Microsoft agrees to $1.2bn purchase of Yammer | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft agrees to $1.2bn purchase of Yammer

microsoft.com

146 pointsmehrshad89 comments

This is what keeps me from being a shareholder of Microsoft: that they are willing to pay ridiculous premia to purchase speculative or middling businesses.

Think about it this way. $1.2B in cash would purchase ~39.1 shares of MSFT stock, had they repurchased stock instead of buying Yammer (at today's open of $30.70/sh, per yahoo finance). Those shares have a proportional claim on $106.7M of after tax earnings over the last 12 mos (approx $2.73/sh, TTM, again per yahoo finance). $1.2B represents 1/250th of MSFT's market cap.

Even if Yammer grows revenues at 100% y/y for the next 10 years (it won't), its cumulative after-tax earnings won't come close to the benefit shareholders would have received--esp when discounted appropriately for the risk--had MSFT simply bought back $1.2B worth of stock.

Don't get me wrong, Skype represented even more egregious profligacy. But my point is that I (and many others) would be far more interested in owning MSFT stock if they fired the entire corp dev team and replaced them with a small laptop that merely issued orders to buy back stock every quarter.

Silicon Valley used to view MSFT as a rapacious shark. Now it sees MSFT as a well-heeled but dim tourist--an interloper that has more money than brains and is willing to spend exorbitant sums for shinky trinkets. Sadly, MSFT has warmed to the role.

Obviously this is strategic. Enterprise Social has a lot of room to expand, MS can do things that Yammer can't do on their own.

Can, but won't. What have they done with Skype in the year and a half since purchasing it?

I can't believe MSFT's shareholders haven't gotten rid of Ballmer yet.

there's been a lot of work on skype, most of it coming in the next months. it takes months or even years for two big companies to merge and align strategies, not to mention products and tech are often shared behind the curtains so you wouldn't know about progress until some big news or big release, ie. wait till win8

Also, 1) potential to eventually sell MS products to yammer's customers. 2) being able to win other enterprise deals in competition with Salesforce/Oracle by being able to claim that you have something similar to Chatter.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1.2+billion+%2F+msft+pr...

I don't think there would be enough shares for that price so this is a very speculative comparison.

Microsoft's acquisition of Groove Networks 7 years ago (http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/features/2005/mar05/03-1...) in a very similar space failed to ignite anything. I also rarely ever hear about groove anymore and haven't seen it used in the wild in about 5 years. I like yammer and have used it at the past couple of startups I've been at, but there's a good chance that yammer will be on the same downward path post-acquisition.

Groove got folded into the Sharepoint family - the technologies are still alive, I believe.

Alive, and used by practically no one.

Huh? SharePoint is used by 78% of the Fortune 500, according to Wikipedia...

SharePoint is absolutely dominating among US government agencies.

I lived in three countries in europe, and I've met people working on sharepoint in all three, so add another anecdotical evidence on this side of the pond too.

I suspect that ghurlman means that Microsoft SharePoint Workspace product (based on Groove) isn't as popular as the very succesful SharePoint server - I don't think the latter has much Groove-derived technology in it (although I could well be wrong).

SharePoint Server and Groove only share enough code to make the Workspace product work.

SharePoint is fine. A rather large portion of my income depends on it.

SharePoint Workspace, which is what Groove became is never used, anywhere.

If only.

Sharepoint may be an atrocity against good software, but it is heavily used in the industry. You would cry if you knew how much money MS makes off of it.

Can you qualify your statement: "Sharepoint may be an atrocity against good software"?

The product has actually improved a lot since the earlier versions that people usually associate their negative opinion of it with; and i've actually been seeing a lot more success stories than horror stories as of late with SharePoint 2010 deployments.

Well, obviously it's a subjective opinion. I'll just say that my idea of good collaborative software is something a bit different than a pile of word docs hooked up to a web front-end and some other pages editable through a wysiwyg control that makes Frontpage 2000 look like a champ. But maybe that's just me. Obviously a lot of people find it useful. But to me I think it succeeds more due to the fact that it's an MS product and the extreme lack of robust competition in that space than it's due to any substantive positive qualities of sharepoint itself.

