ParisLemon

Todd Bishop of GeekWire asks the question, I think the answer is “yes” (though the continued investment in Xbox and elements like Kinect should ultimately be close).

To me, there are two things that are most interesting about Microsoft’s Facebook investment.

1) Nearly everyone in the tech press at the time panned the deal as a ridiculous rip-off, sign of another bubble, etc. Those same people are now strangely quiet on the topic — for good reason, they look like huge jackasses.

It just goes to show you that you should never take anything the tech press says too seriously. Way too much is based on the present and there’s not nearly enough thinking about the future. This deal was all about the future.

2) Along those lines, while the return on this investment will be good ($15 billion valuation turning into $100 billion at IPO time — and it will probably be 10x in the near future), this is still not about the money — it’s all about the strategic alliance. Microsoft gave itself an “in” to get access to Facebook’s data. And the deal stopped Google from getting a similar deal.

Microsoft still hasn’t been able to do enough with the relationship to boost Bing, but even that doesn’t really matter. What matters is that Google and Facebook are at odds (or some may say, at war). Microsoft won by not losing.