Yammer is TC50 Winner - This is a Joke? Right?
readwriteweb.com
readwriteweb.com
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!
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.
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.
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?
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.
Does anyone else feel that TechCrunch's credibility has taken massive hits in 2008?
Do you know anyone who is actually using Yammer?
If the Twitter dev team were able to give me everything I wanted, then I'd want the ability to start a private group with people, where updates into that group are protected from my public timeline.
I'd also like the ability to add custom tabs onto my twitter UI so that I could get instant context of any conversation happening within my group, while maintaining the ability for these messages to get forwarded to my mobile device if I wanted.
I would pay for a service like that, absolutely.
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?
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.
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.
They sell pretty well around here.
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?
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.
Fail.
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.
... anyone?
(Not to mention: 'enterprise' budgets are under severe constraint these days, so getting money to pay for a Twitter clone is unlikely.)
The idea that 1$/user/month is outside an "enterprise" budget is laughable. Stop making things up.
So is the idea that Fortune 500 companies would let data like this be in the cloud.
I have been seeing a lot of cool thinking on how The Cloud can go private for these orgs.
In a way, that has started. A lot of software providers (including us) will sell a VM image that can be loaded up and moved around as needed (to provision more hardware). It seems like a baby-step.
$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.
They also would never thrown down their credit card for a 40k/month expense.