Put iPad out of your mind for minute and listen to the following two statistics: According to Microsoft, SharePoint now brings in an adjusted $2 billion in a year, and, the firm claims that “two out of three enterprise workers have SharePoint.”
We could quibble about what constitutes ‘enterprise,’ but the facts are somewhat simple: SharePoint is a simply massive business for Microsoft. From a different perspective, SharePoint brings in nearly double in revenue than what Microsoft paid for social business communications firm Yammer.
The takeaways from this are as simple as you would expect: Microsoft’s massive – and presumably massively popular – SharePoint business is a key element in its larger enterprise package of software that it vends for top dollar. Therefore, disruption to its growth could limit its ability to dominate the lucrative sector as it does in some way. Therefore, Yammer had to be neutralized as a threat, as SharePoint couldn’t risk the effective competition.
And thus Yammer is now Microsoft, and SharePoint continues to grow. Capping that, Microsoft is moving to better integrate Yammer into its packages, perhaps as a way to sell Yammer to smaller firms, and keep SharePoint for those that have larger budgets. Today the firm announced “plans to make Yammer available with Office 365 Enterprise and SharePoint Online.”
Just for fun, at Microsoft’s market capitalization to revenue ratio of 3.22:1 [that is a rough figure, don’t whine about the rouding], SharePoint is worth $6.44 billion.
SharePoint, Lync, Yammer, Office 365, and now Skype are something of a new vanguard for the firm, moving enterprise software both into the social age, and the cloud. So far, it appears to be working.
Top Image Credit: Paul Downey
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