MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIF. — Microsoft Corp. emerged Wednesday with a rare triumph over archrival Google Inc., winning the right to invest in Facebook Inc. in a deal that valued the social networking upstart at a staggering $15 billion.
Microsoft is betting that online social networking is the marketing platform of the future, letting advertisers narrowly target their brands to people who group themselves around such affinities as the Lakers or French cooking.
Best known for its Windows and Office software, Microsoft is trying to become an advertising giant by snapping up Web marketers and partnering with fast-growing sites such as Facebook, which now boasts nearly 50 million active users.
Facebook was founded in a Harvard University dorm room less than four years ago. Now No. 2 in social networking sites behind MySpace, it has become the tech debutante of the year -- the hottest company inside the hottest Internet trend.
The company attracts as much Silicon Valley attention as search-engine king Google itself, largely because Facebook allows thousands of programmers to add features that help its users update one another on their every move and thought.
The investment should make it easier for Facebook to recruit staff, buy smaller companies or sell shares to the public.
"This gives Facebook the war chest to compete against whoever might show up to claim what now clearly seems to be their birthright: to be the dominant social operating system in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and most of Europe," said Lee Lorenzen, a venture capitalist in Monterey, Calif., who invests only in companies that create Facebook programs.
Microsoft, based in Redmond, Wash., is generally regarded around Facebook's current base of Palo Alto as being about as hip as Mr. Rogers. But that may have worked in its favor in outmaneuvering Google, the Web giant that has bedeviled it: Facebook has been poaching technology talent from Google, and there is some tension between the two, making Microsoft a less threatening investor.
"Talented people want to be where they can make a difference," Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's 23-year-old chief executive, said of the recruiting war during an interview last week. "We have a culture focused on building things."
As part of the deal, Microsoft gets to keep selling the banner ads that appear on Facebook pages in the U.S., and it won the right to sell ads internationally.
