Microsoft gets Office for example. It's never been entirely comfortable with the Internet, of which search is a part - it's how the company as an entity thinks. Search is baked into everything Google does, it's in their corporate DNA. But they think about social the way MS thinks about search.
When you have google execs making fun of social on the record from few years ago, it sounds a lot like Gates saying "The Internet? We are not interested in it".
No ones talking about value because value isn't static. At the end of the day, the good big cos realize they f'd up and what they were once making fun of does indeed have tremendous value.
Microsoft gets Office for example. It's never been entirely comfortable with the Internet, of which search is a part - it's how the company as an entity thinks. Search is baked into everything Google does, it's in their corporate DNA. But they think about social the way MS thinks about search.