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Microsoft agrees to $1.2bn purchase of Yammer
- Chirag 14y agoNow Microsoft seems to be finally getting wiser, Yammer is a good purchase for Microsoft. Specially if they can integrate it with Sharepoint and Office Suite. This can turn out very cool product from MS in long time, now I can only wish they down't screw up with a good product.
- mindcrime 14y agoDon't worry, if they screw it up, there will be something better (and Open Source to boot) along to replace it. Give us time, give us time...
- MartinCron 14y agoSpecially if they can integrate it with Sharepoint and Office Suite As a person who uses Yammer on purpose and Sharepoint only under duress, I would prefer to keep them distinct.
- auxbuss 14y agoThey can. They (Yammer) bought One Drum (http://onedrum.com/ http://onedrum.com/) only a couple of months back. (Checking my twitter feed, they arrived in SF from Stirling (Scotland) on 24 April.) The guys are currently quite happy; tweeting: "Two startup exits in 12 weeks. I am Midas", "An analyst just asked Steve Ballmer if OneDrum played an important role in the acquisition".
- reilly3000 14y agoThey need to have an answer to "The Social Enterprise" that SFDC is out marketing...
- mindcrime 14y agoThis is going to be interesting; sleep with one eye open, Mr. Ballmer, sleep with one eye open... Edit: for the downvoters who probably don't "get" the reference, out startup (Fogbeam Labs) are now competing with Microsoft since we're in this same "enterprise 2.0" space as Yammer. Anyway, Mr. Ballmer... "never mind that noise you heard, it's just the beast under your bed." :-)
- mindcrime 14y agoAnd this is why I love HN... Nothing like showing a little support for one of our own. :-) It's not like we're the scrappy, underdog competitor, building Open Source products that will contribute to the world whether we ever make a dime or not, while Microsoft are the original Evil Empire of Software - monopolistic, profiteering gluttons who will do anything to make a buck. le sigh it's all right, I still love you guys anyway. :-)
- kprobst 14y agoYou seem to come across as petulant rather than someone who is challenging an entrenched competitor with innovation or whatever. Less talking, more doing. Just a thought.
- mindcrime 14y agoYou seem to come across as petulant rather than someone who is challenging an entrenched competitor with innovation or whatever. I'm not sure how "petulant"[1] fits into this, but OK. Less talking, more doing. Just a thought. We don't do a lot of talking, is the thing. One offhand comment on HN so far... I have to say, I'm a bit surprised at the downvote frenzy. No Metallica fans here, I suppose. sigh As for doing, if you find somebody doing more "doing" than we do, mark it down on a calendar. I've coded until my wrists feel like they're about to fall off, put in 100 hour weeks for week after week after week after week after week, flown back and forth from Chicago to RDU dozens of times just to keep in touch with my co-founders, and sacrificed more opportunities to go out with my friends, go on dates, or otherwise have fun, than I can count... to write code, do customer development work, do market research, competitive intelligence, you name it. If we fail, it won't be for lack of "doing," that I can promise. Geez, I'm not usually so defensive either, but I find your comment amusing given the circumstances. Anyway, back to the grind... [1]: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/petulant http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/petulant moved to or showing sudden, impatient irritation, especially over some trifling annoyance
- davidcollantes 14y agoNever heard of Yammer until now. The buying price is a lot; I remember the days when millions were only used (born in the sixties). Anyway, yet another company swallowed by Microsoft. Whether it will "live" or "die", it is too early to tell.
- bad_user 14y agoWe've used Yammer inside our small company, but quickly gave up on it because we are few and I think Yammer is a lot more useful in big companies were you should keep up to date on what the other groups around you are doing. The implementation is pretty solid though and I liked the features provided. It really is Twitter for the Enterprise, so this acquisition makes sense for Microsoft. Some smart people like Coda Hale also work there. I wonder if they'll leave or not.
- mindcrime 14y agoWe've used Yammer inside our small company, but quickly gave up on it because we are few and I think Yammer is a lot more useful in big companies were you should keep up to date on what the other groups around you are doing. Just out of curiosity, are you willing to say how big (employee count, maybe) your company is?
- bad_user 14y agoOscillating between 5 and 10 people.
- mindcrime 14y agoGotcha. The research I've done so far leads me to believe that the real value in this kind of tech doesn't start to kick in until you get up into the hundreds of employees. Right now we're operating on the belief that companies that are a target for our product begin with the ones of about 500 employees (allowing for a few simplifying assumptions).