Edit: fixed wysiwyg typo.

WYSIWYG (not wisywig)

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYG

I'm not the OP, but I have an opinion on this!

It's true that Sharepoint 2010 is better than earlier versions. With this version the whole edit-file-in-sharepoint-using-word scenario works probably 95% of the time. That's a huge step forward over earlier versions.

Of course, since the edit-file-in-sharepoint-using-word scenario is pretty much the only thing Sharepoint can do that still leaves it in the category of an atrocity against good software.

(Yes, I realize that Sharepoint technically can do other things: wikis etc. If you've ever used any other good product in the same space you'll find the Sharepoint implementations laughable though).

Let me put it this way. I've spent time at Amazon and at MS. Amazon's solution is a federation of wikis that is globally searchable and a few custom tools which individually have probably had about 2 or 3 developer-weeks of effort put into them. And it's easily a million times better than sharepoint.

From the rumors I heard, that acquisition was mostly about getting Ray Ozzie on board.

Groove is now Office Communicator (and parts of it are also now part of Sharepoint).

It is the enterprise IM software for any company that has legally-imposed archiving requirements for their communications.

Nobody talks about Groove or O.C. because it's not that type of product. It's a utility, not a toy.

We used Groove years ago at lockheed and the adoption had to be forced down the throats of our teams because the app was too clunky.

We use Yammer now at work and it works pretty smooth, except there is still far too much activity that happens outside Yammer that reduces its potential value.

This is where I think that there is still a lot of room specifically for Salesforce and potentially linkedin, which could do really well in this space.

Obviously Salesforce has chatter and a range of utilities that are already in this space - but still a lot room to build some amazing tools.

This is a good thing.

To make it clear:

Groove -> Office Groove -> SharePoint Workspace (not SharePoint in general)

Office Communicator -> Lync (unrelated to Groove, internally developed from the start I think)

Ah, I didn't realize they'd rebranded it, because of course they did. I'm somewhat familiar with sharepoint, but have never used SharePoint Workspace, so I don't know if that's a marginalized utility within the Sharepoint infrastructure or if it's a big piece that really is getting a lot of use.

I wouldn't be surprised if in a year or two, yammer is also rebranded under the SharePoint name as something like SharePoint TeamChat 2013 Enterprise. If that happens, it'll likely drop off my radar as quickly as Groove did.

Some features of Lync came in part from the Parlano acquisition in 2007:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/press/2007/aug07/08-29Pa...

Interesting to think that Parlano started as an in-house java chatroom/im tool at UBS (the big Swiss bank).

I wonder if any of the team from UBS that were spun off made any money from the acquisition.

Did anyone else try out and use Yammer for awhile and then ultimately switch away from it or off it it in favor of another tool or just back to email?

We used it when I worked for TechCrunch (way back when). It's perfect for that setting: lots of writers, coordinating coverage, sharing interesting bits of information that you're not exactly sure who will find interesting. Etc.

It's not a good tool when it gets bastardized into a product management/planning/feature request tool. As a developer for them I was keenly aware of this flaw.

I've tried it in other contexts since leaving and it hasn't been a fit. Prefer HipChat/Trello.

A company I used to work for used it. I found the client to be really horrendous. It was written in some sort of god-awful Adobe Air thing that used 100% CPU constantly while it ran. Just awful, I can't comprehend why anyone would use a terrible bloated architecture like Air to create what should be a simple lightweight chat system. And the chat program itself had no advantages over any other chat system.

Maybe I just didn't "get it".

I've never known anybody to use the native client. The web interface works well enough.

We've been using it at our company since sometime around September with anywhere from 80-100 employees. Despite my efforts to get sales staff engaged in the product, they haven't picked it up because it isn't intuitive enough nor does it work similarly enough to Facebook (despite the visual rip) for them to be comfortable with it. I've had continued issues with the UX (enter posts instead of creating a line break, can't edit posts or replies, no way to organize posts by chronological order only instead of whichever post has the latest response, showing when private groups are created on the public wall, the way it deals with files/attachments, users not understanding how to stop receiving the sludge of email notifications it sends by default -- not to mention how it doesn't strip email signatures when you reply that way -- and lots of other things) on top of some gnarly early-2000s-esque UI. The product just looks and feels broken and I've been interested in seeing how larger organizations use it because (and I think I've posted this sentiment on HN before) there's got to be tools out there that are better put-together and user-friendly (Jive, et al?). As such, our staff still relies on email, document servers and our internal CRM.

