Microsoft will debut a Facebook for the enterprise called TownSquare at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston today. Microsoft Office Labs launched the product to 100 Microsoft employees in January and about 8,000 have signed up since, Office Labs GM Chris Pratley told Computerworld, which described TownSquare as "strikingly similar to Facebook.com." Similar? TownSquare does all the tricks Facebook's news feed does, updating users with changes their contacts made to various networked documents. So why did Microsoft stop at ripoff and not go for a complete copy? You'd think for its $240 million, Microsoft could of just "pulled a Zuckerberg" on some of Facebook's code and called it a day.

When a partnership like Google and Salesforce.com's gets announced so publicly, it's a safe bet that the message is meant for investors and rivals, not customers. Look at the substance of their new partnership: Salesforce.com for Google Apps amounts to adding a tab to link the two Web-based services. Salesforce.com helps companies organize their customer leads and sales; Google Apps offers simplified and hence limited Web versions of familiar office-productivity apps like Microsoft Word and Excel. Add 2 + 2, and you get 4, not 5, as Google and Salesforce would have you believe.