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Microsoft Buys Yammer For $1.2 Billion
itwbennett writes "Confirming the rumor that emerged earlier this month, Microsoft has bought enterprise social networking software maker Yammer for $1.2 billion. Yammer will become part of Microsoft's Office Division." If you're not familiar with Yammer, it's essentially a messaging system that gives more control to administrators than does using an outside company's service, like AOL's AIM. "Enterprise social networking software," as Wikipedia explains it, means that Yammer "is used for private communication within organizations or between organizational members and pre-designated groups, making it an example of enterprise social software. ... Access to a Yammer network is determined by a user's Internet domain, so only those with appropriate email addresses may join their respective networks."
From: Yammer [mailto:noreply@yammer.com]
Sent: 26 June 2012 8:41 AM
To: Me
Subject: Yammer Signs Definitive Agreement to be Acquired by Microsoft
Dear Yammer Customer,
I am pleased to announce that Yammer has signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by Microsoft. After the close of the deal, Microsoft will continue to invest in Yammer's freemium, stand-alone service, and the team will remain under my direction within the Microsoft Office Division. With the backing of Microsoft, our aim is to massively accelerate our vision to change the way work gets done with software that is built for the enterprise and loved by users.
As a Yammer customer, you will continue to get a secure, private social network—delivered with the same focus on simplicity, innovation, and cross-platform experiences. Over time, you’ll see more and more connections to SharePoint, Office365, Dynamics and Skype. Yammer’s expertise in empowering employees, driving adoption, and delivering rapid innovation in the cloud will not only continue to power our stand-alone service, but also anchor the communication and collaboration experiences in Office 365.
You can find more information in this press release and our blog post.
Sincerely,
David Sacks
Yammer CEO and Founder
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25% Time Savings: Download The Total Economic Impact of Yammer (April 2011), a commissioned study by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Yammer.
Somehow, I think the next version of their client will *NOT* run on Adobe AIR.
I mean, Lync (with federations and so on) pretty much covers every "locally admistered" instant messaging + file sharing + desktop sharing + voice + video needs you have...and it works across organization boundaries. So what is Yammer for?
I've never used Yammer but that price seems awfully high considering how simplistic it sounds. I think they could have recoded a similar but more fitting product for their company for a lot less money. It sounds like an IM program with a bit of security restrictions. I think there's a dozen or so of those on sourceforge that were made for significantly less than $1.2bil.
As someone forced to use MS products, anything is better than OCS
So what is Yammer for?
Maybe it's for helping bosses to feel less jealous of your Facebook account, so they don't have to demand its password?
*rimshot*
Yammer Dammer Doooo!
Probably for buying out and shutting down a potential competitor?
Or maybe they've got good Mac integration, since MS's Lync support on Mac is sort of half-there (it's basically just Communicator, there's no group support, etc.).
- chrish
I don't use social networks in my personal life; I'm not going to use them in my business. I work for a very large tech company with employees in the 100,000+ range. We have our own internal "twitter" and some sort of "social network" stuff and NOBODY USES THEM. They're dumb. They serve no purpose. You need a phone, email, and IM. That's it. And you don't need "an outside service like AOL Instant Messenger". Fucking setup your own Jabber/XMMP servers. That's what we did many years ago, after we moved off of internal IRC.
Seriously? What is with the overpayment of these companies.
Is this like sports, and high priced overpaid players. Where stupid GM's pay ridiculous prices because they know other stupid GM's will also pay ridiculous prices?
i.e. we better shell out 1.2 Billion for these guys before Apple, Google, Facebook, etc... do!
It is basically an internal Twitter for a company. At least for larger companies, you have upper management giving out tweets (or yams or whatever they want to call them) until they get bored with it. Low-level employees are afraid to write anything interesting out of a fear of accidentally writing something management will get upset about. So you get to see a few boring posting from upper management and that's about it.
Take away the fear and it would be a good internal tool for a company. However, there is no barrier to entry for competitors.
And that was my experience with Yammer.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Office 2013 Communicator for Windows (Premium|Business|Home) Edition 1.0 for Windows 7/8.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Maybe they need them to add a SPELL CHECKER TO THEIR MESSENGER...like really now. its been fracking 12 years with MSN and still no spell checker support. What confuses me even more is that they already have the spell checker library that exists for word / office and all they will need to do is link it.
"Yammer"
As much as I like yammer, I think startups that use stronger freemium model (http://bitrix24.com comes to mind immediately, but there are others), will byte a good chunk out of their market share.
I have experimented a bit with Yammer, to find that its user interface is as simple to use as Facebook and similar websites. Adding photos or any kind of document to a Yammer "repository" seems to me like it will make it easier to search and find it later on.
In comparison, my (also limited) experience with SharePoint is that if internal communications in a company were handled there rather than via email, stuff would be easier to find and actual knowledge bases for products and client projects would become easier to create and maintain.
The problem with SP (IMHO) is that it's not as easy to use as email or any common website. It is very easy to feel discouraged from using it and just keep sending email attachments all the time. I suspect that the existing developments that bridge Yammer and SP will be very useful to help the adoption of SharePoint in those 80K companies already using Yammer.
Yammer knows they have made a killing and absolutely lack the willingness or the balls to take responses to this decision. They know the obvious: they will be hammered for this with questions they don't want to have to answer.
Microsoft knows sharepoint has always been complete garbage aside from certain business functionality (which ties in to what Yammer can do), so this is just an acknowledgement of an easily 10-15 year gap/weakness in their products.
Does this acquisition fix anything? Nope. We're easily looking at 1-2 years to "integrate" Yammer properly in some fashion, let alone dealing with Windows 8 at the same time may prove to create serious issues. Does anyone think Yammer of today is necessarily what people need a minimum of 2 years from now? That's the question which will be proven in time, but you don't need to be a genius to predict an answer of "no".
I hate Microsoft (so my view is not entirely unbiased), but if they're trying to do anything *other* than fail this is not the way to proceed. A solution would be: fixing some of their existing products (focus on quality) instead of taking hardline definitions of what is "in scope" for any particular program/product. Yet they simultaneously say "bolt on more programs if you want more functionality". Fixing things would go a very long way to making their products less shitty. Security is simply not a valid reason by itself for why expansion in scope for any product is refused and simply ignored outright. Then again, that's what you get with a proprietary vendor - it's their choice to disregard *your* feedback as a customer.
"I've made a huge mistake"
Oh microsoft, stick to badly debugged device drivers.
Yammer is not a competitor to Lync, though. I don't know what prompted GP to even make such a connection. As TFA says, it really is a "corporate social network", nothing more.
Lync does not offer public offline messages.
Than anything else, reminds me of the Facebook Instagram acquisition.