By E. Brown
Today’s news was surprising to some and confirmation to others…
Microsoft has bought a 1.6 per cent stake in Facebook worth around $240 million, based on a valuation that assesses Facebook’s worth as $15 billion.
The deal is intended to help both companies expand their advertising revenues, with Microsoft becoming the exclusive third-party advertising platform partner for Facebook.
The two companies have an existing partnership already and rumours have been circulating recently that Microsoft was going to buy the social-networking site.
Facebook was keen to emphasise that the deal would be beneficial to its 50 million users.
So, what is next? Microsoft definitely has an interest in the Facebook audience demographics and psychographics. Wouldn’t it be ideal to tie this kind of information to a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software or Learning Management System (LMS) or both?
Next, create a Web-based dashboard for company owners and leadership to view their constituents at a glance and you have something truly powerful in this time of rising Business Intelligence (BI)!
What’s next? We’ll see.
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WeirdGuy Creative 
Interesting thought. Certainly Microsoft has to make these sorts of investments to stay on top. Often it’s the individual, maverick developers that are coming up with the best stuff, and big companies like Microsoft, Google, and IBM are using smaller, innovative projects (though Facebook is hardly small anymore) to keep their products relevant.