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!
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.
pbreit|13 years ago
shangrila|13 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!
alexscheelmeyer|13 years ago
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.