Top Facebook exec: 'Microsoft got cool again'

On stage Tuesday at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference, Facebook Chief Information Office Tim Campos announced that the social network chose to buy Microsoft Office 365 for its employees because "Microsoft got cool again."

Campos elaborated that the "key aspects of our culture are things like 'be bold, move fast.' Most importantly, 'move fast.' That aspect of our culture is most important, and that's where Office 365 comes in."

Microsoft Office 365 is the subscription-driven, cloud-focused version of Microsoft's famed productivity suite, which includes tools like Word, Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint. Its main competitor is the Google Apps suite.

To that end, Campos says, Facebook's philosophy is to provide its employees with tools that help them work the way they want, on the devices they want. Since Office 365 works on Macs, PCs, iPhones, and Android, it meets those needs soundly.

Plus, Campos praised Office's ability to help Facebook's employees deal with the mounds of data that they generate both internally and externally, by way of artificial intelligence-driven tools like Microsoft Delve and Microsoft Exchange's Clutter feature for filtering unimportant messages.

But most importantly of all, Campos says, is the speed and focus with which Microsoft keeps making Office 365 better, adding new and useful features, capabilities, and apps to the productivity suite on a rolling basis. That resonates with Facebook's own "move fast" mantra, Campos says.

"In this, we're happy to see that Microsoft has gotten its mojo back," Campos says.

Judging from a Quora answer from 2010, Facebook has been primarily using Microsoft Office for at least that long. But this represents an important step from the boxed software Office of old into the modern Office 365, on which so much of Microsoft's hopes rest.

Facebook and Microsoft have been getting quite cuddly as of late, with a series of partnerships announced to bring Facebook apps to Windows 10 and more.

Meanwhile, Facebook has been making its own tentative first steps into building enterprise software, even as Microsoft takes its own cues from Facebook to add more intelligence and social features to Microsoft Office 365. Maybe Microsoft will end up adopting some Facebook technology, too.