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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

#71

Post by GFischer »

pbreit wrote: post #49
csallen wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's nice, it's still a pretty hefty valuation but if they're that profitable it's not as awful as I initially expected.

Microsoft has done some good investments and acquisitions in the past, and also some duds. The jury is still out on Skype.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisition...

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

#72

Post by mindcrime »

pferde wrote: post #66
mindcrime wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure Diaspora has any enterprise specific leanings, although - to be fair - I haven't spent as much time studying Diaspora as I probably should have. OTOH, there is another Open Source (ALv2) "enterprise social networking" project out there, and we're always happy to have other folks get involved. https://github.com/Fogbeam/Quoddy So far we support features like: A "facebook wall" like event stream for variou…

I guess it is not distributed (meaning I can run my own Quoddy server, and talk to users at friend's Quoddy server)?

I guess it is not distributed (meaning I can run my own Quoddy server, and talk to users at friend's Quoddy server)?

Well... there's not exactly a notion of "distributedness" built in. That's on the wishlist (and, in fact, this project sprung out of a much older project that had that as it's core idea) but there is support for receiving and display messages from any other arbitrary system that supports the activitystrea.ms protocol. So modifying Quoddy to emit, as well as consume, activitystrea.ms messages would give you a way to achieve a degree of "distributedness." And that wouldn't be a hard change to make in and of itself.

The trickier part would be how to say "I want to receive updates from remote user $FOO when they come in" since $FOO is probably not a user on your local Quoddy instance. Once we have FOAF support implemented, it would be easier to talk about navigating the remote social graph and connect to non-local users... but a short-term way to achieve that could probably be hacked up.

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

#73

Post by bitsweet »

newobj wrote: post #18

I remember laughing at them when they launched at and won TC50. "Twitter for the enterprise! What a dumb idea." I'm laughing all the way to their bank now.

Same here, I also thought Twitter was originally a dumb idea... now I don't call ideas dumb.

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

#74

Post by va_coder »

jkaljundi wrote: post #59

From actual usage of Yammer, have heard of many companies where it is in use but the user engagement is really low. Can anyone using it comment on any success stories or failures of using Yammer internally? What has worked and what not?

I work at a company that uses Jive (forum software written in Java) and its a grave yard. I'm really surprised that Yammer is so popular.

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

#75

Post by larrywright »

samstave wrote: post #38
mindcrime wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They had previously acquired Powerset, for one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powerset_%28company%29

Powerset had a ton of hype, then they were acquired and then they seemingly died. Never heard anything about them since.

I think that technology was rolled into Bing. I don't think they ever expected that it would be a standalone product offering.

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

#77

Post by gaius »

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…

I would like to see "SpaceX" as a measure. As in, "Microsoft has just acquired Yammer for 1.5 from-scratch space programmes". Just to put the real value of money into perspective.

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

#78

Post by pbreit »

alexscheelmeyer wrote: post #68
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?

I am one who thinks "Yay! Another accelerator to the Microsoft death-spiral" when reading this. I am not sure what data it is you want me to put in my data bank, as I do not buy your premise that getting bought by Microsoft is any kind of validation. Quite the contrary. You can get rich by playing the lottery, just as you can get rich by making a crappy product that you manage to get enough hype around to get sold to…

Just so I'm clear, you're comparing spending 4 years building an extremely successful business communications company to winning the lottery? Bernie Madoff? Casual gaming? Downvote.

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

#79

Post by nivertech »

DrJokepu wrote: post #67

I'm not very familiar with how raising funds works so this is a genuine naive question and I'd appreciate if someone could explain this to me. On their "About Us" page, they say that they've raised $142M in venture funding. How much equity VCs typically get for such an investment? 20%? In that case, the exit of the VC would be around $240M which in not even a 2x profit. Is it possible that the equity owned by the VCs…

I expect investors to have majority of equity in the company now, more like 60% or even more, not 20%.

You can't raise 142M and stay with 80% of the equity.

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

#80

Post by mindcrime »

adventureful wrote: post #39
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.

The Facebook IPO punched a temporary hole in their valuation. I think Microsoft got a modest steal due to that. Yammer has already won their segment. Imagine owning a private corporate social network, spanning the globe, with paying clients. It's an extremely valuable segment.

Yammer has already won their segment.

Depends on how narrowly they define their segment. I've done a ton of customer development interviews with people over the past 8 or 9 months, exploring this whole "enterprise 2.0" space, and I've found that - by and large - most people haven't even heard of Yammer (or Jive, or Broadvision, or Lotus Connections, etc). My perception is that anyone playing in this space isn't even really competing with Yammer (or Jive or whoever) they're competing to convert current non-users of this kind of technology.

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