Microsoft Buys Yammer

Rich Wood blogs about the recent Yammer acquisition over on the Microsoft Blog.  I’ll let Rich tell his own story but here’s my two cents:

1. Rich pegs it about the short term implications.  I don’t think we’ll see anything incorporated beyond any existing integration between Yammer and something like SharePoint
2. This highlights the importance of an activity feed. I’m seeing more and more companies buy off on the idea of a filterable activity feed to help you track and sort the deluge of information.  Yammer excels in that.
3. It will have an impact on tools like Newsgator which run on top of SharePoint but frankly, it’s so far away I don’t think anyone is going to change their buying or implementation plans.
4. Matt Morse, another social guru within Perficient, notes that Yammer runs in the cloud so it may patch a cloud need without necessarily closing the activity stream gap for on premise installations.

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Here’s a little of what Rich has to say.

By now you may have heard the rumor that Microsoft is looking to buy Yammer for a billion dollars.

It’s a pretty shocking thought, but while anything can happen, I’m reserving my real shock until and unless something actually goes down.  Right now, this is just another rumor, nothing more, and a surprising one at that.  I spent the last two years in the Microsoft field, and do you know who worked hard to sell against us in the social space?  Yep… Yammer.  In my neck of the woods, they weren’t very successful at it, though– just persistent.  As far as competitors went, I was always more impressed with Jive’s approach and toolset.

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