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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."
with the German anti-trust law, which are a wee bit more strigent than the US anti-trust law.
If it had happened, I think we might have seen Microsoft suffer the same fate as ma bell. Oh well, M$ will still have their day.
bash: rtfm: command not found
It seems pretty counterintuitive to me that a monopoly would be allowed to merge with anything, even a small company.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Pure bullshit.
.net crap in.
.net when the business market place has pretty much said J2EE is what we want.
MS want ERP vendors to think they almost acquired SAP. Then ERP vendors will think wow that could be us. How can we make ourselves more attractive to MS for buyout. I know, we'll program a bunch of
This gets vendors to try to play extra nice with
Of course, but is there an ERP package that isn't bloat-ware? The fact is that MS wants to get into the market and Bill has $50 billion burning a hole in his pocket. On first-look, it made sense for Bill to at least "kick the tires".
That corporate mergers have increased(Peoplesoft&Oracle,Clearchannel) under the Bush administration and no one really cares until you turn on the Cnn/moneyline and notice that the corporations aren't hiring because of HIGH productivity by their businesses. Most hirings come from small business. To me mergers mean only one thing , an attempt to monopolize.
With that said, I used to work for Tivoli, an IBM subsidiary, and we used RETAIN for problem tracking so that we could be tied into IBM global operations and receive support calls internationally, So I know all about crappy mainframe applications. Still, using raw RETAIN (which I did through x3270 on my linux desktop) was better than using ACME CCM, a screen scraper interface to retain which ran on OS/2. It was SOP at Tivoli to have an OS/2 system to run ACME, and whatever other system to do all the rest of your work on - like running Notes for email. (I didn't do THAT, either, I only used Notes for processes for which it was mandatory, like filling out some types of forms.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
MS would have been tied up, defocused, defanged, and out of our hair for YEARS with this acquisition. Gates and Ballmer (unfortunately) were wise and disciplined to pass it up. Historically, most big-company mergers wind up losing value (witness Daimler-Chrysler, a $40B abortion). Still, it's a pleasant thought :-)
Does explain the SAPDB sale to MySQL a little more rationally though. That was one piece of baggage MS would not have tolerated.
I also suspect that WGIII and Uncle Fester took a hard look at the install base, evaluated their chances of actually converting some of the largest customers, overestimated it by at least double and still realized they'd be buying into supporting a product on competitive operating system platforms and databases for a basically a decade at least. Further noticed that many of these customers have ahem connections that they'd rather not mess with (it's rumoured that Haliburton is or was the largest single instance SAP system in the world, this appeared on a chart at one SAP conference and then disappeared for future appearances of the same presentation).
I've always had the impression that the policy from Remond was to find the "sweet spot" for their back office applications. In this case, the best target is probably a notch or two down from the customers who are willing to bay a SAP solution.
Whatever the reasons might be, MS in fact went ahead and bought Navision Financials instead, which probably was better for the overall backoffice strategy.
//Wegge
After eyeing up SAP for a year or two Microsoft plucks up the courage and asks SAP for a date.. they both have dinner together in a fancy restaurant but conversation is dull and they avoid eye contact all night, SAP looks bored, Microsoft eyes up the waitress all night while SAP eyes up the bartender.
Microsoft pays the bill and SAP contributes to the tip.
Both go home alone, end of story.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=SAP:
Market Cap: 51.18B
It would have cost them all their cash, but they'd have bought a company that works very much against all the way different than MSFT:
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
This sounds like what Microsoft did with Intuit and some other companies who's names escape me right now (I believe Novell in the 80s was another). They send all sorts of people over to "investigate a merger", when in reality what they are doing is learning how you do business and who your key people are.
Perhaps this is what Microsoft's intent was with SAP?
I was in software retail when MS MOney was launched to compete with Quicken. We had stacks of Quicken for $49.95 and stacks of MS Money for, ultimately, $5.00. We couldn't move MS Money at any price. People would walk right by the huge endcaps MS paid for to spend more on Quicken.
In a nice demonstration of the Law of Perceived Value, sales of MS Money fell off as the price went down. People figure that if it's marked down that heavily, then it must suck. Pretty much everyone who bought it at all paid at least $39.95 for it.
Then they tried to buy Intuit and the FTC raised an eyebrow.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
Let me add my two cents to what others have said about the pathetic UI of SAP and its operation in general.
I work for a state where we have implemented SAP for most everything we have to do. Every day we have to sign in and input our time codes so we get paid. In my case I have 7 different codes to put in because my work is actually funded my 7 different agencies.
If you happen to work overtime you put in the amount of time you worked, manually calculating the correct percentage of time allocated to each funding agency because SAP won't do it for you AND still have to call your timekeeper to let them know you worked overtime so they can input the time you worked because SAP won't recognize the time you've already put in.
To get to your timesheet you have to click an expandable menu tree 4 times just so you can input the current date so SAP knows which time period you are dealing with.
When certain agencies have to generate reports they have to choose between a report which either has the correct number of columns or the correct number of rows but never both at the same time. When I helped someone create a helpdesk ticket regarding this matter (I know the helpdesk guys for other reasons) the response came back that the report formats were created before the system became implemented and there were no plans at the current time to go back and redo them.
There are numerous other issues involving SAP but I won't bore you with the details. Suffice to say the amount of money spent on this abomination could have been used to give the state employees their union negotiated annual COLAs which the union then threw away for 2 years because of cost saving measures.
The one nice thing is that the governor, senate, house and their attendant staff don't have to deal with this mess. They continue to tout the virtues of having SAP without actually having to use it on a daily basis.
Oh, the guy who started this whole fiasco? He is currently the head of the Homeland Security Department. Now everyone in the nation gets to suffer as much as we have.
Cheers