The Kinect, which sells for $150, has won solid marks from reviewers, who have praised the intuitiveness of the peripheral. The Kinect is a blast to play, Luke Westaway of CNET UK wrote recently, "so long as you don't mind sacrificing all of the dignity you've spent your whole life accruing. We've spent several days playing our way through the launch titles and concluded that it's impossible to maintain any sense of self-respect while playing."

Playing the Kinect is embarrassing, Westaway continued, "but that's a big part of the fun. Similarly, watching your friends flailing around like loonies is a treat not to be missed." Plenty of consumers seem to agree. As of last week, Microsoft had reportedly sold more than a million Kinect units worldwide – a strong showing for a fledging device.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Innovation/Horizons/2010/1122/Kinect-is-hacker-friendly-and-that-s-a-good-thing-Microsoft-says

Google Docs Infiltrates Microsoft Office

In the insect world, parasitic wasps inject larvae into certain caterpillars. The larvae feed on the caterpillars, turn them into zombies, and eventually devour them.

This may seem like an overly dramatic metaphor to use to describe Google's strategy for dealing with Microsoft, but the parallels are eerily similar. It's perhaps most evident in Google Chrome Frame, software that seizes certain page rendering functions from Internet Explorer 6 and replaces them with Chrome's JavaScript engine.

But it's also useful in understanding the technology Google acquired when it bought a startup called DocVerse in March. DocVerse made plugin software that enabled cloud-based collaboration in Microsoft Office applications Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.

Google on Monday plans to re-introduce the DocVerse software under a new name, Google Cloud Connect. The software, available for Windows computers in a limited preview, provides a way to use Office applications as clients that connect to Google's cloud.

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"Users of Office 2003, 2007 and 2010 can sync their Office documents to the Google cloud, without ever leaving Office," wrote DocVerse co-founder and Google group product manager Shan Sinha in a draft blog post provided by Google. "Once synced, documents are backed-up, given a unique URL, and can be accessed from anywhere (including mobile devices) at any time through Google Docs. And because the files are stored in the cloud, people always have access to the current version."

Microsoft, understandably, would prefer that its customers choose its cloud. Last month, it took steps to encourage that choice with the beta launch of Office 365, a hosted service that combines Microsoft Office, SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, and Lync Online. Office 365 starts at $6 per user per month, which is still higher than the $4 and change it costs per month to use Google Apps For Business.

Google's enterprise group has long been aware that it's not always possible to convince companies or employees to give up Microsoft Office, particularly if the relationship goes back for decades. Many companies that have become Google Apps customers have also kept Microsoft Office licenses. The City of Los Angeles, for example, a prominent Google Apps customer, conducted a study that suggested 20% of its employees would continue to use Office.

Google hopes to encourage Office users to inject its Cloud Connect code into Microsoft's software, in order to win them over from the inside.

http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/hosted/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228300283&cid=RSSfeed_IWK_News

Windows 8 to showcase 'desktop as a service'?

Since April, it’s been quiet on the Windows 8 leak front. But here’s a new tidbit to keep the “what’s next for Windows” faithful going for a bit longer.

Blogger Charon at Ma-Config.com unearthed a slide presentation from a Microsoft architectural summit held in London in early April of this year that focuses on virtualization futures. (As Microsoft watchers may recall, new virtualization capabilities are expected by many to be part of Windows 8 when it ships around 2012 or so.) There’s only one slide in the deck that explicitly calls out the 2012+ “Windows Next.” But the deck still gives some general sense of what the Softies are thinking on the Windows client virtualization front.

The Microsoft solution architect presentation, entitled “Desktop as a Service,” describes some of the customer pain points associated with Windows today. From notes that are part of the slide deck:

Customers today “see application compatibility issues, they see DLL hell, they see an inability to manage efficiently, they see high costs associated with maintenance and upgrades, they see a relatively short lifespan…..This cannot continue. Customers are increasingly refusing to let this continue.”

What could alleviate these problems in a single bound? Virtualization technology! Or — to reflect the deck’s messaging more accurately — a panoply of virtualization technologies.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/windows-8-to-showcase-desktop-as-a-service/7975