Analysts at Forrester Research Inc. have some free advice for Bill Gates: make an offer for Siebel Systems Inc. before Oracle Corp. seals the deal. In a "memo to Microsoft," R Wang and his colleagues urge Microsoft Corp.'s techies to get serious in the enterprise applications space by buying Siebel, which is in the midst of being acquired for $5.8 billion by Oracle, pending approval by federal antitrust regulators. And, while Microsoft is often accused of destroying competition in the PC market, its acquisition of the CRM specialist would "inject competition back into the tier one enterprise application market," the analysts argue. There was no immediate word on whether Forrester, which dispatched the memo in an e-mail to journalists, had also sent it to Microsoft execs, much less drawn a response. —Kate Gibson
Go to a PDF version of the memo
Continue reading below
