Microsoft Should Acquire SAP, Not Yahoo 188
Reservoir Hill writes "Randall Stross has an insightful article in the NY Times that says that if Microsoft thinks this is the right time to try a major acquisition on a scale it has never tried before, it should pursue not Yahoo but SAP, another major player in business software, thus merging Microsoft's strength with that of another. This is more likely to produce a happy outcome than yoking two ailing businesses, Yahoo's and Microsoft's own online offerings, and hoping for a miracle. Stross points to Oracle as a company whose acquisition strategy has picked up key products and customers while avoiding venturing too far from its core business, or overpaying. Stross recommends that Microsoft acquire SAP and leave it alone as an autonomous division — which would avoid a culture-clash integration fiasco. Besides, large enterprise customers are arguably the best customers a software company can have. A few dozen well-paying Fortune 500 customers may actually be more valuable than tens of millions of Web e-mail 'customers' who pay nothing for the service and whose attention is not highly valued by online advertisers."
Wrong POV. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not. Microsoft's problem is Google. Google are eating them in the only arena where you can make serious money on the web (ad brokerage) and doing things to threaten MS's monopoly elsewhere (Google Apps, Photoshop on linux, Webmail, etc)
The Yahoo purchase might not be a solution to this problem, but a SAP purchase sure as hell won't be.
(and frankly, I can't imagine SAP's websphere/java using userbase being enthused with the next SAP release being C# only)
Megamonopoly (Score:1, Interesting)
Really, Microsoft's problem is that it's too big and doesn't do anything interesting on its own. Helping it buy some other huge corp is going in exactly the wrong direction. Microsoft should be spitting up, not borging yet another corp out of business.
Not quite correct (Score:5, Interesting)
MS has failed dismally with its various acquisitions, with very few exceptions. MS core money makers are OS and Office. They seem to be putting very little energy into Vista and fixing its problems, doing something which would make their core business sound. In fact it looks like they've just cut these adrift.
If Google had not emerged as the new obsession, they'd still be aiming for Apple with knock-off interfaces, Zune etc.
This is reaaly the MS tradgedy: instead of being customer focussed and delivering new exciting products and technologies (something such an organisation should be able to do with their huge resources), they have become competition focussed.
Re:Wrong POV. (Score:5, Interesting)
I know you're just being funny, but you're right that they probably wouldn't bother coming up with their own proprietary OS. I mean, they already use Linux internally anyway: that plus a lot of their own code is one of their strengths.
Now, what would cause problems for Microsoft would be a Google distro marketed to the Dells and HPs and Lenovos of the world, and also on store shelves. Google has both the brand recognition and the in-house technical skill to pull that off, and it's probably that which keeps Ballmer awake at night. Hell, much of the overseas market would jump on a Google OS in a heartbeat: Microsoft is not well-liked in many parts of the world. I kinda hope they do it, just to shake up Redmond a little.
Worse yet for Microsoft, if such a Linux distro just happened to integrate phenomenally well with Google's online services and Android offering
MS already has a Bussiness Application. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Wrong POV. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Wrong POV. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Wrong POV. (Score:4, Interesting)
Google has made a lot of money from ad sales and web search. That's one big fat market segment, without a doubt. But no one uses google for comporate data processing. They do, however (and for better or worse), use SAP. In the services sector, which Yahoo and Google aren't in, SAP is big. That's not to say that they're brilliant but they do make money and are a 'best of breed' (doesn't speak well of the breed, but that's another post).
Yahoo is real estate. SAP is a running, producing engine. I think SAP is a better idea. Leave Yahoo alone, I'd say to Microsoft. Stick with what you do best: tying up clientele with proprietary, always-needs-integration stuff.
Re:Not quite correct (Score:4, Interesting)
As someone pointed out, lack of customer focus is not a new thing for Microsoft. They have always been competitor focused. I don't think Microsoft can change this, it's too core to what their company is all about. Microsoft is always really unhappy when anybody talks about someone else more than them. They want to be 'it' for some rather amorphous domain of computer oriented mindshare.
Re:Wrong POV. (Score:3, Interesting)
Yahoo plus Microsoft clout potentially creates a Pepsi to Google's Coke in the search area. All those advertising dollars that are fleeing from network TV have two places to go, not just one.
Yahoo has been trying to get on equal terms by itself, Microsoft has been spending squillions to buy up the best brains they can in the area but they don't have the business base to work from.
