Forget Yahoo, Salesforce.com still remains the better fit for Microsoft
Jerry Yang: If Ballmer wants me, first, he must bring me a Shrubbery!
(Credit: Anne Broache/CNET News.com)Give Steve Ballmer credit for trying to bail Jerry Yang out of an impossible position. But he'd do better teaming up with Marc Benioff and Salesforce.com.
If you're a Microsoft shareholder, the good news is that Saturday's love letter to Yahoo's board finally starts the clock ticking. Yahoo's got three weeks to come up with a final yes or no answer--and no, Microsoft says, this is its best and final offer. Hopefully, Yahoo's incredibly deluded board will continue to fancy its prospects and tell Microsoft's negotiators to take a hike. At that point, Microsoft can do much, much better for itself by taking a run at Salesforce.com.
Microsoft is working on CRM Live in a bid to go after Salesforce.com, but its still unclear how its services push will do. In the meantime, Benioff's cleaning up and having a one great time mocking Microsoft's inability to turn "software-plus-services" into a winner. (Check out the recent interview News.com's Dan Farber and I did with Benioff.)
But this is all the usual window-dressing. Microsoft's ready to pay $44 billion and change--and that's still one helluva lot of change--to buy Yahoo. So if Ballmer came up with a serious offer, Benioff and the Salesforce.com board would take it in a heartbeat. The combination would bring together two companies whose similar enterprise DNA would mesh a lot better than would a kludge like "Microhoo." There's been a ton of discussion about the difficulty making a Microsoft-Yahoo pairing work. Do you really believe Yahoo's Greta Garbo act is going to make any post-merger transition smoother?
The Salesforce.com scenario's a lot cleaner. Benioff's company is developing a next-generation platform, similar in some ways to what Microsoft did with Windows except in the cloud. The similarity is in bringing thousands or millions of developers into the tent to build applications that require a subscription or license to the platform. It prints money, and in the case of Salesforce.com takes a lot of the 20th century drudgery out of the development process. Salesforce.com is based on Java and Oracle, but customers don't care whether its .NET or Java as long as it works.
In addition, Microsoft would still have money left over to invest in beefing up its search business. Microsoft's Google obsession shouldn't obscure the fact that there's huge potential revenue within grasp if management can turn its software services into a success.
If Jerry Yang & Co. want to screw this one up, Microsoft should avoid future headaches and simply wish them well.
Charles Cooper has covered technology and business for more than 25 years. Before joining CNET News, he worked at the Associated Press, Computer & Software News, Computer Shopper, PC Week, and ZDNet. E-mail Charlie. 
Even though it is going to kill him, he won't let go of the idea of going into debt for a mediocre company.
"If Jerry Yang & Co. want to screw this one up, Microsoft should avoid future headaches and simply wish them well."
How well will it be for MS that David betted Goliat?
(You can evaluate this in "number of chairs to be thrown by Ballmer")
Yahoo, keep fighting this. Microsoft is a "has been." Microsoft can't do what you did and that is why they want you. "If one cannot build it, buy it." In other words, buying you is their extremely lazy approach to actually making some sort of progress in network applications. Innovators make things happen, they just think buying up the innovators make the innovators of themselves.
Do you own salesforce stock Chuck?
That is the only reason I can think of that you would write this story. It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
listen; if I am interested in the attractive brunette at the local cafe, you wanting to push the fat opera singer at me makes no sense whatsoever. You are certainly not much of a pimp...or a forward thinker Chuck.
Did you need to meet a deadline with this story?
Not very well thought out, or even researched (names are important to get correct) Chuck. I don't blame you, I blame your editor for approving this cobbled piece of garbage of a story.
Sorry, no writers guild award for you.
All MS will have is OSS systems it knows nothing about and some new, very pissed off employees who are rushing for the exits.
Microsoft want's Yahoo's market share in a market where they have not succeeded and where they are falling behind. Furthermore, the enterprise market is very different from the consumer market that Yahoo serves. Microsoft has succeeded in the consumer market where they were the market leader (home PC operating systems), but otherwise they have not done so well (e.g. XBOX). The sales processes, cash flow models, support models, server cost models and just about everything else is very different between Yahoo and Microsoft. If one of them was successful and gaining market share then the acquisition might make sense. However, it looks like both those companies are losing market share to Google in North America and Baidu and others around the world.
Forget Yahoo. Go with Salesforce!
- by crmchampion April 7, 2008 7:24 PM PDT
- blather
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