Apple buys Facebook (…or not)

Apple Inc - Photo from my iBook

Image by Farid Iqbal via Flickr

Every year Danish Saxo Bank publishes a list of 10 predictions that follow 3 simple rules and that are based on the Black Swan Theory:

  1. It is unpredictable
  2. It carries massive impact
  3. After the fact we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was.

In this years list we see a prediction on Apple and Facebook:

What do you do when you want domination of the electronic and mobile device consumer market and have no significant presence in social networking? Oh, and a war chest of a mere USD 51 billion? You buy Facebook, the mother lode of (yet to be monetized) social networks. Facebook is worth USD 43 billion, according to sharespost.com. In interviews, Apple CEO Steve Jobs has explained that Apple was in talks with Facebook about partnership opportunities, but that the talks ultimately produced nothing. Facebook was after “onerous terms that we could not agree to”, according to Jobs. At the Web 2.0 Summit Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg called for Apple to ease its approach to connecting Ping with Facebook, and said that Apple had to “get on the bus”. Steve Jobs might get on the bus indeed and buy Facebook outright. It makes perfect sense; Facebook doesn’t compete against Apple and it ‘faces up’ to Google, which Jobs loves since Google has become his new number one enemy. It’s a deal made in heaven… The gigantic 500+ million Facebook user base could be integrated across Apple’s consumer products and services – every Facebook user automatically has an iTunes Store account and FaceTime chat is integrated into Facebook chat. That’s a lot of iOS devices.”

Wow, that would be something. BTW this is not the only source talking about this possibility, TUAW did it, Macficionado also reported on this and Gizmodo reported on the dinner date of Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg at the beginning of October 2010.

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A BPOS Security Breach, is your email safe?

“Our records indicate that a very small number of downloads actually occurred, and we are working with those few customers to remove the files,” he said in a statement. “This issue applied to Offline Address Book information only, and no other information was affected. Offline Address Book contains an organization’s business contact information for employees. It does not contain Outlook personal contacts, e-mail, documents or other types of information.”

The statement above was done by Clint Patterson, Microsoft’s director of BPOS Communications last week.

Apparently the offline address book of Exchange Online could be inadvertently downloaded by other customers of the service. No emails or any other information was at risk at any moment.

Microsoft claimed the issue was resolved within two hours of being discovered. However, during this time "a very small number" of illegitimate downloads occurred. "We are working with those few customers to remove the files," Patterson said.

Only customers of BPOS Standard were affected, showing us both the dangers of a cloud and a shared environment.

Don’t get me wrong, I am a fan of cloud computing, but a shared environment of identity information introduces risks – as shown here.

 

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Hey psst, wanna know about Windows 8?

www.neowin.net has published three points about Windows 8:

  1. Windows 8 will contain Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) – see picture 1 & 2
  2. Automated Cloud Backup services (BaaS)
  3. Cloud based identity and roaming settings (IDMaaS) – see picture 3

for details, click the items to see the source. I think #3 is significant. this open ups the possibility to create portable personalities. If you log in to a system, the system will know who you are and what your preferences are. Think about that for a while….

Windows8-slide1 
 

picture 1

Windows8-slide2 
 

 

picture 2

 

Win-slide3 

picture 3

 

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