Microsoft to Pay $240 Million for Stake in Facebook

Nrbelex writes to mention The New York Times is reporting that Microsoft has beat out Google and Yahoo for a 1.6% stake in Facebook. The investment will cost Microsoft $240 million valuing the total site at somewhere around $15 billion. "The astronomical valuation for Facebook is primarily evidence that Microsoft executives believed they could not afford to lose out on the Facebook deal. Google appears to be building a dominant position in the race to serve advertisements online. Fearing it might lose control over the next generation of computer users, Microsoft has been attempting to match and in some cases block Google's plans, even if that effort is costly."

Comments

Simple API

[SIGALRM]

From TFA:

The high valuation also represents a belief that Facebook is creating an important new operating system -- one that exists on the Web instead of on personal computers.

I'm not sure how a valuation is capable of representing a belief, but it does reflect an acknowlegement of important trends. Facebook's platform is similar to other "Web 2.0" RESTful APIs but is pretty simplistic (i.e. CanvasPages--which is basically an IFRAME, alerts, feeds, and privacy settings, etc.). Don't expect a RoR framework or anything close to Google's API.