Microsoft: We tried to buy Facebook

By Tom Warren, on 9th Dec 10 3:40 pm with 4 Comments

Microsoft’s Senior Director of Corporate Strategy and Acquisitions admitted on Thursday that the company tried to buy Facebook.

“Yeah we tried to acquire Facebook” admitted Fritz Lanman at the LeWeb 2010 conference in Paris, France. Facebook refused to sell and Microsoft ended up investing $240 million into Facebook when it was valued at $15 billion in 2007. Fritz said that many people were puzzled by the investment but that it was part of a strategic decision for Microsoft. “It was a good investment for the company” said Fritz. Microsoft has used the investment to build deeper integration with its online services and overall business development relationship.

Microsoft and Facebook have been partnering on a number of technologies recently. The software giant has a long standing advertising partnership that saw it invest a $240 million equity stake in Facebook back in 2007. In October Facebook announced a partnership with Microsoft’s Bing search engine to provide social integration. Users of Bing now see social powered search results that incorporate information that their friends have liked on Facebook. Microsoft and Facebook also revealed Docs.com earlier this year. The site is built on a stripped down version of Microsoft’s Office 2010 Web Apps platform. The service can be used to share Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents with Facebook friends.

Facebook recently unveiled a new messaging system that utilizes Microsoft’s Office Web Apps. The new messaging platform will allow Facebook users to view Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. Microsoft and Facebook will continue deeper partnerships in 2011 so expect more announcements to follow in the coming months.

  • http://www.messengeradictos.com Rafael Valdés Camelo

    I remember that Facebook wasn’t valued at that moment, and Microsoft buying 1,6% of Facebook for $240M, gave Facebook that value.

  • Anonymous

    I like when microsoft makes investments but now in things like Facebook,

  • NotSoSlowFastWaitHuh

    um Bernhardy … hotmail is a very poor use of ONLY Exchange ActiveSync 2.5. It is NOT fully Microsoft Exchange based. I’d advise all hotmail users looking for better to read the finer details on what the Windows Live team actually did when they turned on EAS for Windows Live Hotmail. They effectively made it interesting only for those for those eunichs who don’t care about HTML email on a mobile client. In addition, users still need the Microsoft Outlook Hotmail Connector add-on just to get their emails in desktop Outlook. For a company that owns a whole email ecosystem (service, delivery protocol, protocol client, etc.), this is unacceptable.

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