5 BURNING QUESTIONS: Microsoft to buy Yammer, says WSJ. Now what?

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Maybe I’m amazed.  According to no less than the Wall Street Journal, Microsoft is in fact acquiring Yammer, Inc.
This begs a few questions for which we’ll anxiously be awaiting answers, then:

1. What, if any, aspects of Yammer’s current offering will be integrated into the next release of Microsoft’s productivity stack?  In other words, how will this affect Office 15 and SharePoint 15 (if at all)?
2. What does Yammer have in the hopper that appeals to Microsoft over and above its own “future state” development efforts?
3. What is the impact on Microsoft’s loyal social partners like NewsGator (2011 Partner of the Year) and Neudesic (You know, the guys who rented Disneyland out for SharePoint Conference 2011)?  Unlike Yammer, these guys never sold against Microsoft.
4. What will the impact be on current Yammer subscribers– both “freemium” and paying customers?  From a freemium perspective, you have to wonder how long you’ve got until sunset– Microsoft has never given away basic social tools before, but maybe that changes now?
5. What is the impact on Microsoft’s online services, especially SharePoint Online?  How long will it take to get Yammer tied into this suite– or perhaps more appropriately, how quickly can we get some social tools into Office 365 Standard (multi-tenant) environments?

I’ll be keeping an eye on how this plays out.  As with anything Microsoft does, it’ll probably take a couple years to gauge the real impacts on everything from strategy to software to customers.  Microsoft has been working hard to brand themselves as a social player (I recently noticed on LinkedIn that former “Productivity” colleagues are now titled as “Collaboration and Social Media” colleagues) and this is another incremental step.