Did you see the post at http://www.techcrunch.com...

And anyway, since when do senior execs do their own research? Bill and Ozzie have TAs who do that. You should count Technical Assistants, Architects, and others who write the analyses that inform the execs.

The MSFT brass are spending so much time on FB, the GOOG execs are not. If I was a GOOG shareholder, I’d be worried. Are leaders living in a closet? What technology visionary wouldn’t spend a fair amount of time on Facebook? It’s clearly becoming as important to the Internet as search. This would be like back in ‘99 if folks at MSFT weren’t using Google on a daily basis. Maybe if they had they would have figured out search(or bought GOOG) before they became such a competitive threat.

Full Disclosure: I own MSFT and don’t own any GOOG. But my giant portfolio of 4 MSFT shares in my ShareBuilder account aren’t enough to bias my blog commenting.

Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer and Ray Ozzie are paying close attention to Facebook because Facebook is going to be worth $100 billion by the time of its Q4 2008 IPO when they go over 200+ million users.

Even more important to the troika than Mark Zuckerberg joining the billionaire list is the fact that Microsoft has the potential to leverage the market disruption created by the world’s first mainstream Social Operating System to bypass Google in Advertising (just like they used the market disruption created by the world’s first mainstream Graphical Operating system to bypass Lotus 123 with Excel).

You can read my full post about this comparison between Windows and Facebook in the “Triumph of the Nerds — Part Deux” article available here:

http://blog.adonomics.com/

You can read the details about my other views on Facebook in my “Official Altura Ventures & AppFactory Facebook Investment Fund
Group (see http://www.face...?gid=2392191727)” including the discussion board post entitled “Is Facebook worth $100 Billion? Yeah and Here’s Why:“ (see http://www.face...&topic=2793).

To summarize the points in my post:

1. Facebook will grow to 200 million users by Dec. 2008. I base this on what they’ve already accomplished:

FB Year 1 (Dec. 31, 2004) — 1 million users
FB Year 2 (Dec. 31, 2005) — 5 million users
FB Year 3 (Dec. 31, 2006) — 12 million users
FB Year 4 (Apr. 26, 2007) — 20 million users
FB Year 4 (Aug. 1, 2007) — 30 million users
FB Year 4 (Dec. 31, 2007) — 50+ million users
FB Year 5 (June 6, 2008) — 100+ million users
FB Year 5 (Dec. 31, 2008) — 200+ million users

2. Facebook’s valuation will be around $500 per user. I base this on the multiple sources of revenue that will flow to them from:

2a. targetted brand advertising — their Yahoo play
2b. keyword driven search advertising — their Google play
2c. P2P e-commerce transactions — their eBay play
2d. B2C e-commerce transactions — their Amazon play
2e. Industry Alliance transactions — their Microsoft vs. Google play

3. Facebook has more developers working on building cool apps for its social operating system than any other single piece of software on the planet. I base this on the 80,000+ application developers that have are currently writing apps for the platform. As I described on video (see http://facerevi...-2-facebook-vc/) , this puts Google in the position of playing catch-up to Facebook in a world where Microsoft has the inside track to managing Facebook’s advertising business.

Thanks,
Lee Lorenzen
CEO, Altura Ventures — the 1st Facebook-only VC

And, yes, I was Faceslammed by Bill. Here’s the details: http://scobleiz...-by-bill-gates/

I asked Steve Jobs at the latest Apple press conference if he was on Facebook. He answered “no.”

If you were…let’s see when you actually become the CEO of a $266 billion dollar company and face competition from everywhere.