There is a lot of talk about the recent Microsoft investment in Facebook. While an outright acquisition at that price might have been a little crazy, a partial stake has many more benefits. Let's see if the illuminati start talking about those instead.

Microsoft-Facebook: 'A True Bubble Deal'

After the software giant struck a deal valuing the social networking site at $15 billion, commentators from around the Web are weighing the implications

It didn't take long after Microsoft (MSFT) agreed to take a stake in the social networking site Facebook (BusinessWeek, 10/25/07) for the comments from readers to start pouring in. Most of them focused on the price the software giant paid, a $240 million investment that values the fledgling company run by the 23-year-old Mark Zuckerberg at an astonishing $15 billion.

"Can anyone else feel the '.com-Bust' coming again? Sell you idiot!" one person wrote on BusinessWeek.com, under the screen name Allison.

Source: Microsoft-Facebook: 'A True Bubble Deal'

I am officially super excited. Tuesday October 16th was the worldwide launch of Microsoft's Unified Communications products. Over a year ago, we held a strategy day announcing our intention to bet big in this space, and this week we backed it up with a ton of momentum.

It's been about two months since I joined the Unified Communications Group to lead the product management for Office Communications Server enterprise voice and conferencing, Microsoft RoundTable and end point devices workloads. I joined at a time when everybody was 150% focused on launching our solution and I got to watch and learn, and jump in to help in a few areas. I've been blown away by the level of orchestration that the team put in place to line up this launch ... and the reception from customers, partners and media was even more impressive.

Bill Gates kicked of the day with a keynote, talking about how the telephony industry has seen very little innovation, held back by the vertically structured hardware based solutions that have been around for years. With the move into voice over IP, there is an opportunity to reinvent this industry with the power of software. I've seen the deck a hundred times and will be presenting it myself when I keynote in South Africa next month, but somehow Bill just sounds more convincing when he says he wants to turn an entire industry 90 degrees. He described the shift about to happen as "profound as the shift from the type writer to word processing". Words can't do it justice, check out the streaming video of the talk here.

Jeff Raikes then came in with a polished run through the value unified communications brings to our customers and partners. I saw Jeff rehearse the night before although he flipped through a lot of the slides quickly. But he delivered with some choice stats and soundbites. The average worker received just under a 100 messages in 7 different locations in one day. They spend 37 minutes a day making calls to people who aren't there. This is all about to change with unified communications ... "The era of dialing blind; the era of playing phone tag; the era of voice mail jail; the era of disconnected communications – that era is ending"

Jeff brought in my manager, Eric Swift, to do the demo showcasing Outlook Voice Access, Microsoft Exchange, Outlook Mobile, Communicator Mobile, Office Communications Server, Live Meeting, Microsoft RoundTable, a Polycom USB device internally called "Catalina", an IP phone by LG Nortel we call the Tanjay and Office Communicator and how all these solutions fit together to make communications streamlined for information workers. I played the role of the Finance Manager in the demo, but props go to Manish Sharma on our team who put the whole thing together. We had a couple of minor hiccups, but overall it went very well.

Jeff also brought in a customer who had deployed our solution to talk about the benefits, the CIO of L'Occitane in France (women usually know the company!). We have a Technology Adopter Program and Rapid Deployment Program that allows early adopter customers to deploy our solutions before mainstream release and Microsoft get's to create a case study. We have over a hundred of these customer case studies showing the real benefits of unified communications with what we have today.

Over lunch I met one of our training partners who explained how over the last 17 years, Microsoft had helped him make his fortune in helping enterprises make the most of new technology. He was planning on betting big on unified communications and saw huge potential. "Microsoft's done well for me" he said. I am really proud of that about Microsoft. We couldn't be successful with the systems integrators, consultants, hardware vendors and trainers out there that form our ecosystem, and it certainly is true for the hundreds of unified communications partners.

And the media reception has been pretty phenomenal. This CNN video features Renee Lo in the background and all the folks on her IM list are on our extended team. We have seen dozens of original articles already and love it or hate it, you can't ignore Microsoft investing in this category in this way. And having Bill Gates personally front it as potentially the last big launch during his time at Microsoft makes it even more compelling.

I am really excited to be part of this. Already, my team is working with engineering and business development teams on the next generation of audio/video/web conferencing, enterprise voice solutions, end user devices that don't come packed with a hundred dumb buttons and more. I am presenting to five customers from three continents next week at our Executive Briefing Center, all eager to start realizing the benefits of unified communications. Can't wait!

Woohoo! It's great to see this launching so that finally I don't have to go to three different sites to find my contacts, send out an invitation/manage RSVPs and trash talk or share photos after an event. I still remember when we first talked about creating an Events service and can't wait to start using. Great work team and good quote from Jay below:

Link to Microsoft launching Evite-type event site

"The service, which will be at events.live.com, is expected to roll out gradually over the next few days. It's part of a broader attempt by Microsoft to fill out its lineup of Windows Live online services.

Jay Fluegel, Windows Live Events product manager, said he doesn't think people will need to choose the service to the exclusion of other social networking and photo-sharing sites. For example, people will be able to embed photo albums from Windows Live Events into third-party sites, such as Facebook.

"Our goal with Windows Live is just to offer an integrated suite of services," he said. "In many cases, because of the number of Hotmail, Spaces and Messenger users we have, people have stored a lot of their contacts and relationships with us. That makes it easy when it comes to invitation scenarios and other entry points within Windows Live.""

Haven't written in a while and will do when things calm down. For now, here are some videos posted on web around our Unified Communications story.