Why Microsoft's $1.2bn Yammer deal makes sense
Peter Petrella, creative director at Gyro, believes Microsoft's new $1.2bn baby Yammer could revolutionise the way we all work.
Peter Petrella
The summer of spending looks to be continuing, with Microsoft’s much-anticipated acquisition of Yammer. The deal was reported as imminent weeks ago, so it’s not much of a surprise. The real surprise is that, in a rare occurrence, it seems that everyone (including myself) is in agreement that this deal was win-win for everyone involved.
Being an enterprise social media tool, it’s not got the glitz of an Instagram, and as such it’s been relatively under the radar for all but those in B2B tech. But Yammer could very well revolutionise the way that all of us work, in the marketing industry and beyond. Over eighty per cent of Fortune 500 companies are reportedly using Yammer already.
Social and B2B are usually billed as an awkward couple, but it’s the networking aspect that is most important here. Until now, Microsoft has been slow to react to the social boom, with many of its competitors already having added social aspects to their enterprise solutions (Oracle, IBM and Salesforce have all done so). Its Sharepoint product does have some form of social elements, but predates even Facebook and is much maligned for often being more of a hindrance than a help.
Yammer on the flipside, gets a $1.2 billion vote of confidence from the market leader in Microsoft, whilst also avoiding an IPO, which has become much less desirable since the Facebook debacle. Had another company stepped in, perhaps we would have seen a few more raised eyebrows. It does seem a perfect fit however, as Microsoft looks to transition fully to the Cloud with Office 365 and Yammer should integrate well.
With Facebook/Twitter etc such an integral part of workers lives now, it makes complete sense to bring in an adapted internal social tool, in order to facilitate collaboration and fast, global communication. It’s an incredibly interesting proposition to think of an internal network, linked to fifty other offices, with the ability to quickly access and share files, all integrated into Word/Excel/Powerpoint – and that’s before we add the prospect of Skype into the mix.
It also has some intriguing consequences for e-mail. Should we continue to move forward towards enterprise networks, as it seems inevitable, e-mail will surely adapt to a model where real-time conversation is enabled. Gone will be the times of sitting on an e-mail for a week!
At this point, much of this is speculation and there are still a lot of questions to be answered. External social networks are optional, but how will employees feel about an internal version that’s ‘forced’ upon them? We also do not know exactly how Microsoft plans to use Yammer alongside its current array of B2B products and offerings.
However, despite this the acquisition has seemingly given a real legitimacy to enterprise social networks. No doubt a delight for WPP’s Sir Martin Sorrell and his vision of horizontality!