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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.
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.
Do you know anyone who is actually using Yammer?
Yammer: Coming soon to a corporate domain blacklist near you
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 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 rais…
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.)
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$/user/month is outside an "enterprise" budget is laughable. Stop making things up.
So is the idea that Fortune 500 companies would let data like this be in the cloud.
Forgetting everything else, I would imagine that the TC50 winner would be a company with a much more innovative idea than Twitter for the 'enterprise'. (Not to mention: 'enterprise' budgets are under severe constraint these days, so getting money to pay for a Twitter clone is unlikely.)
Sure, IT budgets are growing more slowly than they used to, but they are still bigger than they have ever been. The idea that 1$/user/month is outside an "enterprise" budget is laughable. Stop making things up.
$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.
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.