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

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

#31

Post by froo »

swombat wrote: post #14
johnrob wrote: post #13

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.

So who wants Yammer? (apart from the VCs) Do you know anyone who is actually using Yammer?

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.

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

#32

Post by colinplamondon »

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!

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

#33

Post by hooande »

sabat wrote: post #20
johnrob wrote: post #13

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.

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.

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?

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

#34

Post by hooande »

thorax wrote: post #11

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…

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.

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

#35

Post by trevorturk »

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/

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

#39

Post by shiranaihito »

jasonbentley wrote: post #26

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?

Someone does:

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

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

#40

Post by jmacd »

sabat wrote: post #19
jmacd wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

This also assumes that an organization that big would ever even consider paying the going-rate for a piece of software. Now way.

They also would never thrown down their credit card for a 40k/month expense.

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