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."

Comments

Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Why?

[hairyfeet]

Did you miss the memo? Even Forbes pointed out what a piss poor CEO Ballmer is. Just look at the money he flushed down the crapper on Zune and kin, his idea of "leadership" is to buy something "kinda sorta" similar to something that was hip and then flush MORE cash flopping it around before giving up and letting it die.

Lets face it, other than the X360 (which nobody is even sure if they have made back all the cash they've blown and are really into the black on it, as you'd have to figure in the cash blown on XBox 1 and the 2 billion RROD fiasco) and Win 7 which if the rumors are true was basically left alone by Ballmer while he was busy with kin, Zune, and trying to buy yahoo the man's track record just stinks. Hell you could probably have a monkey throw shit at a stock page and end up with a better ROI than what the Ballminator has done with a decade at the fricking company. if it wasn't for the cash cows of Windows X86 and Office they'd be half dead already and it looks like Ballmer is taking a dump on one of those sacred cows because nobody wants a WinPhone and he won't rest until MSFT has put out a piss poor knockoff of every single thing Apple has done.

So the fact he's gonna blow another billion on a company he won't know fuck all what to do with? really doesn't surprise me at this point. I'd have to say he's giving the Pepsi guy at Apple a serious run for his money in the "Hey lets take a successful company and torpedo it!" dept. Seriously board how much damned longer are you gonna let that moron wipe his ass with money? hell does he even HAVE a strategy? Or is he like Dilbert's PHB merely playing buzzword bingo?

What's the point?

[Darkness404]

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.