Yammer is TC50 Winner - This is a Joke? Right?

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/yammer_tc50_winner.php

by sant0sk1 • 18 years ago

40 45 18 years ago

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hooande3• 18 years ago

Yammer: Coming soon to a corporate domain blacklist near you

humanlever• 18 years ago

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.

froo5• 18 years ago

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?

furiouslol2• 18 years ago

You guys are just being paranoid. Salesforce runs fine within the corporate environment. Besides, they copied the Salesforce IP restriction configuration for extra security. I'm betting that the corporations will embrace it.

wheels• 18 years ago

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.

sabat5• 18 years ago

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.)

jmacd3• 18 years ago

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.

aneesh• 18 years ago

> "The idea that 1$/user/month is outside an "enterprise" budget is laughable."

So is the idea that Fortune 500 companies would let data like this be in the cloud.

sabat5• 18 years ago

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.

MicahWedemeyer• 18 years ago

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

fallentimes• 18 years ago

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

froo5• 18 years ago

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.

jauco• 18 years ago

The salty cookies that are called 'cut' in America and England, are rebranded as 'tuc' in the Netherlands since 'cut' is dutch slang for vagina (written with a `k').

They sell pretty well around here.

pxlpshr• 18 years ago

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.

thorax2• 18 years ago

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.

sabat5• 18 years ago

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

thorax2• 18 years ago

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.

hooande3• 18 years ago

So let me get this straight...yammer should have won TC50 because no one would use their crappy product if they didn't win?

Fail.

markbao• 18 years ago

http://weblog.markbao.com/2008/how-i-built-a-webapp-in-18-ho...

johnrob• 18 years ago

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.

swombat• 18 years ago

So who wants Yammer? (apart from the VCs)

Do you know anyone who is actually using Yammer?

froo5• 18 years ago

While Yammer seems an interesting spin on things, I'd much prefer to have this functionality contained within Twitter in the form of private groups - purely from a convenience point of view if anything.

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.

sabat5• 18 years ago

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.

JayNeely• 18 years ago

Want may be transient, but need is subjective.

froo5• 18 years ago

I agree with you on principle, but in today's society (which could be arguably described as hedonistic) people often seem to choose something they want over something they need.

hooande3• 18 years ago

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?

carpo• 18 years ago

People most often buy things they want ahead of what they need, unless it's food and shelter. And even then, they usually want a type of food or shelter that they don't really need, and will buy it even when they can't afford it.

greenagain• 18 years ago

But everyone understands that TechCrunch is a joke, right?

dustineichler• 18 years ago

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.

jasonbentley• 18 years ago

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• 18 years ago

Someone does:

http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/05/never-hate-only-eve...

ryanwaggoner2• 18 years ago

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.

colinplamondon• 18 years ago

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!

furiouslol2• 18 years ago

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.

trevorturk• 18 years ago

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/

rgrieselhuber• 18 years ago

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

whatusername• 18 years ago

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

DaniFong• 18 years ago

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

_b8r0• 18 years ago

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?

Yammer is TC50 Winner - This is a Joke? Right?

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