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The question is more, "Can Microsoft extract more than 1 billion (or whatever the exact purchase price is) + return on investment from this purchase?" If they

The question is more, "Can Microsoft extract more than 1 billion (or whatever the exact purchase price is) + return on investment from this purchase?" If they have ~1 million paying users, and have anywhere close to 3/user (considering some are on group licenses, some are in the 15/mo range), that's 36 million in revenue a year, with a potential total of much more. Microsoft must believe they can grow the user base, be able to integrate it with existing products (sharepoint) that will drive upgrades, and extract more than a billion dollars of value. In this case, I wouldn't bet against them.

marvin 14y ago
You can bet that they'll integrate this with SharePoint. I don't necessarily think direct revenues from Yammer had anything to do with the decision. This isn't the first aquisition they've done this with - see Fast Search And Transfer a couple of years ago. The SharePoint product line generates huge revenues for Microsoft, so they could easily justify spending a lot of money on something like this. So now we'll have another huge addition to this already humongous monstrosity. But I guess it's a good thing for Microsoft if they want to grow SharePoint into a SAP-like product that is everywhere and impossible to get rid of. Seems like a sensible purchase to me, although at a somewhat high cost. I think they paid 200MM for FAST a couple of years ago, for advanced search features.
reirob 14y ago
Already done: http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/yammer-accelerates-momentum-in-a-breakout-2011-1606205.htm http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/yammer-accelerates-m... in the section "Platform Growth": Yammer released a number of key enhancements to its platform, enabling integration with a wide range of business applications: [...] Yammer released a new version of its SharePoint integration, adding a highly secure, real-time social layer to the native SharePoint platform, making it social, mobile and engaging for enterprise employees.

marvin 14y ago

You can bet that they'll integrate this with SharePoint. I don't necessarily think direct revenues from Yammer had anything to do with the decision. This isn't the first aquisition they've done this with - see Fast Search And Transfer a couple of years ago. The SharePoint product line generates huge revenues for Microsoft, so they could easily justify spending a lot of money on something like this. So now we'll have another huge addition to this already humongous monstrosity. But I guess it's a good thing for Microsoft if they want to grow SharePoint into a SAP-like product that is everywhere and impossible to get rid of. Seems like a sensible purchase to me, although at a somewhat high cost. I think they paid 200MM for FAST a couple of years ago, for advanced search features.

reirob 14y ago

Already done: http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/yammer-accelerates-momentum-in-a-breakout-2011-1606205.htm http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/yammer-accelerates-m... in the section "Platform Growth": Yammer released a number of key enhancements to its platform, enabling integration with a wide range of business applications: [...] Yammer released a new version of its SharePoint integration, adding a highly secure, real-time social layer to the native SharePoint platform, making it social, mobile and engaging for enterprise employees.