Microsoft’s acquisition of the enterprise social network Yammer may be bad news for MBA students.
"Generally speaking, there is nothing more convenient than a one-stop shop for a customer," he adds. "Microsoft has just added another product to its shelves that a customer will now no longer need to look elsewhere for."
But some MBA students, such as Jamie DeMaria, a second-year student at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill, say that Yammer isn't part of their academic or professional lives—and that's not necessarily something that is about to change.
Both UNC's online MBA program and his employer have their own internal communications platforms, says DeMaria, the vice president of education marketing and strategy at Medscape, which is part of the company WebMD, in Baltimore.
[Read about how to gain an MBA admissions advantage with social media.]
"What it came down to is, really, we have so many systems that we use that at the end of the day, we didn't really jump into [Yammer] whole hog, because it was another user name and password to remember [and] another system you had to have up and running on your computer, and we had some tools internally that we turned to instead," he says. "If Microsoft would beef [Yammer] up and insert it into the Office suite, people may be more apt to use it."
Asked if the $1.2 billion price tag that Microsoft paid for Yammer should lead MBA students and businessmen to take the network more seriously, DeMaria says it all boils down to how efficient Yammer is. "My team says it's not convenient," he says. "[Even] if they were to pay $10 billion for it, it's not convenient."
Searching for a business school? Get our complete rankings of Best Business Schools.
Reader Comments (