So hopefully you’ve caught wind of the $240,000,000 that Microsoft invested in Facebook today, if not you can read about it everywhere else. So aside from the mind blowing $15 Billion valuation, what does this mean to you and me? Well probably more to me than you, but I digress. Essentially this means two things for Facebook, and one thing for Microsoft.
For Facebook it means that they get a war chest of cash to acquire and expand with, something they did not have before (they were running about break even). This will let them snap up small apps, key intellectual property, and build their own internal structure a LOT. This will also let them get access to Microsoft’s huge ad sales team, and their resources. This lets Facebook focus on building traffic and features, and allow them to focus less on building their own internal team of ad sales people.
Microsoft on the other hand gets a piece of what is going to be essentially the biggest people search engine on the planet. They also get a piece of what is quickly becoming a huge percent of people’s online attention. Online attention is a huge business, think how many thousands of times you’ve heard of the term sticky. Well folks, facebook is like a tar pit.
So what does this all mean to me? Well as a facebook app developer, it means there will be much better monetization options coming, more robust infrastructure, and a lot more money flowing into the facebook eco-system. The Facebook economy has just had a major booster shot. Remember folks, if anyone knows about building software platforms, its Microsoft.
