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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."
wikipedia reports 34 million users. this would it mean $294 per user... sounds a bit overpriced to me..
Plus, Facebook uses Java to upload its images and Flash to play the videos.
.NET and Silverlight.
They'll be replaced with
Oh, and kiss goodbye to the mail account that you've registered with Facebook. Spam ahoy...
Summation 2
Facebook runs pretty snappy - begs the question of are many other projects using ASP.NET, JSP or other heavy duty systems where PHP on Commodity hardware would scale well. In any case I will be leaving if MS buys facebook.
Great. Just another reason not to use facebook.
As for the number of users, I wonder how many of them actually USE facebook, vs simply having registered in order to see someone elses crap. I know a lot of people who've been roped into 'signing' up to these sights in order to see their cousins christmas pictures, or to rsvp to a wedding shower where the idiot hosting it sent out the invitations via facebook.
So far: I don't have a facebook profile; I don't want a facebook profile; and I'm dreading the day where I have to get a facebook profile because I need to see someone elses effing facebook crap. I just know that sooner or later an important client is going to send me a facebook invitation that I'll -have- to register on the site to properly respond to...
I hate social^H^H^H^H^H^H viral networking sites.
Its sort of funny that myspace is so Microsoft loving ( .NET and SQL server), but facebook the Lamp Champ is the one now partially owned by MS.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
I know your post was sarcastic, but any mac users dealing with the agonizing slowness of their photo upload applet should be cheering for joy if what you're saying is true.
Flash on Mac isn't all that hot either. Adobe's more or less been shitting all over the platform ever since Apple started directly competing with them. A single Youtube video can easily suck up 80% of the CPU cycles on a modern Core Duo machine.
As long as the number of competitors remains small (ie. 2), I think that Silverlight will actually boost the quality of web applications on ALL platforms.
Java's had its time, and frankly, while it's found niches in other fields, it sucks for web applets. Java applets need to disappear into the ether, resting alongside VRML. (Facebook IS in a pickle, because at the moment, Java probably is the best solution for multiple photo uploads...)
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Well...your money won't be because the evil Jew bankers have it all and they are using it to bring in the New World Order.
Note to Mods: That was supposed to be funny.
Seriously though, you (the parent) might actually have a reputation to tarnish unlike the prospective puchasers of Facebook (Microsoft and Yahoo)...
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
Face it we are being bought and sold like cattle. In this case MSFT is buying a place to plug in their future office live apps. A few updates down the road you will see the edit interface look like office live. This will mean that thousands of people are getting used to a MSFT product on Facebook and will use office live when they have to decide where to type their next document. Let's say Google buys Slashdot and changes the Post Comment screen to a docs.Google style screen (with awesome presentation style comment ability) then when it comes time to choosing a Word Processor in 3 years I'm going to choose docs.Google since I've already been using it on Slashdot and you will make the same choice. So this 5$ share is nothing more then MSFT buying future customers. They didn't buy the farm for the land they bought it for the cattle. ---- Mooooo....
I don't see it happening. 5% is a far cry from majority shareholder. Especially if Google and other companies are buying in, as other folks have written. My (optimistic) guess is that there's no hidden agenda. Can't a company just invest in another company that looks promising?
Seeing as I'm currently in charge of the financial systems for a medium sized newspaper who puts all their content online as well, I think I'm in a better position to say how much money comes from what.
We get dick from online. I mean, it's like joke money. Maybe a hundred thousand a month...more on a good month. Retail ads are 20 times that, and classified more still. Actual circulation revenue, including single copy which is pretty expensive compared to a subscription, is well into the millions and that is money that comes in every month, like clockwork. Sure, on Thanksgiving you're pulling in enough ads to double your circulation money, and Christmas too, but then there's the rest of the year.
The problem with newspapers is that the actual process of creating and delivering the paper is a huge time and money sink. Despite that we're still running a solid profit, though as many people point out, it's shrinking. Online is obviously the answer to a prayer...we could afford a HUGE drop in ad revenue and still make a profit if we could close down the print product. But as it stands with online advertising, it's still not profitable enough to think about that.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Sun was actively discouraging the use of applets over five years ago. The use of Java on the web has since been almost entirely server-side. There's no reason an applet is necessary to perform a binary upload. See Google's file attachment method as an example and Jakarta Commons FileUpload as the likely back-end to what is little more than a standard multipart form submission.
Just because the people implementing the technology suck doesn't mean the technology itself does.
