Microsoft Office Applications for Facebook?
|
Written By Dan Kashman | November 9, 2007 | Share This
|
|
Enough has been written this week about Facebook’s new advertising solution that allows marketers to reach consumer through “Social Ads” and branded “Facebook Pages”. My favorite take on the recent announcement has got to be that of Nick Carr and his view of the impending MySpace-ification of Facebook. Making things more interesting, Microsoft announced last week that it has expanded its advertising relationship with Facebook and that it has made a $240 million equity investment.
In light of recent announcements, I’m surprised that no one has been discussing a more obvious and natural extension of Microsoft’s business and a huge potential revenue generator for Facebook: porting the Microsoft Office suite to Facebook applications.
Picture this; you are busy checking to see which of your “friends” has uploaded new photos from their office Halloween party when you are alerted to the fact that Joe Schmo just added the Microsoft Excel application. You click on Joe’s alert to install the Excel app onto your own Facebook profile, and see an invite to collaborate with Joe through Excel. Incidentally, you and Joe have been considering teaming up to start the next great web-based business, so both of you download the PowerPoint app and subsequently send an invitation to your developer friend who helps you hammer out a 10 slide pitch deck. The pitch deck then gets converted into a SlideShare presentation that is ready for distribution–perhaps as a “wall post”–to your venture capitalist friends.
For Facebook, of course, an MS Office suite of applications broadens the range of activities available to their 52 Million + user base, allowing them to create and share documents, spreadsheets and presentations, while increasing the time spent on site from today’s respectable 20 minutes a day to something orders of magnitude greater. The permission system already present in Facebook allows users to share these documents with fine grain control without ever having to attach anything to an E-mail.
As scary as this concept may be to the folks in Redmond, they must realize that their $16 billion dollar a year crown jewel is under attack. If you are a college student or a recent college grad, are you really willing to pay $150 - $500 to put MS Office on your machine? Google is banking on the fact that you might be interested in a less expensive albeit less feature rich, substitute for something along the lines of $0.
I would like to think that there is more to the Microsoft / Facebook partnership than just display ad inventory. I would also like to imagine that there is more to Facebook’s utility than playing scrabble and throwing food at your friends. The Office suite of products would certainly be a way to place Facebook squarely at the center of an increasing number of people’s everyday lives, which in turn would make the platform even more compelling to advertisers.
If Microsoft and Facebook played their cards right, this arrangement would clearly be a game changer. Microsoft could capitalize on the immense Facebook market, while monetizing this newly integrated software suite, and Facebook would increase user engagement. Regardless of the return on such a partnership, the real dilemma would be what to call this new Office suite… my money is on “Face-Off.”
Topics: Advertising: Online, Microsoft, Social Media, Uncategorized |
[…] Read the rest of this great post here […]
[…] the three-year-old firm would be able to transform itself into a hub for all sorts of Web activity. Some say that a “natural extension of Microsoft’s business and a huge potential revenue generator […]