The bigger concern for the industry though should be where Mr Softy and The Goo go next. Microsoft can buy SAP and Yahoo, its not either/or. Google is likely to buy stuff as well. The same math works for them.
Re:Oh, the humanity. (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh, and I can promise you this, if one day in the future I open my SAPGui and that damn paperclip pops up to ask "I see you are trying to heirarchy to organize your material management, can I help?", I will drive to Redwood and burn it to the ground. Not just MS, the whole city.
Microsoft's real plan: (Score:3, Interesting)
2) Buy back Microsoft stock on the (relatively) cheap
3) Profit!
Well, OK, the math isn't all that impressive, but slowly taking the company private through stock buybacks is considerably more sane than most other suggestions of what to do with their cash horde. If you ignore the huge chunks of stock controlled by Gates and a few other early owners it looks more plausible. Effectively going private over time by getting rid of the public stockholders would give Microsoft the ability to take more risks. Paying dividends to employee-owners is a much better model than handing out stock options now that the dot bomb insanity has wound down. (It's late, hopefully that's coherent...)
Re:No, whinney is right on the point and so is MS (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft has been, for a lot of its history, very customer focused. They would not be able to achieve their current market position without being customer focused. It wasn't until they have secured their monopoly on Windows through OEM deals that they became the evil company they are today.
I can remember a couple brilliant examples where they outsmarted their competition by paying attention to what the market really wanted:
- Windows for Workgroups: They realized people did not want file and servers - they wanted to share files and printers and do e-mail. WfW, for all its failures, was a bright example of simplicity. With this, they more or less took the low-end of the NetWare business from Novell. This foothold allowed them to claim the rest of NetWare's share with NT.
- Visual Basic: People wanted an easy to use language to develop for Windows. The C/C++ tools they had were hideously expensive and painful to use (they more or less still are - C++ on Windows helps create the ugliest C++ I ever saw). VB surpassed all other development environments for Windows for flexibility, ease of use and productivity. It was the Ruby on Rails of its time. Sadly, it pretty much caused massive brain damage to a generation of programmers that never quite recovered.
Windows 3: People wanted GUIs but couldn't care less about bulletproof multitasking. OS/2 was great, but Windows 3 hit the sweet spot. 3.11 hit it even better with its TrueType rendering.
Windows 95: The last major overhaul of their consumer OS. Gave a nice (for the time) and easy to use GUI overhaul to the tired Windows 3 desktop. Thanks to the problems with the 68K to PPC transition, it was even stable compared to Macs - a first for MS.
Re:Wrong POV. (Score:4, Interesting)
I think this is the largest reason why Microsoft is doomed to fail if they don't get their act together. They require a massive corporate lockin with all of their products, and there is a much smaller pool of startups doing creative things with
Even yahoo has acquired many companies that operate outside of the "Microsoft bubble". Microsoft would stumble in a huge way if they tried converting all of yahoo's acquisitions into pure
Advice to microsoft:
* Learn to play nice with standards that already exist instead of wasting money creating your own.
* Stop trying to sell software, move to a pure subscription model.
* Make sure
* Make sure linux and OSX machines can integrate well into Microsoft environments.
* If you actually sit down and talk with apple, yahoo, google, sun, etc, I am sure they would be perfectly willing to cut you in to how they are revolutionizing information. You need to learn your place and stop pretending like you can take them all on at once. Your biggest weakness is that you do not know how to operate in your own market any more.
If Microsoft does all of those things, they have a chance of surviving the next 10 years. I really want to see them succeed because I love the progress Microsoft research is making in the fields of virtualization and compiler theory. Stuff coming out of Microsoft research is pretty cool, but their marketing department is killing them.
Re:Wrong POV. (Score:4, Interesting)
with SAP Microsoft will gain a product lineup with large customers that pay for service, can't migrate easily and SAP's product will have synergies with Microsoft's other products where they can sell more products to a customer.
But I'm of the opinion that Microsoft can (and does, in fact, have their eyes on) get most of the benefit there without having to buy SAP to do it.
I don't see SAP alone as being a major growth product at this point in time. It's aimed at fairly massive corporations, and I think by this point, most of the existing companies that see a need for something like SAP have already implemented one.
I think the synergy potential between existing SAP systems and Office/.NET/Windows Workflow/BizTalk/etc. is enormous. Company A has SAP implemented already? Well, maybe they'd like an application that sits in Outlook and automatically grabs order e-mails from customers and pre-fills most of the data in their SAP order entry forms and auto-archives the e-mails sorted by customer across all salespeople in some searchable central repository, making their salespeople that much more efficient and eliminating a lot of operator error.