Application servers like .NET are different -- heavy, with lots of metadata to make database development easier, and with a focus on object oriented language features (I don't develop much in .NET, but with JEE, pages are basically represented with objects, and data displayed on the page is represented by members of the object). What you aren't told is that decreased development time comes at the expense of decreased server capacity -- on the same hardware, a CGI website can support more concurrent users than an application server. There are scalability arguments for JEE and .NET, although those arguments are shot down with real data (the 2.6 series kernel features very efficient forking, on the order of O(1), and beats thread spawning on Windows!). It isn't very important for development on an intranet, since it is unlikely that you will have hundreds of millions of requests per day on an internal network, but for public websites, this consideration is very important (think Slashdot effect).
Palm trees and 8
what about python? it can handle process forking and such to do uploads while displaying output to user... it can also handle all sorts of fun things... yumm...python. (and more importantly can run very efficiently on the same apache that runs php :D)
I've refused to use Facebook (despite some pressure from friends) since they won't allow me to use my chosen email address, despite it being perfectly standard.
The problem is that I use 'plus addressing' (eg me+facebook@home.com) and their email validation scripts has a bug that claims it is invalid. It's not uncommon for validation scripts to have this bug, but most web sites are happy to find the bug and fix it. Not so with facebook - my impression is that they're just a little bit arrogant. So be it.
Yeah, I could not use plus addressing, or use some other account, but it hasn't got to the point where I want to bother yet. It's still annoying though.
Max.
Well, IMHO, since I don't have any actual say in this stuff...
1) They're stupid. They whore out to doubleclick, etc, just like everyone else instead of doing quality chosen local ads that they could pitch to their local advertisers for better rates. They're slowly overcoming this problem, and ad revenue is increasing.
2) Most newspapers are still working their way into the whole "web" idea. I mean, print media produces more actual web-friendly content than most industries, and, even better, it has a short shelf life, so they have nothing to lose by putting it on line. Do they take advantage of this? No. they put it up for a few days, then take it down.
This is hilariously frustrating if you know anything about the web, because you know that it's not whats there right now that's valuable, it's whats there in total. Newspapers in particular are sources for immense amounts of detailed information about things in their coverage area, and while it's utility is pretty limited in the usual archival forms (e.g. Microfiche) it would be astoundingly useful if they just left the content up to be indexed by search engines. Couple that glut of content with some advertising, and you've got an archive of data that costs very little to host and will bring in ad revenue every time someone finds something relevant in your coverage area.
At some point the big media companies (Gannett, McClatchy, Media General, etc) are going to realize that they're sitting on an informational goldmine and start actively leveraging that information to draw people to their sites. Right now it's all the aggregators (like Slashdot, Digg, Fark, etc) who are picking up the burden of providing the relevant information to the interested parties, because print is stuck in the whole, "Barf up a bunch of content and people will come" mentality. That will eventually change.
3) They still think in the back of their minds that if they put together a really good online component, they'll kill their bread and butter print product. This is, at heart, stupid. People thought television would kill print too. We still don't have a good portable disposable medium that will take up the slack, and moreover, there are a lot of people who are just wedded to the idea of the physical paper. That's going to be the case for decades to come, and that's a conservative estimate.
This means that they don't put enough real resources into online. I could give you numbers that would make you laugh your ass off, I mean seriously embarrassing. The people who are doing it are reporters, but not the good reporters...You get Peter Principle crap, so the reporters that end up doing it are people who can be spared to do it, and they have no special training, and no technical competence, and all too often, no fricking IDEA of what they should be doing...Just a very limited idea of what the hell the web is about.
Again it's just incompetence, and industrial blindness. Random example. You pay a professional photographer a daily wage. You send him out to cover a fire, a little league game, and a miss toddler usa pageant. He takes (conservatively) 500 photos. Of those 500 photos, maybe 4 make it into the paper, some probably in black and white. The rest are discarded. On the off chance that any picture will be used in the paper, the photojournalist has secured (in advance) the names of the people in it.
Can you imagine the kind of photo galleries you could create with that sort of information? Cheap to host, simple to index, throw some ads on it...Profit!
Print will die, but the content will live on. They need to transition that content to a digital forum, and then show the world what they really collect. The sheer volume of information has to be trimmed down to fit in the available space...What if there was no space limitation? Take every newspaper website, and, instead of making some ephemeral short term shallow content, make it like the tip of an iceberg, provide what you pay to collect already, and let people dig through it.
Sigh.
This is obviously and old and polished rant. You can guess how seriously they take my opinions...I'm just a techie after all...What do I know about newspapers? =P
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.