- mahyarm 14y ago
- ckluis 14y agoCan you say Facebook style communication > sharepoint? Good purchase.
- dm8 14y ago"$1.2bn in cash" Wow. Has there been any acquisitions north of $1bn with cash (and no equity) buyouts?
- trapped123 14y agoThis is really a good buy for Microsoft. Yammer has the potential to eventually penetrate most of the medium to large enterprises. I have used it and it really is great tool for multi-location organizations.
- cmwelsh 14y agoHow does this compare to Salesforce's Chatter? They seem to be the same thing, but I've heard Yammer is much better. I've only used Chatter.
- MartinCron 14y agoI haven't used Chatter, but Yammer is extremely smooth and polished. I've been really impressed with it.
- michaelbuckbee 14y agoChatter is more like a private enterprise version of Twitter (small messages, 'I'm working on X right now') Yammer is more like a private enterprise version of Facebook, lots of groups and media postings and timeline/widgets commenting similar to Facebook.
- rabble 14y agoIronically enough, yammer started out as a twitter clone for the enterprise, and evolved in to something more like a private facebook.
- Mystitat 14y agoI think Chatter is closer to your description of Yammer than Twitter. It really revolves around groups and updates on objects, and it has private messaging now.
- spinchange 14y agoEmail isn't going anywhere (anytime soon), but I do think news-feed style posts with threaded comments for lots of group communication is far preferable to cc:->ALL. Smart buy for MSFT.
- ams6110 14y agoThat's what Lotus Notes was, right (news-feed style posts with threaded comments). At least that how I saw it used, in the mid-late 1990s.
- FixThisPOSSite 14y agoHm, I don't remember that at all. We used it for what I thought was its main purpose: shared documents. For example, bug databases and design documents. Sadly, some companies used it as their primary E-mail system and that's it. For E-mail, it sucked, and to maintain that bloated thing for only that purpose just revealed how little the company understood it. I created an issue-tracking system with it in about a day, which a few people got. But many people simply didn't understand what Lotus Notes was for.
- EGF 14y agoDid anyone else try out and use Yammer for awhile and then ultimately switch away from it or off it it in favor of another tool or just back to email?
- andrewpbrett 14y agoWe used it when I worked for TechCrunch (way back when). It's perfect for that setting: lots of writers, coordinating coverage, sharing interesting bits of information that you're not exactly sure who will find interesting. Etc. It's not a good tool when it gets bastardized into a product management/planning/feature request tool. As a developer for them I was keenly aware of this flaw. I've tried it in other contexts since leaving and it hasn't been a fit. Prefer HipChat/Trello.
- wavephorm 14y agoA company I used to work for used it. I found the client to be really horrendous. It was written in some sort of god-awful Adobe Air thing that used 100% CPU constantly while it ran. Just awful, I can't comprehend why anyone would use a terrible bloated architecture like Air to create what should be a simple lightweight chat system. And the chat program itself had no advantages over any other chat system. Maybe I just didn't "get it".
- rabidsnail 14y agoI've never known anybody to use the native client. The web interface works well enough.
- mnicole 14y agoWe've been using it at our company since sometime around September with anywhere from 80-100 employees. Despite my efforts to get sales staff engaged in the product, they haven't picked it up because it isn't intuitive enough nor does it work similarly enough to Facebook (despite the visual rip) for them to be comfortable with it. I've had continued issues with the UX (enter posts instead of creating a line break, can't edit posts or replies, no way to organize posts by chronological order only instead of whichever post has the latest response, showing when private groups are created on the public wall, the way it deals with files/attachments, users not understanding how to stop receiving the sludge of email notifications it sends by default -- not to mention how it doesn't strip email signatures when you reply that way -- and lots of other things) on top of some gnarly early-2000s-esque UI. The product just looks and feels broken and I've been interested in seeing how larger organizations use it because (and I think I've posted this sentiment on HN before) there's got to be tools out there that are better put-together and user-friendly (Jive, et al?). As such, our staff still relies on email, document servers and our internal CRM.
- jsight 14y agoPrevious (interesting) discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4114546 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4114546
- tednaleid 14y agoMicrosoft's acquisition of Groove Networks 7 years ago (http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/features/2005/mar05/03-10grooveqa.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/features/2005/mar05/03-1...) in a very similar space failed to ignite anything. I also rarely ever hear about groove anymore and haven't seen it used in the wild in about 5 years. I like yammer and have used it at the past couple of startups I've been at, but there's a good chance that yammer will be on the same downward path post-acquisition.
