Marc Benioff: Yammer Should Not Have Sold The Company To Microsoft

Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff said on stage today at Disrupt San Francisco 2012 that Yammer should not have sold to Microsoft and that he passed on buying them due to the conflicts with Chatter — its own activity stream product.

“You can do so much more when you are independent,” Benioff said. “They still have a lot of work to do on their platform.”

He added, “If everything is going fine, then no need to sell now.”

Benioff was on stage with TechCrunch Founder Michael Arrington. He used the chat to say why he did not buy the company:

“I did think about buying Yammer, but we have 150,000 paying customers on Chatter already and it’s redundant.”

Yammer sold to Microsoft earlier this year for $1.26 billion.