Archive for the ‘Facebook & Microsoft’ Category

It seems like not a week goes by when facebook doesn’t launch an attack on google’s dominance of…pretty much everything.

The word on the street is that on monday, facebook will launch what’s been called “Project Titan” (seriously?) or the “gmail killer”.

This makes perfect sense from facebook’s point of view. Let’s face it, we are already there at facebook on some level most of our online time. We can message within it, and now we’ll be able to email within it. I am sure this will be incorporated into the messaging system and your contact list.

@facebook.com

I wonder though who will be an adopter of this? Changing email address is a pain, notifying everyone who is in your contact list, and hoping they use the new one.  I doubt that facebook  business page owners will want to have their email handled by facebook.

I think that this is aimed at the person, (yes I am talking about you again Mum), who has an email account, probably hotmail or one from your first ISP, who isn’t doesn’t have a good reason to keep it. Someone who predominantly uses the  internet for facebooking.

The trend though is to keep eroding the tools that google offer, and place them within the facebook walls. See the earlier post on Microsoft Office for Facebook we wrote earlier.

Imagine arriving at “work” which these days means: glancing at your phone, or sitting down with your Latte at starbucks, etc …and proceeding to work on spreadsheets, dealing with email and tweaking that presentation you have been working on. Also collaborating with colleagues online, bit of social planning  and then you get a pop up that one of your prospective clients is in the line at the same coffee shop. You look up, see them and invite them over for an impromptu presentation you were going to be giving them later in the week.

Oh, and you were doing that all within facebook.

OK so here is my predication, full integration of Microsoft’s Office programs in Apps form within the year. You’ll be working within facebook using the Microsoft Office Cloud.

As google ups the anti this week with their decision to not allow your gmail contacts to be automatically fed into Facebook (because Facebook won’t allow you to download your full contact database in transferable format) the lines of battle are being drawn up with more detail every day.

A further sign of this could be seen when Facebook decided that Bing (microsoft) would be the search partner within the facebook’s city walls. (When bing launched someone wrote critically that the letters stood for But It’s Not Google, however I think facebook’s decision to partner with them could more accurately be described as Because It’s Not Google. )

As great as google Apps for business are, they are not part of Facebook, and it’s increasingly unlikely that they will be. Facebook and Microsoft on the other hand seem to be getting closer and closer by the day.

What do you think? Would you use Word, Publisher, Excel & Powerpoint if they were online & free at facebook, (in return for being bombarded with ads). We are leaving comments open for this.