Microsoft Confirms Rumors of Their Offer to Buy Facebook

In the Le Web conference held in Paris, Microsoft’s Senior Director of Strategy and Acquisitions Fritz Lanman confessed while having dialogue at a panel called “How to get acquired.” In reply to a simple question of the host Loic Le Meur stated, as we quote: “Yeah we tried to acquire Facebook. Facebook had a lot of similarities to Microsoft back in the day.” His reply has verified all those previous rumors back in the day, which said that Microsoft has made an offer to buy Facebook but there was no authentication of the rumor at the time. It was first detailed in David Kirkpatrick’s book “The Facebook Effect”

While still on the stage, Lanman also suspected Facebook’s with now could be way much higher than what Microsoft had calculated at the time. Reportedly Facebook’s renowned founder Mark Zuckerberg calmly discarded the offer made by Steve Ballmer, who valued the social networking website for almost $15 billion back in 2007. Whereas after the denial, later Microsoft invested a little of $240 million, henceforth the two well-established companies worked together in a search partnership.

In the book entitled ‘The Facebook Effect,’ Kirkpatrick wrote that Ballmer had asked Zuckerberg ““Why don’t we just buy you for $15 billion?” and again according to the book, it is stated that he answered in following words: “I don’t want to sell the company unless I can keep control.” Kirkpatrick wrote on convincing that, “Ballmer took this reply as a sort of challenge. He went back to Microsoft’s headquarters and concocted a plan intended to acquire Facebook in stages over a period of years to enable Zuckerberg to keep calling the shots. But Zuckerberg rejected all the overtures.”