Microsoft may buy Yammer for $1.2 billion

Microsoft, in an attempt to boost the services of its Office software might buy business social networking site, Yammer. According to the Wall Street Journal, Yammer has agreed to sell itself to Microsoft for $1.2 billion. Launched in 2008, Yammer essentially sets up private social networks within corporate offices. A part of its services, as a social network also include internal file sharing and communications service. While Yammer is in no way a real threat to Microsoft (like perhaps Instagram may have been to Facebook), it connects to several Microsoft programs, like Outlook and SharePoint. Yammer, can of course lend its services over to Microsoft to make a more complete Office package. The acquisition, however, is not confirmed and neither Microsoft representatives, nor Yammer reps have made any comments on the matter.

Could Yammer enter the Microsoft campus?

Yammer has been called the Facebook of companies in a way and has been used by many startups as well as bigger businesses. According to CNET, more than 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies use Yammer. The social network themselves have said that their services have been used by 2,00,000 companies around the world.  The rumours of this acquisition started popping up yesterday when many people in Yammer’s San Francisco headquarters were overheard discussing the acquisition. A woman named Sarah Taylor also tweeted that she heard people talking about the potential acquisition at a coffee shop very close to the Yammer offices.

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Microsoft already has another social network, So.cl (pronounced ‘Social’) based on the Bing API, which serves more as an information sharing tool. If the deal does go through, Yammer would be the second company that Microsoft would buy, effectively preventing it to go to an IPO. The first was Skype, which Microsoft acquired in the October of last year. The sale price on that deal was a whopping $8.5 billion. The deal, while it was still in progress, faced some hiccups when it came to receiving approval from the European Union, despite being approved by the Federal Trade Commission in the United States. However, the deal was finally approved by the EU and Microsoft could now attract more users to their Office and Windows software which they believed Skype would help them accomplish. Will Yammer supplement Microsoft’s services well?