Yes, a number of people at my company (with about 1000 people in it) tried to spread usage of it, but it only stuck with about < dozen people. Communicating through status messages doesn't really seem to give enough detail to anyone who needs to know.

I'm not sure what you mean by communicating through "status messages". It doesn't seem like a good way to operate. Posts are not limited in the same way as Twitter messages. You can add various attachments, and create messages longer than 140 characters. In most companies email is the dominant form of communication and other tools (including discussion boards etc.) just don't get uptake because people drop back to email.

In very big companies (> 20k) there is more of a need for a tool that that can connect people in different "silos". I've seen how Yammer has helped people in this type of organisation.

I've always loved the concept but found the products so crappy (visually and UX) that I can't keep in the routine of using them.

Yep, we tried it and switched away from it because it simply didn't work; some messages failed to get through and it didn't seem to click with the team at all. I can't fathom what about it could be worth over a billion dollars.

Used it in last company, a good excuse to fool employees to stay away from Facebook yet use something similar at workplace.

Now Microsoft seems to be finally getting wiser, Yammer is a good purchase for Microsoft. Specially if they can integrate it with Sharepoint and Office Suite. This can turn out very cool product from MS in long time, now I can only wish they down't screw up with a good product.

Don't worry, if they screw it up, there will be something better (and Open Source to boot) along to replace it. Give us time, give us time...

Specially if they can integrate it with Sharepoint and Office Suite

As a person who uses Yammer on purpose and Sharepoint only under duress, I would prefer to keep them distinct.

They can. They (Yammer) bought One Drum (http://onedrum.com/) only a couple of months back.

(Checking my twitter feed, they arrived in SF from Stirling (Scotland) on 24 April.)

The guys are currently quite happy; tweeting: "Two startup exits in 12 weeks. I am Midas", "An analyst just asked Steve Ballmer if OneDrum played an important role in the acquisition".

They need to have an answer to "The Social Enterprise" that SFDC is out marketing...

Email isn't going anywhere (anytime soon), but I do think news-feed style posts with threaded comments for lots of group communication is far preferable to cc:->ALL. Smart buy for MSFT.

That's what Lotus Notes was, right (news-feed style posts with threaded comments). At least that how I saw it used, in the mid-late 1990s.

"$1.2bn in cash"

Wow. Has there been any acquisitions north of $1bn with cash (and no equity) buyouts?

This is really a good buy for Microsoft. Yammer has the potential to eventually penetrate most of the medium to large enterprises. I have used it and it really is great tool for multi-location organizations.

Previous (interesting) discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4114546

This might be blasphemy, but why not turn Sharepoint into a platform for the enterprise that developers can create software like Yammer for instead of snatching up these enterprise software companies for billions?

I've used and implemented Sharepoint. It's software that looks great on paper (or slide deck) with many bullet points about "integration" and "business requirements", but it's an absolute nightmare to use and deploy well.

I know a fellow who, while working at MSFT a few years back, proposed this very thing. Nobody bit.

because it would make the servers ever slower?

Isn't that what Azure is all about? I don't know for sure. That's one of MSFT's classic flaws, too many options, too many platforms, too many ephemeral products.

I love Yammer, so I'm really really hoping this doesn't become another AOL/WinAMP debacle.

Never heard of Yammer until now. The buying price is a lot; I remember the days when millions were only used (born in the sixties).

Anyway, yet another company swallowed by Microsoft. Whether it will "live" or "die", it is too early to tell.

We've used Yammer inside our small company, but quickly gave up on it because we are few and I think Yammer is a lot more useful in big companies were you should keep up to date on what the other groups around you are doing.

