Microsoft and social networking

Lovely post from Rob Scoble on what Microsoft thinks of the new spate of web apps out there. I would say I'm gobsmacked, if we hadn't seen this before; Microsoft doesn't hire idiots, it hires very intelligent people. As such, I find what Steve Ballmer (yes, Steve 'Dance monkeyboy!' Ballmer) has to say about the success of Facebook rather odd. I've made a similar, albeit slightly different point in the past, so it might be worth going back to that to clarify why I'm a bit shocked.

Ballmer says that a lot of social networking sites are faddish, flashes in the pan, and that they fall out of fashion quickly. I'd partially agree here - Scoble argues that LinkedIn and Facebook are his Rolodexes now, but their currency depends on the network effect - how often people update their profiles. I bet quite a lot of my business contacts on LinkedIn (In fact several I can think of right now) updated their information a couple of jobs ago. Plaxo is hopefully going to make a big deal of its plan to be the Switzerland of social networking - a way of managing your data online. But I still think that social networking sites are superseded by new and innovative feature sets - in the latest case, Facebook's ability to add home brewed applications at will.

So Steve can breathe a sigh of relief that I'm behind him there.
Ahem. That's not going to keep me from updating my LinkedIn and Plaxo
profiles when I next come to change jobs, of course.

What I do find gobsmacking is Steve Ballmer's assertion that

“There can’t be any more deep technology in Facebook than what dozens of
people could write in a couple of years. That’s for sure.”

I feel he's missing the point here, and completely ignoring some
things that made Microsoft what is is today - market ownership and
leverage. As Scoble says, eBay has lots of competitors, and no-one can
touch it, or will touch it until the community attracts dissipates.
Microsoft bought the rights to a disk operating system and sold it,
with a few tweaks, to IBM for its PCs a long time ago. DOS wasn't
anything that hadn't been written before, either.

There's a lovely book that a magazine
I worked for a long time ago gave out with subscriptions. If you can
find a copy, I urge you to read it. Microsoft used a very similar
tactic to the one being played out in the Times article above when trying to buy FrontPage. As the
times article points out, Microsoft is keen to invest in Facebook. How
much of what Steve Ballmer says is what he actually believes, and how
much is a negotiating tactic?