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Yammer agrees to Microsoft's $1 billion acquisition offer
- statictype 14y agoIs this the first not-small web software company that Microsoft has acquired? I wonder if they're going to eventually convert all the Java and Scala to C# and F#
- trimbo 14y agoWell, there was Hotmail...
- diego 14y agoRemember Hotmail, for example?
- hkarthik 14y agoThey use a lot of Ruby too.
- rplnt 14y agoThey use a lot of everything because they are huge and they do tons of stuff.
- brudgers 14y agoSkype?
- harryh 14y agoSkype (not exactly web I suppose), Farecast, Hotmail
- mindcrime 14y agoThey had previously acquired Powerset, for one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powerset_%28company%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powerset_%28company%29
- samstave 14y agoPowerset had a ton of hype, then they were acquired and then they seemingly died. Never heard anything about them since.
- larrywright 14y agoI think that technology was rolled into Bing. I don't think they ever expected that it would be a standalone product offering.
- jmspring 14y agoSeems a pretty naive statement. Especially for someone who has been around HN long enough... Just this week Microsoft has updated their Azure tools with additional NodeJS support, Python and PHP support. I know many Java developers that actually thing C# is a better language. Personally, it depends on the platform and tools you want to use. I've written anything from JS to Java to C++ to C# to Erlang to PHP to Python in the last year. I don't care about such things...best tool for the particular job. But, what do I know...
- sosuke 14y agoDarn WSJ gate! Is it confirmed or not?
- naner 14y agohttps://www.google.com/search?q=Business-software+company+Yammer+Inc.+has+agreed+to+sell+itself+to+Microsoft+Corp.+for+more+than+%241+billion%2C+according+to+a+person+familiar+the+matter https://www.google.com/search?q=Business-software+company+Ya... You can get in with the Google referrer.
- theli0nheart 14y agoHere's the full text of the article: Business-software company Yammer Inc. has agreed to sell itself to Microsoft Corp. for more than $1 billion, according to a person familiar [with] the matter. It is unclear when the acquisition will be completed and announced, this person said. A Microsoft spokesman declined to comment. Representatives for San Francisco-based Yammer didn't immediately respond to requests for comment. Yammer is often called Facebook for the workplace because it creates a private social network inside a company. The purchase of Yammer could add social-networking functions to Microsoft's popular Office suite of software. Microsoft has an existing product, called SharePoint, with some functions that overlap with Yammer. Bloomberg News earlier reported Microsoft was in discussions to acquire Yammer.
- harryh 14y agoThey've since updated the article to indicate a 1.2B purchase price.
- NDizzle 14y agoThere goes their hipster cred.
- callmeed 14y agoMaybe they're playing the "ironic" card.
- mindcrime 14y agoWell, this is interesting. Our company (Fogbeam Labs) are working on products in this same "Enterprise 2.0" space: social-networks for the enterprise, knowledge management with a social twist, social-search for the enterprise, etc. So, what - if anything - does this mean for us? Well, it confirms that the area we are working in has value, and illustrates the potential we're chasing. And this could actually be good if/when we start trying to raise outside money, as it shows that there are viable exit scenarios in this field. OTOH, it also means we're competing with Microsoft, and it probably makes us look a little behind the curve. That's OK though... the adage about the tortoise and the hare still stands. On a personal level, I'm excited by this. I like the idea of competing with Microsoft. It's easier to see them as the "evil empire" given their history, and I've never liked Steve Ballmer anyway. These guys I could get fired up about competing with. It's even better that we are a "pure play" Open Source company, where MS has a long history of antipathy for F/OSS.
- nostromo 14y agoI'd rather compete with Microsoft than Yammer in this space; be happy. Remember, Yammer itself was competing with Microsoft.
- dm8 14y agoCongrats to Yammer team. On a side note, we are seeing lot of acquisitions that are > $500M. Buddy Media, Instagram and now Yammer (during last couple of months itself).
