Microsoft is going to buy Yammer, a recent Internet company, for $1.2 billion in order to introduce sharing features similar to those of Facebook into its applications of business software. Yammer deals with the creation of private social networks for workers of the same company to be able to keep tabs on their colleagues’ work. It resembles Facebook’s function allowing relatives and pals to see each other’s personal events.
The purchase of Microsoft demonstrates its attempt to adjust to the latest changes in the industry of technology as the demand for Internet services and tools of social networks is constantly growing. This development constitutes a threat to the global largest software maker, Microsoft Corp., because it can reduce its incomes from sales of its various apps designed for PCs and Windows operating system. In 2011, the company paid the largest sum of money in its history, i.e. $8.5 billion, for Skype, an Internet service of video chat. In the middle of June, 2012, Microsoft demonstrated its new tablet PC, Surface, which would probably compete with the iPad of Apple and will be run on the forthcoming Windows 8.
Steve Ballmer, a current chief executive of Microsoft, hopes that sharing tools of Yammer will encourage the company’s applications such as the programs of spreadsheets and word processing to remain essential elements of many people’s work. Google Inc. has already issued similar programs but they are run mainly on the Internet rather than on devices. Microsoft also has financial relations with Facebook as it invested about $240 million in the social networking site in 2007. At present, the company still has a 1.7% stake with a value of almost $840 million.