The implementation is pretty solid though and I liked the features provided. It really is Twitter for the Enterprise, so this acquisition makes sense for Microsoft.

Some smart people like Coda Hale also work there. I wonder if they'll leave or not.

Just out of curiosity, are you willing to say how big (employee count, maybe) your company is?

Oscillating between 5 and 10 people.

Gotcha. The research I've done so far leads me to believe that the real value in this kind of tech doesn't start to kick in until you get up into the hundreds of employees. Right now we're operating on the belief that companies that are a target for our product begin with the ones of about 500 employees (allowing for a few simplifying assumptions).

Yeah, something like yammer would probably be useful to companies that have crossed the two major office building barrier or similar.

I'm working in big company. Our company was experimenting with it as well but it was too much and later company dropped this experiment. Everyone was using it as corporate facebook and dropped back and forth various links about technology news and etc. Knowing that colleagues I barely know from foreign countries join yammer was not of much of value either (unless your are creepy type looking at nice girls/boys in your company). I have run from it as fast as I can. From other side I don't have Facebook account either so maybe that just not for me. I am glad that our company decided not to invest into Yammer (I think corporate accounts have free quota).

    Some smart people like Coda Hale also work there.
    I wonder if they'll leave or not.

Oh heeeeell no.

well at least we know that someone is incentivized :) congrats

If you haven't already you might want to try out P2 from Automattic (http://p2theme.com/) - it is much lighter weight.

A year or two back P2 was so flakey in so many ways, it was impossible to use.

Has it gotten any better?

Tell me about it. All these valuations and buyouts starting with a $"B" make me a bit nervous (and truthfully, envious as well).

I don't understand how a market of rational actors can support these kind of numbers. There is just this complete disconnect in my mind with the value these companies provide (people, assets, IP, networking, users, etc.) and the sort of figures getting tossed around.

The Yammer acquisition is consistent with one of Microsoft's core strengths (productivity and collaboration tools for the enterprise). Yammer is also a profitable business that's already really popular in Fortune 500 companies (by their own claims 85% of those companies, out of 200,000 total, which is pretty impressive).

The reason I still have trouble understanding a $B acquisition even in spite of these numbers, is that the tech market is so slippery and fast moving. It is a hotbed of continual disruption and I don't see that stopping any time soon. An investment of > $1B is not paid off overnight, but rather takes a great many many years. Will Yammer still be relevant and providing a competitive advantage for Microsoft ten years from now? Will Microsoft in ten years from now even look anything like the Microsoft we know today?

For example, one world I'm somewhat familiar with is financial planning businesses. In selling a financial planning business, you'll give it a back of the envelope pricing of several multiples (say 2x - 5x) of the amount of revenue the business is generating/expected to generate annually. That way, the buyer says to himself "Well, I make the big investment now and then I reach breaking-even point 3 years down the road" and from there it's all profit. 2x - 5x is a reasonable valuation, because both the buyer/seller can reasonably expect the business fundamentals to remain solid for that period of time. If the seller feels the business may be solid for longer, then he may push for a higher multiple. Conversely, a lower multiple may be justified in the opposite situation.

Back to fundamentals, dollars to donuts, a valuation north of $1B for a company earning a fraction of that in revenue is to me making the statement "We expect the fundamentals of this business to remain solid practically forever" or "We expect this company to accelerate from zero to infinity" - because you would literally need it to in order to recoup your out of pocket *

In the tech industry, that just seems a laughable proposition.

* Of course, there are many other considerations (people value, etc.) but at its core the dollars have to add up or you're just upping the ante on the bubble.

Microsoft understands the value of complementary products, that's why their products are so well integrated with each other. This is why calculating the return on investment from an acquisition like Yammer is difficult, because Yammer may help them sell a few more Exchange/Office licenses.

Also companies like Microsoft have plenty of cash that just sits there in a bank account, like $50 billion or something. Buying Yammer is harmless for them and may yield a better ROI than letting all that cash rot.

Are you saying there are 200,000 Fortune 500 companies? Numbers really lose their meaning, nowadays..

