61–70 of 95 posts
From actual usage of Yammer, have heard of many companies where it is in use but the user engagement is really low. Can anyone using it comment on any success stories or failures of using Yammer internally? What has worked and what not?
"Sledgehammer spending" really bugs me. It says "we didn't exercise any brain cells to figure out what our purchase is actually worth, we're just throwing money at the wall because we think we can". Investors should scream at stuff like this. How many things could millions of extra dollars buy? For one thing, maybe they could have acquired 4 or 5 additional companies, patents or other IP. If there was any chance that…
$1b is a steal for Yammer. I'm surprised Yammer would take that right now considering it's current valuation and how bright its prospects are. It has one of the most efficient B2B customer acquisition schemes. Even with the culture mis-match, I suspect this will be a good acquisition for MSFT.
Having been exposed to 4 different Yammer networks, I can see why most dp pros find it a gross interference with their job and not worthy of inclusion in any real plan for internal communication.
"Sledgehammer spending" really bugs me. It says "we didn't exercise any brain cells to figure out what our purchase is actually worth, we're just throwing money at the wall because we think we can". Investors should scream at stuff like this. How many things could millions of extra dollars buy? For one thing, maybe they could have acquired 4 or 5 additional companies, patents or other IP. If there was any chance that…
there's always http://github.com/diaspora/diaspora for those seeking an alternative
I'm not sure Diaspora has any enterprise specific leanings, although - to be fair - I haven't spent as much time studying Diaspora as I probably should have. OTOH, there is another Open Source (ALv2) "enterprise social networking" project out there, and we're always happy to have other folks get involved. https://github.com/Fogbeam/Quoddy So far we support features like: A "facebook wall" like event stream for variou…
On their "About Us" page, they say that they've raised $142M in venture funding. How much equity VCs typically get for such an investment? 20%? In that case, the exit of the VC would be around $240M which in not even a 2x profit. Is it possible that the equity owned by the VCs is much larger than that? It seems to me that VCs would have to own a very large percentage of their equity to make this acquisition worthwhile for them, in which case the original founders wouldn't get anything nearly close to the $1.2B purchase price.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
For the people who "thought it was a joke" have you (or will you) put this data point into your data bank so as to improve your future thinking?
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.
"Sledgehammer spending" really bugs me. It says "we didn't exercise any brain cells to figure out what our purchase is actually worth, we're just throwing money at the wall because we think we can". Investors should scream at stuff like this. How many things could millions of extra dollars buy? For one thing, maybe they could have acquired 4 or 5 additional companies, patents or other IP. If there was any chance that…
The question is more, "Can Microsoft extract more than 1 billion (or whatever the exact purchase price is) + return on investment from this purchase?" If they have ~1 million paying users, and have anywhere close to 3/user (considering some are on group licenses, some are in the 15/mo range), that's 36 million in revenue a year, with a potential total of much more. Microsoft must believe they can grow the user base,…
Yammer released a number of key enhancements to its platform, enabling integration with a wide range of business applications:
[...] Yammer released a new version of its SharePoint integration, adding a highly secure, real-time social layer to the native SharePoint platform, making it social, mobile and engaging for enterprise employees.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Investors should scream at stuff like this. There may be a time when they're completely incapable of making a key future acquisition because they overspent on crap like this. This feels a bit presumptuous to me. Beyond playing into sticker shock, you haven't provided any evidence that they overspent or neglected to investigate other options.
A "nice round figure" is suspicious. Shouldn't a well-researched investment cost an amount that sounds well-researched (i.e. a more precise figure and not something that seems rounded up to the nearest billion)? How about some brief brainstorming on what else they might have done... If I look at the rest of the company: shouldn't Microsoft be more interested in, say, shipping Windows 8 sooner and with more features?…
I think the more important thing is how long would it have taken for them to start from scratch and build Yammer. Integrating the Yammer team and Yammer's products is going to take time as well so there are several variables there that need to be compared not just a simple back of the envelope pay a few guys a few years sort of thing.