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Microsoft To Buy Yammer?
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft seems to have a pocketful of billions sitting around. First Skype, now Yammer – an enterprise social network service launched back in September 2008 that looks almost like Facebook minus the title bars. According to Bloomberg, the deal could reach up to a billion dollars. To date, Yammer claims 200,000 companies which include more than 400 of the 500 Fortune companies. One reason for the purchase may stem from their social-like Sharepoint platform which has been a lost cause to solutions by Salesforce.com and Oracle."
My employer tried Yammer, then installed Sharepoint. Nobody used Yammer after Sharepoint became available, and not many use Sharepoint now. People don't tend to post drivel about work like they do about their personal lives.
It's one of the few double digit growth products in Microsoft's portfolio.
I like Sci Fi, and have read a lot of Sci Fi books.
A story was about the future world where the global economy being controlled by a handful of super-corporations, and some even launched attacks (military style attacks) on each others' installations
When I look at the rate tech giants snatching up all the promising upstarts, I just can't shake the impression that this world we live in might _just_ be moving towards the story above that I read many moons ago
Comparing to the acquisition / mergers of the brick and mortar industry, the tech industry and the bio industry's A/M is super fierce and super fast pace
I shiver when thinking of how many upstarts would remain independent after the dust settles - and it's important because, if the tech giants decide NOT to cooperate with each others, then the internet that we are using may just be split apart into incompatible segments
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Buy it, go public at vastly inflated price (ala facebook) clean up (ala Zuckerberg)
I got to the chocolate box before you, that's why the hard ones have teeth marks.
For what it does, Yammer is awe-strikingly unreliable. You either have to use a web page that a few years ago was able to update itself with new messages via javascript but now fails several times per day (remember to hit reload button at least every 15 minutes if you don't want to miss something important), or you can use an app which requires some bizarre Adobe (?!) dependency and often uses 100% of a core in order to occasionally poll the server for new messages.
if Microsoft does this, they'll be buying absolute garbage: a text-message relay service which can't really relay text. An Internet service where people communicate primarily only to other people in same org, so they could be using a jabberd or something on the LAN but that would make too much sense. Way to go, Microsoft. Glad to see the Borg doesn't just assimilate useful or functional species. How altruistic, to give Yammer's owners a way to cash out of their shockingly broken company.
SharePoint is a billion dollar business. And the fastest growing product of Microsofts Portfolio. So a lost cause uh?
People don't tend to post drivel about work like they do about their personal lives.
That is what meetings are for.
Damni it! Microsoft. Stop beating around bush. If you want to beat Apple and Google, buy Facebook.
What's the point in buying all these startups? I really don't see that it works out much in the end. Is it about patents? I simply don't see the justification to buy startups that are here today and gone tomorrow. Rather than spending billions to buy current competitors, why not pump those same billions into improving existing products. For every startup that produces lots of useful things, there seems to be ten that do nothing but cost cash because either the buying company does nothing with it or the innovations that the company that was acquired are technically meaningless.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
But established competitors such as Microsoft, Apple and Google have way more infrastructure, talent, and cash to make it work out better.
Like MSFT's acquisition of Danger, which produced the Kin?
Big Corp looks for another startup to buy.
That should be readen as "Big Corp looks for another project to wreck", right?
They have way more infrastructure and cash. They don't have more talent, or, if they have, they don't allow such talent to show itself. Big corporations are about putting everybody inside a process, so you can manage them. And you can't put talents inside a process.
So, I guess the answer to the GP's question is that they need to buy startups because they are disfunctional.
Rethinking email
I was really hoping that LinkedIn would buy Yammer someday.
That would've been awesome.
But doesn't Balmer already work there? Or are they buying it so they can explain him? Something that goes with his personality? As I'm typing this - this shows up below...
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
I think you - and the spammer - don't know that the links in comments are no-follow links. In other words, search engines ignore them when it comes to counting inbound links to a site.