No, you misinterpreted, natural language is funny like that. I took those numbers straight from their page: https://www.yammer.com/customers/

     85 Percent of Fortune 500 Companies Use Yammer.
     ...
     200,000 companies - large and small - are 
     changing the way they work with Yammer

He just worded that sentence really awkwardly.

85% of Fortune 500 companies 200k companies total

IMHO, MSFT's made somewhat strong progress on its integration of Skype (so far), promoting it as a strong value-add for the forthcoming XBox Live and WP8.

Yammer's a much-needed HR/quick collab tool for MSFT's appeal to CIOs, and I'm guessing it'll likely come to fruition as an integrated feature in Office 2018, and a beta feature in Office Live sooner than that. It's a good fit - much better than Salesforce buying them out to stifle MSFT/GOOG.

Can you say Facebook style communication > sharepoint?

Good purchase.

And so I will be closing yet another social media account.

It is nice that I have a specific reason (valid or not) this time, besides the usual vague feeling of dissatisfaction.

How does this compare to Salesforce's Chatter? They seem to be the same thing, but I've heard Yammer is much better. I've only used Chatter.

I haven't used Chatter, but Yammer is extremely smooth and polished. I've been really impressed with it.

Chatter is more like a private enterprise version of Twitter (small messages, 'I'm working on X right now')

Yammer is more like a private enterprise version of Facebook, lots of groups and media postings and timeline/widgets commenting similar to Facebook.

Ironically enough, yammer started out as a twitter clone for the enterprise, and evolved in to something more like a private facebook.

I think Chatter is closer to your description of Yammer than Twitter. It really revolves around groups and updates on objects, and it has private messaging now.

Does anyone know what their revenue/profit margins were like?

With apparently 5 mn users, Microsoft just paid ~$200 per user... C.R.A.Z.Y. This just beat Instagram to a pulp as the yard stick for ridiculous valuation. When do I see an Oatmeal comic on this?

Yammer charges $5-$15 per user per month. if everyone of the corporate users were charged $5 per month its $60 a user per year. How does that compare at all to a company which had no revenue?

The biggest difference is Yammer has a reasonably stable revenue source in its customers. Instagram has 0 paying customers that I'm aware of.

This is going to be interesting; sleep with one eye open, Mr. Ballmer, sleep with one eye open...

Edit: for the downvoters who probably don't "get" the reference, out startup (Fogbeam Labs) are now competing with Microsoft since we're in this same "enterprise 2.0" space as Yammer.

Anyway, Mr. Ballmer... "never mind that noise you heard, it's just the beast under your bed." :-)

And this is why I love HN... Nothing like showing a little support for one of our own. :-)

It's not like we're the scrappy, underdog competitor, building Open Source products that will contribute to the world whether we ever make a dime or not, while Microsoft are the original Evil Empire of Software - monopolistic, profiteering gluttons who will do anything to make a buck.

le sigh it's all right, I still love you guys anyway. :-)

You seem to come across as petulant rather than someone who is challenging an entrenched competitor with innovation or whatever. Less talking, more doing. Just a thought.

You seem to come across as petulant rather than someone who is challenging an entrenched competitor with innovation or whatever.

I'm not sure how "petulant"[1] fits into this, but OK.

Less talking, more doing. Just a thought.

We don't do a lot of talking, is the thing. One offhand comment on HN so far... I have to say, I'm a bit surprised at the downvote frenzy. No Metallica fans here, I suppose. sigh

As for doing, if you find somebody doing more "doing" than we do, mark it down on a calendar. I've coded until my wrists feel like they're about to fall off, put in 100 hour weeks for week after week after week after week after week, flown back and forth from Chicago to RDU dozens of times just to keep in touch with my co-founders, and sacrificed more opportunities to go out with my friends, go on dates, or otherwise have fun, than I can count... to write code, do customer development work, do market research, competitive intelligence, you name it. If we fail, it won't be for lack of "doing," that I can promise.

Geez, I'm not usually so defensive either, but I find your comment amusing given the circumstances.

Anyway, back to the grind...

[1]: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/petulant moved to or showing sudden, impatient irritation, especially over some trifling annoyance

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