
Yammer is TC50 Winner - This is a Joke? Right? - sant0sk1
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/yammer_tc50_winner.php
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colinplamondon
I have no idea why everyone is bitching about Yammer- it's great!

We're using it to push out all the status stuff, random ideas for down the
line, links, and deploy info. If Twitter allowed private networks, tagging,
and threaded conversations we'd use Twitter. But, unfortunately, Twitter
missed the boat and has failed to move forward in this area, leaving an
opening for Yammer.

And guess what? They executed brilliantly! Good for them.

Now, to be fair, we're very decentralized being in Seattle, Nashville, and
Budapest, so this is pretty much ideal for us. Yammer for general 'here's what
I'm up to' stuff, IM and Skype for longer conversation, and email inbetween.

I like the example from Yammer's presentation- 75% of emails you would have no
problem having other people see. Hell, it'd be a great resource- yet, emails
are not easily seen by people outside of the original recipients (the
founders, for a startup).

With Yammer you can just publish the 75%, which are then sent out to everyone
now and in the future. Someone six months down the line can look up
#excelgeekery and see how our financial model has evolved, or check out
#design to see the design progression. It becomes a training tool, a way for
getting new hires into the flow of things, and a resource for everyone
involved.

How exactly is this a bad thing? It's a win for everyone involved!

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furiouslol
You practically said everything on my mind. Yammer is a better version of
Twitter. Built-in tags, threaded view. It's just really well-done.

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pxlpshr
There's a lot of hate being thrown Yammer's way because it's a twitter-clone,
but I thought Yammer was brilliantly executed with additional layers of their
own innovation. They have what Twitter does not: a very viable subscription
model. Could be a nice acquisition for LinkedIn if you ask me.

I do agree though with the general consensus that it should not have been the
winner. I thought OtherInbox was leaps and bounds more innovative.

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greenagain
But everyone understands that TechCrunch is a joke, right?

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hooande
Yammer: Coming soon to a corporate domain blacklist near you

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humanlever
The same day people where I work started sharing invites to the service it was
escalated up the ladder as a risk.

That's not to say Yammer's a bad idea. Just a poorly executed one. A better
business model would have been to whitelabel a script or produce an appliance
that companies could run on their own. Both would sell.

~~~
froo
I agree that a script that could be run internally would be a much better idea
but there are already twitter clone scripts available on the market.

I think it could be interesting to see some sort of quick asynchronous
communication tool that was a part of a project management tool like FogBugz
or Basecamp but was integrated with your account instead of being standalone.

What does everyone else think?

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wheels
Well, if IT departments do decide to block it it shouldn't be too hard -- all
they'd have to do is to filter out the confirmation mails on the corporate
spam filter. Those have to being sent since the system is keyed on where your
email address is.

The question is if IT departments would respond fast enough for there to not
be a pile of data sitting around when they discover it.

Though, as I've mentioned previously, I actually like the idea. Having
something like this at the last company I worked for would have saved product
managers from the various projects I was working on from having to come around
to see what was on my schedule for the next day or two or when I could get
around to that something-or-another issue. Granted, I didn't sift through the
rest of the TC50 companies, so I don't know how they stack up to the
competition.

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jasonbentley
Finally. I got an invitation at work for this the other day, I signed on, and
was like, really? This won the Palme D'Arrington? It's sloppy, has SMS
messages that sound like Yoda, and doesn't seem to interoperate with anything.

Does anyone else feel that TechCrunch's credibility has taken massive hits in
2008?

~~~
shiranaihito
Someone does:

[http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/05/never-hate-only-
eve...](http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/05/never-hate-only-ever-
destroy.html)

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markbao
[http://weblog.markbao.com/2008/how-i-built-a-webapp-
in-18-ho...](http://weblog.markbao.com/2008/how-i-built-a-webapp-in-18-hours-
for-699/)

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johnrob
Make something people want. Either people want it or they don't, but I say
judge a startup by that and not just technical innovation.

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sabat
Make something people need. That beats "make something people want" any day of
the week. Apologies to PG, but it should be "need". Want is transient; need
isn't.

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hooande
It's all fun and games to tell other people to make something targeted at
"customers with their hair on fire", but in reality most people's basic needs
are met. Are there any "needs" that you have that aren't being satisfied right
now? In many cases it's best to make something people want first and get them
so used to using it that they really NEED it.