Still means someone has to waste modpoints on that crap.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Contrary to the claim of the blurb, Salesforce Chatter integrates into Sharepoint. I am a Salesforce emp and we have plenty of customer references I'd be happy to bring out.
I think you - and the spammer - don't know that the links in comments are no-follow links.
I didn't know. Let me check.
Ooops, the way I understand nofollow, these type of links are meant to have the rel="nofollow" attribute. Now (using Chrome), if I right-click/"Inspect element" on such a link, I don't see the "rel" attribute being defined (neither in the element's text representation, nor in the "Properties" of the "HTMLAnchorElement") - so I suspect that Google's crawler won't see it either.
Are you absolutely sure that what you know is currently accurate? Admitting that the past has seen /. using the nofollow approach, are you absolutely sure that /. didn't silently drop it - e.g. to increase their chances of being seen a "preferred source of ad click-throughs"?
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Dear folks at Microsoft and everywhere else,
I'm truly sorry but I really cannot put all my personal data on dozens of different "social networks", because I do not even have the time to keep my professional webpage up to date.
Tip: Try inventing something new and exciting.
Best,
aaaaaaargh!
M$ is once again abusing their monopoly. When prosecuting M$ this time do it right by going just beyond fines which is just a slap on the wrist, revoke their corporate charter. M$ should cease to exist.
--
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Friends do assist M$ addicted friends in committing suicide.
It was there a few days ago. I checked while replying to a CleanMyPC post.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
The whole point of enterprise social platforms is too TRY to get people to post drivel about work.
When you are a Fortune 500 company with hundreds of thousands of employees worldwide, who operate in silos and rarely communicate among eachother, communication platforms can be a huge boon to your company. They let people informally share knowledge that can directly impact your bottom line. If an employee in NYC has a non-time-sensitive issue with an application, maybe instead of calling the company help desk they can just post a question in a forum, and someone else in Malaysia who is just getting their morning coffee takes 5 seconds to answer it - boom, the person got their answer faster, and with less stress, and you just saved money. The multiplicative effect of that, if properly embraced, can be enormous.
The whole problem with these platforms, however, is they are usually not implemented properly. You can't just throw up a social platform on the intranet portal and expect 10/20/30 years of in-grained culture to change - there has to be initiatives driven from the top down to encourage employees to use the platform and educate them on why it is better both for them and the company.
No nofollow attributes on the 2girls1cup links indeed, not even when being logged out. It would be cool to have a "score" attribute, so you could get score="-1" for those troll posts, but OTOH sometimes we link to pages we don't endorse (like the GGP) and still a positive moderation.
sorry, s/troll/spam/
Posting again, I'll shut up now, but it actually works like that. When googlebot (et al) loads up a slashdot page, only the posts with moderation greater than 0 are included in the HTML. So only those links are used in google. Nice system. There was a story about googlebot running javascript, but it probably doesn't simulate random clicks, so we're still good.
Microsoft Innovation, a ship without a rudder. That they have to go out and buy such 'innovation` merely demonstrates the paucity of any real innovation at One Microsoft Way ...
--
pauÂciÂty/ËpÃsitÄ"/ Noun: The presence of something only in small or insufficient quantities or amounts; scarcity.
AccountKiller
Sorry but I know 10x the small businesses that are using SharePoint compared to SalesForce or Oracle. (Actually, I don't know a single company using Oracle.)
Everyone's experience may vary, and I deal mostly with 5-100 employee sized businesses. But the ability to set up a SharePoint site so quickly (especially if you have it hosted by someone who knows what they're doing), have it integrate with Exchange and your Office documents and your Windows Phone, makes it a pretty great solution for businesses that can't afford something huge.
Displaying different content to users than you show to search engines?
weeeeeeeee
wait till the quality moderators at google get wind of this....
... so you could get score="-1" for those troll posts, but OTOH sometimes we link to pages we don't endorse (like the GGP
This is why spamming 2-3 days older posts may work: less annoyance for readers, less incentive to mods to spend their mod points for something of less interest.