- timthorn 14y agoGroove got folded into the Sharepoint family - the technologies are still alive, I believe.
- ghurlman 14y agoAlive, and used by practically no one.
- pcwalton 14y agoHuh? SharePoint is used by 78% of the Fortune 500, according to Wikipedia...
- eli 14y agoSharePoint is absolutely dominating among US government agencies.
- riffraff 14y agoI lived in three countries in europe, and I've met people working on sharepoint in all three, so add another anecdotical evidence on this side of the pond too.
- arethuza 14y agoI suspect that ghurlman means that Microsoft SharePoint Workspace product (based on Groove) isn't as popular as the very succesful SharePoint server - I don't think the latter has much Groove-derived technology in it (although I could well be wrong).
- rch 14y agoAnd so I will be closing yet another social media account. It is nice that I have a specific reason (valid or not) this time, besides the usual vague feeling of dissatisfaction.
- cheez 14y agoDoes anyone know what their revenue/profit margins were like?
- phmagic 14y agoThis might be blasphemy, but why not turn Sharepoint into a platform for the enterprise that developers can create software like Yammer for instead of snatching up these enterprise software companies for billions? I've used and implemented Sharepoint. It's software that looks great on paper (or slide deck) with many bullet points about "integration" and "business requirements", but it's an absolute nightmare to use and deploy well.
- damoncali 14y agoI know a fellow who, while working at MSFT a few years back, proposed this very thing. Nobody bit.
- chris_mahan 14y agobecause it would make the servers ever slower?
- calydon 14y agoIsn't that what Azure is all about? I don't know for sure. That's one of MSFT's classic flaws, too many options, too many platforms, too many ephemeral products.
- josscrowcroft 14y agoI love Yammer, so I'm really really hoping this doesn't become another AOL/WinAMP debacle.
- vivekl 14y agoWith apparently 5 mn users, Microsoft just paid ~$200 per user... C.R.A.Z.Y. This just beat Instagram to a pulp as the yard stick for ridiculous valuation. When do I see an Oatmeal comic on this?
- mikeryan 14y agoYammer charges $5-$15 per user per month. if everyone of the corporate users were charged $5 per month its $60 a user per year. How does that compare at all to a company which had no revenue?
- mark_story 14y agoThe biggest difference is Yammer has a reasonably stable revenue source in its customers. Instagram has 0 paying customers that I'm aware of.
- hncommenter13 14y agoThis is what keeps me from being a shareholder of Microsoft: that they are willing to pay ridiculous premia to purchase speculative or middling businesses. Think about it this way. $1.2B in cash would purchase ~39.1 shares of MSFT stock, had they repurchased stock instead of buying Yammer (at today's open of $30.70/sh, per yahoo finance). Those shares have a proportional claim on $106.7M of after tax earnings over the last 12 mos (approx $2.73/sh, TTM, again per yahoo finance). $1.2B represents 1/250th of MSFT's market cap. Even if Yammer grows revenues at 100% y/y for the next 10 years (it won't), its cumulative after-tax earnings won't come close to the benefit shareholders would have received--esp when discounted appropriately for the risk--had MSFT simply bought back $1.2B worth of stock. Don't get me wrong, Skype represented even more egregious profligacy. But my point is that I (and many others) would be far more interested in owning MSFT stock if they fired the entire corp dev team and replaced them with a small laptop that merely issued orders to buy back stock every quarter. Silicon Valley used to view MSFT as a rapacious shark. Now it sees MSFT as a well-heeled but dim tourist--an interloper that has more money than brains and is willing to spend exorbitant sums for shinky trinkets. Sadly, MSFT has warmed to the role.
- KaoruAoiShiho 14y agoObviously this is strategic. Enterprise Social has a lot of room to expand, MS can do things that Yammer can't do on their own.
- beedogs 14y agoCan, but won't. What have they done with Skype in the year and a half since purchasing it? I can't believe MSFT's shareholders haven't gotten rid of Ballmer yet.
- dewiz 14y agothere's been a lot of work on skype, most of it coming in the next months. it takes months or even years for two big companies to merge and align strategies, not to mention products and tech are often shared behind the curtains so you wouldn't know about progress until some big news or big release, ie. wait till win8