Microsoft's acquisition of Groove Networks 7 years ago (http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/features/2005/mar05/03-1...) in a very similar space failed to ignite anything. I also rarely ever hear about groove anymore and haven't seen it used in the wild in about 5 years. I like yammer and have used it at the past couple of startups I've been at, but there's a good chance that yammer will be on the same downward path post-acquisition.
Ah, I didn't realize they'd rebranded it, because of course they did. I'm somewhat familiar with sharepoint, but have never used SharePoint Workspace, so I don't know if that's a marginalized utility within the Sharepoint infrastructure or if it's a big piece that really is getting a lot of use.
I wouldn't be surprised if in a year or two, yammer is also rebranded under the SharePoint name as something like SharePoint TeamChat 2013 Enterprise. If that happens, it'll likely drop off my radar as quickly as Groove did.
We used Groove years ago at lockheed and the adoption had to be forced down the throats of our teams because the app was too clunky.
We use Yammer now at work and it works pretty smooth, except there is still far too much activity that happens outside Yammer that reduces its potential value.
This is where I think that there is still a lot of room specifically for Salesforce and potentially linkedin, which could do really well in this space.
Obviously Salesforce has chatter and a range of utilities that are already in this space - but still a lot room to build some amazing tools.
I lived in three countries in europe, and I've met people working on sharepoint in all three, so add another anecdotical evidence on this side of the pond too.
I suspect that ghurlman means that Microsoft SharePoint Workspace product (based on Groove) isn't as popular as the very succesful SharePoint server - I don't think the latter has much Groove-derived technology in it (although I could well be wrong).
Sharepoint may be an atrocity against good software, but it is heavily used in the industry. You would cry if you knew how much money MS makes off of it.
Can you qualify your statement: "Sharepoint may be an atrocity against good software"?
The product has actually improved a lot since the earlier versions that people usually associate their negative opinion of it with; and i've actually been seeing a lot more success stories than horror stories as of late with SharePoint 2010 deployments.
It's true that Sharepoint 2010 is better than earlier versions. With this version the whole edit-file-in-sharepoint-using-word scenario works probably 95% of the time. That's a huge step forward over earlier versions.
Of course, since the edit-file-in-sharepoint-using-word scenario is pretty much the only thing Sharepoint can do that still leaves it in the category of an atrocity against good software.
(Yes, I realize that Sharepoint technically can do other things: wikis etc. If you've ever used any other good product in the same space you'll find the Sharepoint implementations laughable though).
Let me put it this way. I've spent time at Amazon and at MS. Amazon's solution is a federation of wikis that is globally searchable and a few custom tools which individually have probably had about 2 or 3 developer-weeks of effort put into them. And it's easily a million times better than sharepoint.
Well, obviously it's a subjective opinion. I'll just say that my idea of good collaborative software is something a bit different than a pile of word docs hooked up to a web front-end and some other pages editable through a wysiwyg control that makes Frontpage 2000 look like a champ. But maybe that's just me. Obviously a lot of people find it useful. But to me I think it succeeds more due to the fact that it's an MS product and the extreme lack of robust competition in that space than it's due to any substantive positive qualities of sharepoint itself.
