What Might Have Been: Microsoft Almost Bought SAP

steveorama writes "This article from Bloomberg indicates that 'Microsoft Corp, the world's largest software maker, approached late last year about buying the German company, a combination that would have vaulted it to the biggest seller of software for business applications.'" The talks came out in advance of likely disclosure in the ongoing merger battle involving Oracle, PeopleSoft and the U.S. Department of Justice. An anonymous reader points to this article in the Financial Times, adding "Microsoft says the discussions were halted due to the complexity involved in the transaction and in integrating the two companies. A merger with SAP would be a profound break with previous Microsoft strategy, and would likely have raised eyebrows among regulators."

Comments

Re:And it would have resulted

[cbreaker]

" The Great Plains (now Microsoft CRM) does not have a ton of visibility yet."

Ohh, it's got tons of visibility - to every technition that's ever had to go within 20 feet of that peice of shit.

It was a peice of shit when it was just plain old Great Plains, now it's a peice of shit with a Microsoft sticker on it.

They thought they could do what they did with Visio, but Visio was actually a good product to begin with.

Apparently they are doing a major rewrite of the whole thing, so maybe it will suck a little less when they are done but it's just terrible, terrible software so I doubt even 2.0 will be worth a crap.