General Consultant Discussion

This may eventually provide opportunities to assist customers - provided Yammer becomes a freebie or much lower in cost (which I'm going to bet over time it might) .

funny you should post this. I just got an invite to join our Yammer internal community from one of my colleagues this morning.

Why is it better or worse than Socialcast for customers?

There may be more opportunity if Microsoft rolls Yammer into Office which I think they will do to make it even harder to get away from ""buying the stack"".

We're also using MS Lync internally. That is pretty useful.

So, this begs the question, ""Is there another 1999-style tech bubble in the works?"" Here's one analyst's view: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57441887-93/how-facebooks-zucked-up-ipo-just-killed-the-tech-bubble/ It's a really interesting read.

$1.2 BILLION - I wonder what the ROI will be on that?

I think the $1.2 billion is easier to justify than the $1 billion that Facebook spent on Instagram which is essentially fancy picture sharing. The world is rapidly changing. The concept of physical offices is fading quickly for many companies. Yammer (and similar) has the strong likelihood of further enabling remote teams. Plus the integration with Microsoft products is going to make it very difficult to get rid of one if the whole team starts using Yammer. Of course this pre-supposes that Google and other competitors don't come up with something more open.

The question is, how much revenue does yammer generate and how much time would it take merely to pay back the 1.2 billion before breakeven taking into account the time value of money. I guess I'm old fashioned in that I think about ROI when thinking how a company should be priced.