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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.
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.
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