- tubbo 14y agothere's always http://github.com/diaspora/diaspora http://github.com/diaspora/diaspora for those seeking an alternative
- mindcrime 14y agoI'm not sure Diaspora has any enterprise specific leanings, although - to be fair - I haven't spent as much time studying Diaspora as I probably should have. OTOH, there is another Open Source (ALv2) "enterprise social networking" project out there, and we're always happy to have other folks get involved. https://github.com/Fogbeam/Quoddy https://github.com/Fogbeam/Quoddy So far we support features like: A "facebook wall" like event stream for various event types, including status updates, calendar events (via iCal), business events (via our business event subscription engine), and external activities (via the activitystrea.ms protocol) Friending / Following users User Lists User Groups (well, this is still being worked on) "User Streams" (sort of like Circles in G+, but more flexible) User profiles (this still needs a fair amount of love) Status Updates (like "post to your wall") ICal Subscriptions Business Event Subscriptions (for SOA integration) And we have a pile of other features planned or in progress. See: http://code.google.com/p/quoddy/wiki/Roadmap http://code.google.com/p/quoddy/wiki/Roadmap Disclaimer: I freely admit that we intend to make money from this initiative eventually, but the code is (and always will be) under a true OSS license (it's ALv2 now and probably always will be) and we don't ask for copyright assignment or anything. Hack on the project with us and hopefully we can hire you full-time when we (land a couple of paying customers | raise a round of funding | win the lottery).
- pferde 14y agoI guess it is not distributed (meaning I can run my own Quoddy server, and talk to users at friend's Quoddy server)?
- mindcrime 14y agoI guess it is not distributed (meaning I can run my own Quoddy server, and talk to users at friend's Quoddy server)? Well... there's not exactly a notion of "distributedness" built in. That's on the wishlist (and, in fact, this project sprung out of a much older project that had that as it's core idea) but there is support for receiving and display messages from any other arbitrary system that supports the activitystrea.ms protocol. So modifying Quoddy to emit, as well as consume, activitystrea.ms messages would give you a way to achieve a degree of "distributedness." And that wouldn't be a hard change to make in and of itself. The trickier part would be how to say "I want to receive updates from remote user $FOO when they come in" since $FOO is probably not a user on your local Quoddy instance. Once we have FOAF support implemented, it would be easier to talk about navigating the remote social graph and connect to non-local users... but a short-term way to achieve that could probably be hacked up.
- newobj 14y agoI remember laughing at them when they launched at and won TC50. "Twitter for the enterprise! What a dumb idea." I'm laughing all the way to their bank now.
- shangrila 14y agoI was at a company a few years ago where the designers and execs were all about using Yammer internally, and I thought it was a joke. A billion dollar joke, turns out.
- pbreit 14y agoFor the people who "thought it was a joke" have you (or will you) put this data point into your data bank so as to improve your future thinking?
- shangrila 14y agoHeh, I suppose so. Thing is, I still feel like my initial assessment was right. It was a very poor fit the company I was at, not to mention it was a rather immature service at the time -- it felt like a half-baked Twitter clone and it made for a poor replacement for chat/email, especially in a small company. Today it seems like an almost completely different toolset with a lot more features. Looking at it now I think it could be useful, but until this story came out I hadn't thought about the service since that time more than 3 years ago. The important takeaway I get from this is that they kept trying and managed to improve and deliver a service that actually works for their target market. If it had stayed like it was I don't think it would have gone anywhere. Hats off to them for pushing through and executing well!
- pbreit 14y agoIt came flying out of the gates, was always more like Facebook than Twitter and is targeted at pretty much all companies (I've worked at a 6 person company that loves it, a company that went from 10 to 100 employees that loves it and a company with 10s of 1000s of employees that loves it).
- therealarmen 14y agoMicrosoft buys Yammer, renames it SharePoint Cloud Server 2012 Mobile Enterprise Social Networking Edition
- berberich 14y agosource (as best as I can tell): https://twitter.com/gsmith/status/213325584921665537 https://twitter.com/gsmith/status/213325584921665537
- rayval 14y agoYammer is Microsoft's Instagram, and not just because of the same price tag. As did Facebook, Microsoft is buying market traction, user engagement, brand equity, UX chops, and vision.
- mtgx 14y agoI think Facebook bought Instagram because they were afraid of its fast growth and what it could become in the future.
- moreorless 14y agoAren't they all the same people?
- antidoh 14y agoNow just Google left to declare a company worth $1B and buy it. It's getting expensive to keep up appearances.