As an example, did anyone really _need_ email before it became ubiquitous? Or
was it something that a few people wanted that became an absolute need after
it achieved mass adoption?

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sabat
OK, point taken; I need a better word than 'need'. How about "Make something
people could really use?" I think this is just all about semantics, really. PG
probably means the same thing I do. It's just that "want" evokes javascript
solitaire games with emergency fake-spreadheet Boss Buttons. And often, people
don't know what they want until you tell them. :-)

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MicahWedemeyer
Waiting for the first Yammer lawsuit due to corporate data being leaked...

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fallentimes
good luck with corporate adoption considering yammer is indian slang for penis

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froo
Out of interest where did you see that?

I thought this might be an oversight, so I did a quick Google search using
variations of "Yammer", "India", "penis", and apart from your comment could
not find anything in the first 5 pages of results for any permutation.

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ashu
certainly, it has got nothing to do with "India". perhaps, "native indian"

~~~
froo
I wouldn't have thought so, after my post I did some (I'll admit not as
extensive) searches for other potential variations using phrases like "slang",
"indian", "yamma", "yama" and even did permutations in within quotes to see if
it would yield anything.

The only thing that was even mildly related to India is "Yama" but he's a
hindu deity of death, nothing to do with genitalia.

Yammer is an english slang word for "to speak incessantly about nothing" which
pretty much sums up twitter.

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trevorturk
I think Yammer is hilarious. The thing is, I don't think they're trying to be
funny.

Twitter:

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and
stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple
question: What are you doing?

Yammer:

Yammer is a tool for making companies and organizations more productive
through the exchange of short frequent answers to one simple question: “What
are you working on?”

Now, my latest pet project...

h8ter:

h8ter is a service for malcontents, hostiles and haters to communicate and
stay hateful through the exchange of quick, malicious answers to one simple
question: What do you hate?

<http://h8ter.org/>

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thorax
I like Yammer, mainly because we'll also be using some of their techniques
ourselves. It's also pretty well executed, just from some casual use.

If TC50 picked a winner solely on whether the TC50 grand prize itself could
make the company successful, then Yammer was the right choice. It might not
have been successful without this, but _because_ they picked it, it may give
TC50 a quick success to parade next year to raise credibility of their
conference.

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sabat
Care to share some details of these techniques? Enquiring minds want to know.

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thorax
Well, their corporate sign-up for SAAS is one of the best mechanisms I've seen
for grassroots growth in an organization. It has a lot of potential in lots of
different areas.

Again and again and again in history, new technology first comes in the front
door of the business before it comes anywhere near the loading dock. (I.e.
employees adopt before IT/management recognizes the usefulness.) Their signup
model really takes advantage of that fact. I'm super-excited to try it out for
some of our upcoming releases, and it's even given me hope that some other
unlikely business ideas might just work with the same sort of approach.

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ryanwaggoner
My favorite part of this criticism was how the author implied that this would
fail because corporations don't want their business data in the cloud (a
viable concern), but then turned around and suggested that companies should
make great software that people want, like 37 signals has done. Ironic.

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rgrieselhuber
How is the risk of Yammer any greater than all of the IM networks people use
at work?

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whatusername
Because something like a corporate sametime network behind is storing data out
on the cloud for some little company to hold to ransom?

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iuguy
Bonus points to anyone who can come up with a reason to ditch either Google
Talk for domains or Windows Live Communication Server to use this instead...

... anyone?

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dustineichler
Yammer hasn't been blacklisted where i work yet and i only think it's b/c it
hasn't caught on yet. We'll see though.

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DaniFong
FitBit and swype struck me as about a thousand times cooler, but who knows...

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sabat
Forgetting everything else, I would imagine that the TC50 winner would be a
company with a much more innovative idea than Twitter for the 'enterprise'.

(Not to mention: 'enterprise' budgets are under severe constraint these days,
so getting money to pay for a Twitter clone is unlikely.)

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jmacd
Sure, IT budgets are growing more slowly than they used to, but they are still
bigger than they have ever been.

The idea that 1$/user/month is outside an "enterprise" budget is laughable.
Stop making things up.

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sabat
I'm not making things up; I work in an 'enterprise'. (And I still dislike that
term.)

$1/user/month in a 40,000-person enterprise (smaller than, say, Oracle) would
be $480,000/year, not a trivial sum to get in the current climate.

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ryanwaggoner
That presumes that every person in the organization signs up. Actual adoption
is likely to be far lower.