On the surface, that doesn't make Microsoft a lot of money, but it ensures that all the people at that company definitely need Office (and not just something that can work with the same file formats, not that anyone's rushing to get away from Office at the moment), need a Windows server, need consultants with MS-tech expertise to set it up, etc. It gets people thinking of MS as a business solutions company and not just an OS/Office company, which it isn't to a lot of people yet.
It doesn't take a lot in the way of SAP/MS cooperation to make the SAP interface part of this easy, and my understanding from people that have worked on projects in this mold is that it's already there.
Google Apps Rule for Group Editing (Score:3, Interesting)
If you have a group of people who need to work on a simple spreadsheet together to collect data (e.g. mailing addresses), a Google spreadsheet is perfect. Reasonably easy to learn, and excellent maintainability.
For some tasks, online document editors are going to dominate. For a shrinking portion of tasks, the desktop software will rule. Just like the old days, web mail did not exist. Today, for many (most?) people I would only recommend web mail.
Not everyone is a Slashdot level computer user...
Re:Wrong POV. (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't know, if Apple can do it, I think Google can too. Maybe Google should just acquire Canonical and work from there though? They already employ Andrew Morton I believe.
Re:Wrong POV. (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, I am posting this from Ubuntu, and I'll admit they've come a long way in the past few releases - but there are still some major issues that you wouldn't see with a normal retail O/S:
(these are on gutsy, fresh install)
1. The search function doesn't work (yes there are other functions to search, but the main search button on every window.. that one doesn't work, at all.)
2. The network manager freezes up my computer when I switch saved networks, or from one wireless network to another (this happens maybe 20% of the time?)
3. The power functions (suspend/hibernate, etc) do not work.
4. The splash screen incorrectly detected my resolution and caused boots to take literally 5 minutes.
This is on a Dell Inspiron 9300, fairly standard laptop hardware.
#2 I can write off as a bug, although I don't see any good reason that my network manager should make my mouse and keyboard stop working (music/video etc keeps playing - but caps lock and any other key/mouse button stops working)
#1,3, & 4 would be unacceptable for a commercial OS going through normal quality control. I think the main problem is that there are so many people working on disparate parts that one fix or feature over here inadvertently breaks something over there.
As far as the support goes - I've posted on http://ubuntuforums.org/ [ubuntuforums.org] (ubuntu's official forums) 3-4 times on issues I can't find previous answers to, and never receive any response. Since I read other fairly helpful responses to others I assume that the main problem is there aren't enough knowledgeable people to assess the complicated problems I've run into - which is where something like corporate tech support would help - they would escalate your issue till you got an answer.
All in all I'm fairly happy with Ubuntu, but some of the problems I've run into, and fixes I had to apply manually would be a deal breaker for a novice user.
P.S. I have everything except the network manager issue fixed myself
Re:Google Apps Rule for Group Editing (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Google Apps Rule for Group Editing (Score:3, Interesting)
Group papers suck in desktop software, but that's all we had when I was going through university.
If I was doing something similar today, all the rough text editing or spreadsheet work would be done online, maybe with Google, maybe with another web site. If it mattered, the final "pretty" edits and formatting could be done in something offline. But for many things, I don't think there would be a need. Google Docs can handle most basic document editing just fine.
Re:Wrong POV. (Score:3, Interesting)
One of Microsoft's problems is Google. Their other problem is Oracle. Now do you see where SAP fits in? They're about the only major enterprise software company that Oracle still hasn't bought.
Re:Wrong POV. (Score:3, Interesting)
In one fell swoop, by buying Adobe Microsoft can guarantee the success of several of their products, such as Silverlight, which Microsoft apparently sees as very important for its future. This would be done by somehow 'unifying' Silverlight with Adobe's Flash and AIR. And by 'unifying' I mean killing off Flash, but not immediately; the trick would be to ensure a stable 'upgrade' path to Silverlight. Ditto Microsoft's XPS could defeat PDF. More speculatively, OOXML could be integrated in various ways in Adobe products. As another benefit, Microsoft can silently kill off development of Flash for Linux, or at least make it buggy and out of date. Ditto AIR.
Really, this would be a win-win-win situation for Microsoft. Adobe is the perfect acquisition. The only possible hitch is that this would clearly be carefully looked at by market regulators. I guess that's why this hasn't occurred yet?