- makecheck 14y ago"Sledgehammer spending" really bugs me. It says "we didn't exercise any brain cells to figure out what our purchase is actually worth, we're just throwing money at the wall because we think we can". Investors should scream at stuff like this. How many things could millions of extra dollars buy? For one thing, maybe they could have acquired 4 or 5 additional companies, patents or other IP. If there was any chance that they could have done this for $500 million or $400 million or $50 million, that matters and should have been investigated thoroughly. Those saved millions of dollars can also be used to employ a bunch of people on projects for years (heck, sometimes entire applications are written by one or two people inside a company, and they might build something really cool that can be sold). Microsoft has lots of money, sure. But this kind of spending isn't thinking long-term. Are they guaranteed to have this kind of money in a few years, even? There may be a time when they're completely incapable of making a key future acquisition because they overspent on crap like this.
- psychotik 14y agohey did this same thing with Aquantive (sp?), and shareholders didn't do jack. That acquisition had to be the biggest $6B wasted EVER. Sadly, nothing you expect/want to happen will.
- abrichr 14y agoJust curious, what could shareholders do in a situation like this?
- pbreit 14y ago$1b is a steal for Yammer. I'm surprised Yammer would take that right now considering it's current valuation and how bright its prospects are. It has one of the most efficient B2B customer acquisition schemes. Even with the culture mis-match, I suspect this will be a good acquisition for MSFT.
- adventureful 14y agoThe Facebook IPO punched a temporary hole in their valuation. I think Microsoft got a modest steal due to that. Yammer has already won their segment. Imagine owning a private corporate social network, spanning the globe, with paying clients. It's an extremely valuable segment.
- Comrade 14y agoSmart buy.
- dhughes 14y agoIt's like Facebook only with your grandmother standing behind you watching every word you type.
- maguay 14y agoActually, that's how Facebook already is ... with your literal grandmother watching everything you post.
- bukl 14y agoActually that describes the original startup that Yammer was spun out of: a spam-heavy social network called Geni, that tries to turn a family tree int a social network, and brings not only your grandmother, but every other crazy distant relative out of the woodwork.
- maguay 14y agoVery interesting. I'd never heard of Geni and the story behind Yammer.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- lukejduncan 14y agoIT's a great exit for the team, but being bought by Microsoft seems like the kiss of death for the actual product
- mindcrime 14y agoCool, that may help create an opening for our startup. :-)
- hankejh 14y ago$1.2 B
- thought_alarm 14y agoSo this is basically a Win32 version of Zynga? Or, is it COM? Well, either way, good for them.
- bukl 14y agoKudos to them for recognizing the value of an internal tool and spinning it off. Their original idea, Geni, seems to be languishing(unsurprisingly-how many mentally ill second cousins once-removed does it take to ruin a social network?).
- lawnchair_larry 14y agoI heard Yammer has no hope of revenue ever and that this is obviously a talent acquisition.
- jkaljundi 14y agoFrom actual usage of Yammer, have heard of many companies where it is in use but the user engagement is really low. Can anyone using it comment on any success stories or failures of using Yammer internally? What has worked and what not?
- lmm 14y agoIn my current company it's pretty successful; it pretty much fills the role that IRC had at my previous two jobs. I guess it's less intimidating for less-technical folks than installing an IRC client (and one less server for ops to maintain).
- va_coder 14y agoI work at a company that uses Jive (forum software written in Java) and its a grave yard. I'm really surprised that Yammer is so popular.
- Porter_423 14y agoYammer is a way for mid-sized businesses to make themselves feel cool while undermining their internal data security; in the wrong hands it can undo all the work of a whole world of corporate controls and make company data subject to tampering by anybody's close friend or casual acquaintance. Having been exposed to 4 different Yammer networks, I can see why most dp pros find it a gross interference with their job and not worthy of inclusion in any real plan for internal communication.
- DrJokepu 14y agoI'm not very familiar with how raising funds works so this is a genuine naive question and I'd appreciate if someone could explain this to me. On their "About Us" page, they say that they've raised $142M in venture funding. How much equity VCs typically get for such an investment? 20%? In that case, the exit of the VC would be around $240M which in not even a 2x profit. Is it possible that the equity owned by the VCs is much larger than that? It seems to me that VCs would have to own a very large percentage of their equity to make this acquisition worthwhile for them, in which case the original founders wouldn't get anything nearly close to the $1.2B purchase price.
- nivertech 14y agoI expect investors to have majority of equity in the company now, more like 60% or even more, not 20%. You can't raise 142M and stay with 80% of the equity.
- xxcode 14y agoYammer says we are their 'top ten' users. We are a 8K employee software company. Most common comment about yammer - "Oh I've used it....once".