EightBlack.

God I hope this doesn’t happen. News today running in the US edition of the Wall Street Journal talks about Microsoft taking a 5% stake in the social networking darling for anywhere between US$300-$500 million. The full article is here.

Mark Zuckerberg, the young CEO and founder is no fool. He’s already knocked back a billion (or just under) from Yahoo! a little while ago. And Google has made it abundantly clear that it wants to play.

Microsoft, for whatever reason, has the tactical advantage given that it already has an ad syndication deal with Facebook which has been running for just over a year now and continues through to 2009.

If Zuckerberg knocked back a cool billion from Yahoo!, I can’t understand why he jumped into bed with Microsoft and what is clearly an inferior search partner with their AdCenter platform. It can’t have been money alone - he’s got people throwing the stuff at him in the same way the US Department of Defense spends money on going to war.

It seems on the surface such an unlikely combination. I can’t imagine a guy who wears thongs to work, comes in when he wakes up, and running one of the hottest online gigs around sitting down for sushi with someone like Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer. It’s about a likely combination as Britney Spears and Barry Manilow.

Maybe Microsoft hired some private investigators and has photos of the Facebook team doing unflattering things with 2 camels and a goat.

Because I’m buggered if I know why the ad deal got done in the first place and equally buggered as to know why on earth Facebook would sell a stakeholding to a 30 year old dinosaur.

Maybe you’ve got the answer?

Here’s a recent video interview of Mark Zuckerberg at the recent Techcrunch4.0 gig held last week in the states. Maybe this has the answer I’m looking for.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 25th, 2007 at 12:46 pm and is filed under Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.