When Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg were seen together at the formers; Palo Alto home it was speculated that they were in talks regarding the integration of Facebook to Ping, its recently launched music based social network. Both companies were said to have been working on some sort of integration a good 18 months prior to the launch of the service. However for some reason, the deal didn’t work out. Apple said Facebook had made unreasonable demands. In any case, having released the Ping, we all thought they might be holding futher talks to ensure Facebook integration in Ping in the ear future.
However, following yesterdays conference call announcing Apple’s Q4 financial results, (where Steve Jobs had a good 20 minutes of spweing venom against Apple’s rivals) some people are thinking whether the Zuckerberg and Jobs meet had more to do than just Ping. Here’s why.
With Apple considerably cash rich, Steve Jobs seems very eager to shop around. But, the question is what can he buy? And what would he? Pretty much anything, we say. With $51 billion in hand, Apple can afford to buy anything of its choice play around with it, lose money and still remain healthy. Analyst Peter Kafka notes that Steve actually saying “We strongly believe that one or more very strategic opportunities may come along that we’re in unique opportunity to take advantage of because of our cash,” and we want to keep our powder dry “because we feel that there are one or more” opportunities in the future.”
We wonder what that opportunity would be. Kafka also adds that there is little chance that Apple would take over a records label or a music company. The other option would be to enter the TV Business or say the gaming arena where even the largest player, Electronic Arts is within Apple’s budgetary reach with a market cap of just over $5.21 billion.
That brings us to the original question. Were Zuckerberg and Steve really discussing Ping? We have reasons to think that it was something much bigger! Imagine an Apple owned Facebook! And even if that is not true, today at Back to the Mac event we saw that iPhoto, iMovie 11 and Garageband 11 – all had more of Facebook love in them. Its just a matter of time before we see Facebook back on ping and an Apple owned Facebook – well wall gardened approach is something they already share in common 😉