Steve Ballmer's Breakfast With Twitter
This just heard: Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer had breakfast this week in San Francisco with Twitter's Dick Costolo, who recently took over the top dog spot from co-founder Evan Williams.
Context & Ripple Effects
Ballmer sitting down with Dick Costolo lands one week after Microsoft executive Fritz Lanman confirmed the company had tried to buy Facebook — evidence that Microsoft's social ambitions run to outright acquisitions, an appetite Ballmer has shown publicly since his 2007 Web 2.0 'I want to buy your company' turn.
The other half of the arc is Ballmer's own conversion: last month he was posting enthusiastically from Kiev after joining Twitter, and now he is breaking bread with a CEO who has held the top job for barely two months after Evan Williams stepped aside. No agenda was disclosed, so what follows reads the tea leaves against that backdrop.
First-order effects
- Costolo, weeks into replacing Evan Williams, becomes the decision point for whatever Microsoft wants from Twitter — partnership terms, data access, or something larger.
- Coming right after Microsoft's confirmed Facebook pursuit, the meeting puts Twitter squarely inside the same strategic conversation rather than leaving it as a neutral platform.
Second-order effects
- Twitter's own December 8 integrations push makes it more valuable as a distribution partner for Bing and Windows Phone 7, giving Microsoft a cheaper path than an acquisition and giving Twitter leverage over who pays for access.
- Any visible Microsoft-Twitter alignment forces rival suitors — Google most obviously in search — to move faster on locking up their own real-time data relationships before Bing gets exclusive ground.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — incumbents with checkbooks courting young social platforms while those platforms court multiple bidders — independent social companies get pulled toward consolidation or multi-partner dependence rather than standalone growth.
- For Windows Phone 7, deep third-party service integrations stop being differentiators and become table stakes, pushing Microsoft to compete on how many social pipes it can secure rather than on handset features alone.
The trend: Social platforms are being repositioned from standalone acquisition targets into strategic integration assets in the search-and-mobile contest among Microsoft, Google, and Facebook.