I remember laughing at them when they launched at and won TC50. "Twitter for the enterprise! What a dumb idea." I'm laughing all the way to their bank now.
The tech is funny and most failed at this - we all know small batches or private twitters isn't that hard to do - they won with hustle and sales (and good tech probably).
The company where I work tried to use Yammer in 2009, and it seemed like a good idea implemented very poorly back then. It was just the engineering division with about 40 people. Tech issues quickly went to email threads where you could deal with code, screenshots etc. It mostly got used as an IRC channel to post WFH messages. But what caused their downfall for us was the constant updates (using AIR--argh) that broke the client, moved buttons around, etc. One by one, people just didn't update, then just removed it (AIR too). Since I hadn't heard much buzz about them until now, I thought that happened to everyone and they died a slow death.
I was at a company a few years ago where the designers and execs were all about using Yammer internally, and I thought it was a joke. A billion dollar joke, turns out.
Heh, I suppose so. Thing is, I still feel like my initial assessment was right. It was a very poor fit the company I was at, not to mention it was a rather immature service at the time -- it felt like a half-baked Twitter clone and it made for a poor replacement for chat/email, especially in a small company. Today it seems like an almost completely different toolset with a lot more features. Looking at it now I think it could be useful, but until this story came out I hadn't thought about the service since that time more than 3 years ago.
The important takeaway I get from this is that they kept trying and managed to improve and deliver a service that actually works for their target market. If it had stayed like it was I don't think it would have gone anywhere. Hats off to them for pushing through and executing well!
It came flying out of the gates, was always more like Facebook than Twitter and is targeted at pretty much all companies (I've worked at a 6 person company that loves it, a company that went from 10 to 100 employees that loves it and a company with 10s of 1000s of employees that loves it).
You've been at a lot of companies in a short amount of time. My experience has been that Yammer is not useful, for when the company was small and even less useful for a larger company. What exactly do you find useful that isn't covered by existing products?
I am one who thinks "Yay! Another accelerator to the Microsoft death-spiral" when reading this.
I am not sure what data it is you want me to put in my data bank, as I do not buy your premise that getting bought by Microsoft is any kind of validation. Quite the contrary.
You can get rich by playing the lottery, just as you can get rich by making a crappy product that you manage to get enough hype around to get sold to Microsoft. It does not mean you should bet on the lottery as a viable business strategy.
Getting the world to think your crappy product is the newest silver bullet might be a viable way of making money (see Zynga, Madoff, et al), but it does not lend itself very well to reproduction.
If you have some specific details on what makes Yammer objectively superior to alternatives (and not just a fad) I am all ears though.
Just so I'm clear, you're comparing spending 4 years building an extremely successful business communications company to winning the lottery? Bernie Madoff? Casual gaming? Downvote.
You can compare things on many aspects. The Zynga/Madoff comparison was on trajectory - meteoric rise followed by sharp fall. Such a trajectory characterizes the scam or fad. My point is that Yammer is a fad, Madoff was a scam and Zynga is probably a bit of both.
When a colleague of mine heard that Yammer was bought for 1 billion he exclaimed : "Oh, so THAT is what we should be doing - create a crappy product and get bought by Microsoft!". My point is that other factors than creating the crappy product is what gets you bought by Microsoft. There is no causal relationship between the quality of the product and the money received. Another similarity to Zynga/Madoff btw.
So the conclusion is that you are better off creating a quality product, despite such evidence to the contrary. Likewise you are better off providing real value to the world, despite some people getting rich by winning the lottery.
I saw what they were doing when they launched and thought "you know, twitter of business sucks but Facebook for business would be brilliant." Too bad I let myself stay stuck in a service business. Going to end that July 1.
I laughed when I read an article about a company ditching email to embrace Yammer. After taking a couple more looks at how it worked, I convinced my company to try it out - it's been fantastic about removing a littering of articles from our emails and putting them into Yammer where people can quickly ignore the noise and discuss the important stuff.
We've also found it a great way to let everyone know that you'll be out of the office, working from home, etc.
We probably aren't perfect in our execution, but it's been a fantastic tool so far.
