Microsoft/Facebook: Mark to market

Microsoft has been falling behind badly in the internet supremacy mêlée. After losing key partnerships with AOL and MySpace to Google, the folks in Redmond needed a leg up on their upstart rival. The company’s purchase of a $240m stake in Facebook, the hot social network, fits the bill. But make no mistake, the clear victor in this round is Facebook’s 23-year-old founder Mark Zuckerberg. Even the tech stock boom’s heyday yielded few deals as frothy as this one. Microsoft is getting less than a ...