Slashdot Mirror
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."
Like that'd bother Microsoft.
In a huge piece of bloat- (and until a couple of years ago vapor-) ware running on top of what is already purported to be bloatware. MS was wise to stay away from that. The Great Plains (now Microsoft CRM) does not have a ton of visibility yet. Oracle is bidding on the plum piece of CRM software in my opinion (JD Edwards snapped up by Peoplesoft!). Now who is going to pick up Lawson?
Have you Meta Moderated t
Once Oracle went after PeopleSoft, it was pretty much inevitable that Microsoft would at least start looking at SAP. So, wow, Microsoft looked.
It's not like this is a transit of Venus or something...
...that two companies that claim to be leaders of business process simplification found that merging there operations was too complex to be feasible?
Vertical monopolies can be just as bad as horizontal ones. Let Microsoft have both and we may as well add a line to our tax forms for them.
MS looked, said no, due to complexity of a merger that could cause DOJ brow raising...(they have learned this is a bad thing)
MS did nothing wrong, yet the slashdot bashing occurs...seems the bashers CAN learn from MS after all...the bashers can learn to READ THE DETAILS, and not to make up FUD!
karma, hah...
Complicated interfaces are a sure sign a German was inovled in the design process. Germans culturally have much higher expectations of their users. I have a Waldorf synthseizer (uQ for those interested) which has a CRAZY interface, it has a matrix of lights which have to be mainpulatd by knobs and buttons to edit paramaters of the synthesizer. Its crazy compared to a british synthesizer like the Supernova II which has neatly partitioned sections and buttons with well defined meanings.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
What would Microsoft have done with it? SAP is widely used, and profitable, but does not match Microsoft's language and operating system strategy: SAP has always been a strongly cross-platform systems and in recent years has including significant support for Java.
It would have been astonishing for Microsoft to end up supporting J2EE applications for Sap on RedHat, at least for existing SAP users. Any move to close down the portability or application language support for an acquired SAP would surely have led to serious monopoly issues.
While I agree with the spirit of your argument, Lynxpro, I must point out (before someone else does) that it is not very well constructed. The poster pointed out the increase of big business mergers during George W. Bush's administration; he said nothing about the Republican party or its historical protection of small business interests. In fact, while one could "read between the lines" and find him critical of the Republican party as a whole, he never says that. By turning it into a partisan issue, you're arguing with a point the poster didn't actually make. A logical fallacy, that.
Furthermore, in defending the Bush Administration and the republican party as a whole, you go "negative", to use political jingo: you critisize the Democratic party in order to make the Republican party look good, rather than leaving the Democratic party (at least mostly) out of it and explaning why the Republican party doesn't do these things. This looks very good to Republicans but not so great to Democrats (whom you are obstensibly trying to convince.) It's rather like when Europeans accuse us of human rights abuses and we say, "But, China is worse!" Who cares? Do we want to be in the same league as China?
But like I said, I agree with the spirit of your post. Just phrase it a little bit more convincingly next time, and we might actually get some converts rather than a lot of people ridiculing you on one hand and a lot of braindead "me too" posts from the other.
IMHO if a company can buy one of the few remaining competitors IN CASH, everyone should be really worried :-(
Bye egghat.
-- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel