Microsoft has been doing this for some time. Outsourcing and linking to services that people are using. Windows Live is integrated into a LOT of services. It's actually pretty nice. They plug into these systems that already exist, and leverage them for their own customers.
But that doesn't change the fact this platform is, from top to bottom, everything Microsoft has been criticizing and sabotaging for the past decade: GPL, Linux, MySQL...
It's like Google deciding to do search through Bing...
It's really smart.