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Yammer agrees to Microsoft's $1 billion acquisition offer

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Re: Yammer agrees to Microsoft's $1 billion acquisition offer

#41

Post by makecheck »

_pius wrote: post #37
makecheck wrote: post #23

"Sledgehammer spending" really bugs me. It says "we didn't exercise any brain cells to figure out what our purchase is actually worth, we're just throwing money at the wall because we think we can". Investors should scream at stuff like this. How many things could millions of extra dollars buy? For one thing, maybe they could have acquired 4 or 5 additional companies, patents or other IP. If there was any chance that…

Investors should scream at stuff like this. There may be a time when they're completely incapable of making a key future acquisition because they overspent on crap like this. This feels a bit presumptuous to me. Beyond playing into sticker shock, you haven't provided any evidence that they overspent or neglected to investigate other options.

A "nice round figure" is suspicious. Shouldn't a well-researched investment cost an amount that sounds well-researched (i.e. a more precise figure and not something that seems rounded up to the nearest billion)?

How about some brief brainstorming on what else they might have done...

If I look at the rest of the company: shouldn't Microsoft be more interested in, say, shipping Windows 8 sooner and with more features? They could pay engineers $200,000 a year (a very nice salary) and contract FIVE THOUSAND of them for a single year with that billion dollars. I'm not saying that would be any more sane of an investment, but I can imagine quite a bit that 5,000 engineers could do: more work on robustness, more bundled applications, more hardware supported, more optimizations...tons and tons of good stuff. Heck, they could do all of that if they hired just 500 engineers and kept them for 10 years, instead of 5,000 contractors for a year. The scale of any billion-dollar investment is insane in those terms.

(This is an example breakdown only. Pick whatever breakdown you like if you don't think this is realistic. The point is, money goes a long way. Companies should take extra time to see if there isn't a better place to spend a few million.)

Re: Yammer agrees to Microsoft's $1 billion acquisition offer

#42

Post by harryh »

theli0nheart wrote: post #6

Here's the full text of the article: Business-software company Yammer Inc. has agreed to sell itself to Microsoft Corp. for more than $1 billion, according to a person familiar [with] the matter. It is unclear when the acquisition will be completed and announced, this person said. A Microsoft spokesman declined to comment. Representatives for San Francisco-based Yammer didn't immediately respond to requests for comme…

They've since updated the article to indicate a 1.2B purchase price.

Re: Yammer agrees to Microsoft's $1 billion acquisition offer

#44

Post by csallen »

pbreit wrote: post #30
makecheck wrote: post #23

"Sledgehammer spending" really bugs me. It says "we didn't exercise any brain cells to figure out what our purchase is actually worth, we're just throwing money at the wall because we think we can". Investors should scream at stuff like this. How many things could millions of extra dollars buy? For one thing, maybe they could have acquired 4 or 5 additional companies, patents or other IP. If there was any chance that…

$1b is a steal for Yammer. I'm surprised Yammer would take that right now considering it's current valuation and how bright its prospects are. It has one of the most efficient B2B customer acquisition schemes. Even with the culture mis-match, I suspect this will be a good acquisition for MSFT.

Do you have reliable information on Yammer's success? User numbers, revenue, etc.

Re: Yammer agrees to Microsoft's $1 billion acquisition offer

#46

Post by shangrila »

pbreit wrote: post #31
shangrila wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was at a company a few years ago where the designers and execs were all about using Yammer internally, and I thought it was a joke. A billion dollar joke, turns out.

For the people who "thought it was a joke" have you (or will you) put this data point into your data bank so as to improve your future thinking?

Heh, I suppose so. Thing is, I still feel like my initial assessment was right. It was a very poor fit the company I was at, not to mention it was a rather immature service at the time -- it felt like a half-baked Twitter clone and it made for a poor replacement for chat/email, especially in a small company. Today it seems like an almost completely different toolset with a lot more features. Looking at it now I think it could be useful, but until this story came out I hadn't thought about the service since that time more than 3 years ago.

The important takeaway I get from this is that they kept trying and managed to improve and deliver a service that actually works for their target market. If it had stayed like it was I don't think it would have gone anywhere. Hats off to them for pushing through and executing well!

Re: Yammer agrees to Microsoft's $1 billion acquisition offer

#47

Post by jmspring »

statictype wrote: post #2

Is this the first not-small web software company that Microsoft has acquired? I wonder if they're going to eventually convert all the Java and Scala to C# and F#

Seems a pretty naive statement. Especially for someone who has been around HN long enough...

Just this week Microsoft has updated their Azure tools with additional NodeJS support, Python and PHP support.

I know many Java developers that actually thing C# is a better language. Personally, it depends on the platform and tools you want to use. I've written anything from JS to Java to C++ to C# to Erlang to PHP to Python in the last year. I don't care about such things...best tool for the particular job.

But, what do I know...

Re: Yammer agrees to Microsoft's $1 billion acquisition offer

#48

Post by planetguy »

makecheck wrote: post #41
_pius wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Investors should scream at stuff like this. There may be a time when they're completely incapable of making a key future acquisition because they overspent on crap like this. This feels a bit presumptuous to me. Beyond playing into sticker shock, you haven't provided any evidence that they overspent or neglected to investigate other options.

A "nice round figure" is suspicious. Shouldn't a well-researched investment cost an amount that sounds well-researched (i.e. a more precise figure and not something that seems rounded up to the nearest billion)? How about some brief brainstorming on what else they might have done... If I look at the rest of the company: shouldn't Microsoft be more interested in, say, shipping Windows 8 sooner and with more features?…

shouldn't Microsoft be more interested in, say, shipping Windows 8 sooner and with more features? They could pay engineers $200,000 a year (a very nice salary) and contract FIVE THOUSAND of them for a single year with that billion dollars

Something something Mythical Man Month something something

Re: Yammer agrees to Microsoft's $1 billion acquisition offer

#49

Post by pbreit »

csallen wrote: post #44
pbreit wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$1b is a steal for Yammer. I'm surprised Yammer would take that right now considering it's current valuation and how bright its prospects are. It has one of the most efficient B2B customer acquisition schemes. Even with the culture mis-match, I suspect this will be a good acquisition for MSFT.

Do you have reliable information on Yammer's success? User numbers, revenue, etc.

http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/yammer-accelerates-m...

Guesses: 6 million users, 1 million paid, 2012 revs between $60-100m.

Re: Yammer agrees to Microsoft's $1 billion acquisition offer

#50

Post by pbreit »

shangrila wrote: post #46
pbreit wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the people who "thought it was a joke" have you (or will you) put this data point into your data bank so as to improve your future thinking?

Heh, I suppose so. Thing is, I still feel like my initial assessment was right. It was a very poor fit the company I was at, not to mention it was a rather immature service at the time -- it felt like a half-baked Twitter clone and it made for a poor replacement for chat/email, especially in a small company. Today it seems like an almost completely different toolset with a lot more features. Looking at it now I think…

It came flying out of the gates, was always more like Facebook than Twitter and is targeted at pretty much all companies (I've worked at a 6 person company that loves it, a company that went from 10 to 100 employees that loves it and a company with 10s of 1000s of employees that loves it).
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