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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."
I break wind and raise an eyebrow or two...MS buys a dumpster and the eyebrows of the DOJ raise so high they knock their own hats off.
http://jayceecorder.blogspot.com
with the German anti-trust law, which are a wee bit more strigent than the US anti-trust law.
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
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
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...
"Only a German company would want to put a piece of software where one program controls every aspect of the organization."
(Non-flame, I'm German!)
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
Microsoft would merge with SAP the same way I merge with a cheeseburger.
Weaselmancer
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
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
Microsoft does nothing. Details at 11.
worst attempt at an anagram .... ever
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
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
Unknown host pong.
...that two companies that claim to be leaders of business process simplification found that merging there operations was too complex to be feasible?
SAP has about the worst User Interface I've ever seen. The only exception might be old IBM terminals running on mainframes.
For all the negative we say about microsoft, they have done a lot for generating a consistant user interface. On SAP, sometimes you have to hit enter, sometimes you click the green checkmark (in "random" locations), sometimes you click the clock icon, sometimes you hit f8.
Unless you use it every day, you forget how to use the basic functions.
You forget how nice it is to use Windows until you use SAP!
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.
Microsoft says the discussions were halted due to the complexity involved in the transaction and in integrating the two companies
I think it was more a COMPLEXITY of the SAP code that M$ did not understand!
Rocco
Worst attempt to remember the word acronym ...ever
Q: What do you get when you merge Microsoft and SAP?
A: Microsoft
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 :-)
Nuts. I was looking forward to MicroSap. Yes yes yes, minus one, redundant, but much like Everest, One has to because it was there.
Yup...
At least Microsoft ran away in time and were smart enough to realize that even they could not integrate with SAP.
This is in sharp contrast to most companies who deal with SAP that end up spending up to 2 billion dollars for a product that doesn't even work.
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
They would be a perfect match:
SAP = Sanduhr Anschau Programma (German for eggtimer watching application)
MS is not known for speedy software either.
A merger with SAP would be a profound break with previous Microsoft strategy
Not sure how it would have been much different than strategy in other markets, but it should be pointed out they did buy out another large ERP company.
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?
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.
"Microsoft says the discussions were halted due to the complexity involved in the transaction and in integrating the two companies."
Wow. Microsoft halts due to any sort of complexity, eh? No wonder their software is so user friendly...
"Instant gratification takes too long." - Carrie Fisher
I supported Navision on Windows in my last job. I was concerned when, in somewhere around May 2002, Microsoft bought Navision that there would be problems, but there weren't. Navision is also meant for smaller comapnies than SAP and has some critical problems on Windows servers, such as having no database replication capability, no live backup capability and a seriously fucked interface (it originally comes from a DOS and UNIX commandline type environment and they even had their own non standard GUI elements).