Here we explore the curious case of Yammer, which despite winning the Top Prize at TechCrunch 50 back in 2008, its launch year, was passionately criticized by bloggers.
Yammer was created with an innovative business model of a social networking platform for enterprise communication within the organizations. Earlier it was viewed as a mere corporate version of Twitter since it involved communication between employees under 140 characters. However, created by Geni, the success and fanfare of Yammer led to it becoming both a product as well as a company launched in 2008. It was then purchased by Microsoft in 2012 while already coming into the eyes of many buyers.
According to Microsoft, Yammer is presently used by 85% of Fortune companies and surpasses having 1 million users on the platform.
The success of Yammer could be attributed to its amazingly designed and user-friendly interface and seizing of an untapped opportunity of providing an efficient communication tool for employees. They can use it to send stuff one doesn’t usually use an email for. “What theme do you all want for the office party?” or “Read this article, it will improve your productivity” are things that people would prefer using a tool like Yammer for.
Microsoft included it in Office 365 tools and clearly articulated the difference between Teams, while last year it also tightly integrated Yammer with Teams.
Now the expectations have again been hyped up for a “New Yammer” by Microsoft as it plans to completely revamp or reinvigorate the app. Unlike the common view of Yammer for smaller and immediate communications, Microsoft views it for building large communities of employees sharing long-tail information.
Although enterprise social networking is on the grow, the challenge to position Yammer in the limelight once again is a difficult task. Perhaps we might finally get a complete integration of Yammer within Teams which might also provide it a sense of direction and identity it has been lacking ever since it was bought by Microsoft. Nonetheless, it would be indeed exciting to see how Microsoft rebuilds Yammer.
