I was working on a reply piece to an article on Publishing 2.0 that claims that Facebook has no use for business. I absolutely disagree with this and while I was listing out the reasons why a Facebook style platform would be brilliant in a business situation (found on BusinessGeek if you are interested), two things popped into my head
- The back-end application I was describing sounded a lot like Microsoft Sharepoint with a better front-end
- This story from earlier in the week where Steve Ballmer claims Facebook is a fad, even though he values it at $10 Billion.
It clicked into place what MS wants a stake in Facebook for. In an earlier posts on GNC and BG, I talked about them wanting either technology, a business contract, or a denial of these to other companies. I am now confident that what they want is access to Facebook IP.
I now expect to see a Facebook like interface on MS Sharepoint in the near future, possibly with extra integration into other MS applications. They will either be getting some code from Facebook to help achieve this quickly, or will be licensing whatever patents they may have to prevent costly litigation in the future. Knowing Microsoft’s history they have probably already done a lot of due process on the strength of the Facebook patent holdings.