Microsoft: Half of all organizations will use 'Facebook-like' tools Exactly one year to the day since Microsoft's $1.2bn acquisition of Yammer, Redmond says its plan to bring social collaboration to the enterprise has only just begun. Yammer now has almost eight million registered users, Microsoft's SharePoint head Jared Spataro said in a blog post on Tuesday. That's an increase of 55 per cent …
Workplace collaboration tools have been around for a decade or so now. What do the softies think social media can bring to the enterprise table that isn't already there ?
Here's a use for it. Next time IBM does a round of layoffs they can publish the list of names and anyone who gets a thousand 'likes' is spared ...
Well now everytime I go to download and expenses claim from our sharepoint site I get little popups asking if I want to join/share/fondle this site with all my friends.
The only explanations I have is that they know filling in expense claims is boring and they believe Facebook is fun - so they want to make filing an expense claim more like Facebook.
Or they are "a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes,
Microsoft purchases some obscure some-other-successful-website-wannabee, sits on it for a while, then fires up its formidable marketing machine to suggest, then state as "fact", then demand that world+dog absolutely must have the same functionality that the wanabee purports to provide. The hope is that the mindless gullible souls that make up the vast majority of the populace will think, "Hey, if Microsoft says I gotta have it, then I gotta have it! <slobber/>...and Lo! and Behold! Microsoft just happens to have just such a solution to their wants and desires.
Thing is...I'm not seeing it work as well as it used to anymore. Win 8, anyone? (Crickets...)
"... will make navigating between the two services more seamless"
Could you tell us exactly how many negative seams there are ? Or are they imaginary seams which will be imaginarily supported up through Version XP then refuse to die because customers demand them ?
We have Yammer. We are required, by company policy, to use it (various senior types get junkets from MS, we have to follow the latest MS fashions; they even think Win8 will trump Apple).
The only ones who do use Yammer are the sales-and-marketing drones who want to suck off each others' egos. The engineers do their best to ignore Yammer and spam-hole the deluge of utter drivel. I do not give a shit if Jack just had an exciting phone convo with the PA for someone who might be a potential lead maybe. Nor the ten replies of mutual masturbation.
Furthermore, when used for "confidential" business "war room" stragey debates, what kind of fuck-nut wants to put all that (unencrypted) on a server beyond company control? In fact, who wants to put next year's plans in the hands of a known monopoly abuser who is also a potential comprtitor? Or in the control of a foreign power?
Screw Yammer. Screw 99% of this social media bullshit. Not everyone needs to know everything about everyone else all the time. It just becomes noise.
And engingeering certainly does not give two damns about the free toy MS gave you (which every sane person hates) but which we now have to supprt because marketing have the MS cock rammed in their mouth so hard it has impregnated what passes for a brain in that department.
We have Yammer. We are required, by company policy, to use it
Same here. Or rather we are encouraged to use it. And yes it's mostly marketing and management and is full of the kind of sycophantic crap that Americans seem particularly skilled at. How anyone can be 'excited' by a meeting is beyond me.
Actually it's the "sales-and-marketing drones" who stand to benefit the most from this technology. Sharing information about clients and sales tactics is a great way to increase knowledge amongst the team and increase sales in future. It also increases motivation and involvement and provides a forum for quick resolution of problems.
For engineers and programmers, it's less useful as we're generally working on a few (or one) long-term project. And generally we don't need the social interaction that the sales-and-marketing drones require.
Ditto, large tech company, but with Salesforce Chatter. We are not obliged to use it, because that would be unusually silly. A couple of execs have gone all social, posting videos, tweeting with the yoof, and so on. We drones are used to parsing the blarney, so it's business as usual.
But something interesting has happened. Chatter has become the de facto first level support platform for salesforce and its embedded apps. Judging by the traffic I see, this is unambiguously its primary use. Kudos to IT, they have run with it. They have support staff manning it 24 x 7. It seems to work. There is even some value in letting everyone see what support issues arise - even the cringeworthy ones.
What we ordered was social networking. What we got is social tech support.
we got Yammer here long before the MS purchase and were equally encouraged with become sociable with the rest of the colleagues in the office, by staying at our desks and typing to them instead of having a chat at the coffee point.
it didn't even last a year here, at the end there were only two people left posting on it, who seemed to have forgotten it was publicly viewable by the rest of the office. was quite fun to read their conversations...
Just as news out of China says Cisco is off their gov list of products , here we go again with people asking us to trust Americans. They want our profiles , emails , telephone numbers we call etc etc .. How is a data collection tool for the secret services all over any help to free the Citizens of their spying and data collection agencies ? How are we supposed to feel safe using an operating system and programs that have been used to infiltrate computers and computer networks ? Really , we should trust them ? You got to be kidding . The day where they want me to lay naked in front of the spying agencies and voyeurs is the day I resign . As a citizen I have a right to privacy , I'm not going to stand there while my rights are violated and play sheep.
Problem right now is noone stands up to those who are turning this world in an Orwellian nightmare . We all sit in front of machines idle , yet even as this is pointed out you keep reading the comments. Are you capable of turning the computer off and walk to your capital and protest ? .. No ? .. They won .
Anonymous
Sorry, after aQuantive, Skype we fucked up again and spent oodles of your cash on a fashionable company. If you sell quickly you won't be affected too much by the write down when we announce it. In the meantime we're going to run a smokescreen campaign telling everyone how wonderful everything is and how our customers love Jabber…
I wonder how they are able to keep their sales etc. if they kind of work against classical marketing rules: gazillion of products with long names probably even their sales team won't remember, stuff that "integrates well" only during sales, unclear licensing schemes... bla bla bla :)
Besides - what do you use to communicate in the softie-realm? Skype? Lync? YbadooYammerHammerBahamer? Share Point? Messenger is killed, right?
I would think that corpos are too much dependent on the MS infrastructure, therefore they will just buy everything they produce. Besides - they have $$$ for sales and marketing - and that can do miracles. Maybe it's not really wrong to say, that corpos are to MS like corpo-workers to dusty products Made in Colombia? ;)
All of these technologies are basically ways of achieving the same thing - to enable management to preserve the illusion that they are "working" without actually doing anything.
Microsoft Word turned into a tool to turn a five minute Dictaphone message into an hour long playing with layout. Then people started using email a lot and it ceased to be as useful for time wasting.
So now social media. Five minutes to send email, an hour spent telling everybody about it on Facebook. (Even worse: 5 minutes to take a dump, same outcome).
It's Parkinson's Law: Work expands to fill the time available. In English speaking countries where presenteeism is so rife (being seen to put in long hours even when there is no productive outcome) it's going to happen.
Yes, yes, I know. I'm posting this on social media. But it's my time, and I don't pretend it's work.
Ask you boss for a time code and a project number so that you can charge the time spent reading/updating yammer with useless information?
See what their reaction is when they realise that someone will have to pay for this and it won't be HIS(or hers) pet project.
Watch its usage drop dramatically amongst anyone who actually does some productive work. The only people with time for this are those with nothing to do.
Now there's a great idea. Implement yammer and fire all those with the highest level of posts because they are obviously not busy working for the company...
Fail, not because MS owns Yammer but I hate all forms of this 'social media'. This includes Facebork and twatter.
Let the Eadon like down-voting begin :)
Well, you don't hate all forms of social media; what is this?
If you mean "hate all forms of self-promoting vacuous self-publishing to get attention", then you have a point.
To social media, you'd need to add half the letters in the local paper and most of what passes for news in the tabloids.
It all began when the US educational system started expecting children to "present" to their classmates, announce their "achievements" and the like.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
