Microsoft to Buy 5% of Facebook Valuing at $10bn

l-ascorbic writes "The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Microsoft is poised to buy 5% of Facebook for $300 million to $500 million, valuing the company at up to $10 billion. Microsoft already handles advertising for the site."

Comments

Re:wow

[betterunixthanunix]

Probably because it would cost so much for FB to migrate to .NET (or any application server). Think about how much traffic FB gets -- now think about how much extra hardware they would need to aquire to switch from a CGI-esque technology like PHP to a big and heavy AS like .NET, let alone the man hours needed to recode everything.

Re:20002 called.

[Xtravar]

There's no reason an applet is necessary to perform a binary upload. Facebook resizes the photos before uploading them.

1. They are saving a ton on storage and bandwidth by doing this.
2. They are saving a ton of Sally's bandwidth by doing so (since she has 800 pictures of her and her friends drunk on Facebook).
3. They are saving a ton of Sally's stalker's bandwidth (who would inevitably download all of her photos in hi-res).
3. UI: Users can easily browse to and check off which photos to upload, with thumbnail previews, which is much nicer than any other non-Java upload system out there.

They do, however, have a HTML form fall-back in case you don't want to use Java. But frankly, it is the most convenient, transparent, and well-designed Java applet I've ever run into. In fact, I'd hypothesize that Facebook's photo system is a success precisely because of the Java applet.