Microsoft Confirms Worst Kept Secret Ever, Buys Yammer $1.2 Billion - Arik Hesseldahl - News - AllThingsD

Microsoft places a major bet on social business

"Yammer can’t have ended up in better hands: A cash-rich owner with time on its hands. For all its vaunted popularity among large companies — you can’t have a conversation about it without running into its well-worn stat that it has five million users at 85 percent of the Fortune 500 — Yammer has a famously difficult time converting its free users to paid users. More often than not, a handful of employees will adopt it, with varying levels of success in integrating it into their workflow. Many just experiment with it and then never take to it.
Those who do like it usually find that the free version is sufficient. By Yammer’s own admission, its conversion rate is about 20 percent. That means that, of those five million users, a mere one million are paid users."

Microsoft Confirms Worst Kept Secret Ever, Buys Yammer $1.2 Billion - Arik Hesseldahl - News - AllThingsD