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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.
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 !
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?
The accepted way of expressing this is
1. Acquire
2. Pump
3, IPO
4. ???
5. Profit!!
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.
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.
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!
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.
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