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Bad timing
February 04, 2008
I'm on the distribution lists of various IT research houses. This morning, I was amused to find in my email inbox a roundup of new research from Forrester. One of the highlighted reports is titled "Microsoft Will Make Small Acquisitions: Its Size, Visibility To Antitrust Bodies, And Strategy Rule Out Big Deals." The report was issued on January 31, one day before Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo for $45 billion.
Comments
And I spend the morning explaining why I would love to work for Yahoo! and certainly not Microsoft...
Posted by: Bertil at February 4, 2008 12:45 PM
Yahoo is a small deal.
-t
Posted by: Tom Lord at February 4, 2008 06:15 PM
Give them some credit: Forrester was talking about acquisitions of companies with software revenues. That may be a narrow view, but they were open about it.
Posted by: Heinz at February 4, 2008 06:37 PM
I thought I was the only one who noticed that! Very funny. They did qualify it as a software deal, but what makes a company a software company anymore anyway?
Posted by: David Bressler at February 4, 2008 10:27 PM
As one of the authors of this report, I appreciate the comments of those who noted the scope of that report was focused on the software market. To be more precise, the report was written for the corporate IT buyer, and was focused on Microsoft as a provider of software to that market. The report made a prediction that Microsoft would not be making big ("big" being on the scale of SAP's acquisition of Business Objects, Oracle's purchase of BEA, or IBM's buying Cognos)acquisitions of other enterprise software vendors in the near term. In the market for enterprise software, Yahoo! is simply not a factor, so the Microsoft bid for Yahoo! does not disprove our thesis.
Andrew Bartels, Forrester Research.
Posted by: BlackBart at February 5, 2008 10:32 PM
>> acquisitions of companies with software
>> revenues.
Be honest.They are after their customer bases with the intent of converting their OTS "shrink wrapped" software customers to the software as service model - something that M$ is loath to do. Best regards to Captain Dunsil.
Posted by: Linuxguru1968 at February 6, 2008 10:58 AM
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