In what was possibly the worlds worst kept secret over the last couple of weeks, MS just announced its intent to acquire Yammer:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/Press/2012/Jun12/06-25MSYammerPR.aspx

This is really nice to see Microsoft making such a power play for the Enterprise Social computing space.  At $1.2 billion that is one big big play.

Yammer is purely based in the cloud which won’t suit everyone however.  Some customers simply cant use cloud hosted software right now for legal or regulatory reasons or are simply not ready or willing to move to the cloud etc… 

But this is certainly a nice move by MS to shore up its standing in the cloud and enterprise social computing space IMHO.  SharePoint initially took the lead way back offering things like My Sites, but soon after lost the lead and has been relying on 3rd party software to bring its offering up to par.  Yammer solves that. More importantly Yammer means MS doesn’t need to sell another product as part of a SharePoint sale.  Its all on the MS docket and can be given away if needed.

Like I said above, there will be a need for on-prem software to do this stuff for the foreseeable future.  So I wouldn’t expect people to leap blindly into Yammer en masse just yet.  But it does signal where the future investment of the platform is going from an MS perspective.

I have always wondered when/if Facebook would create an instant on Enterprise version of Facebook.  It would be pretty easy for them to do given they have all the bits they need and people would instantly get it.  Kind of like flipping the multi-tenancy switch in SharePoint (that’s for you @harbars).

Times are a changin…