I came to this year’s SharePoint Conference with one goal in mind: I wanted to learn everything I could about Microsoft’s enterprise roadmap for Yammer. Well, as of this writing the conference is halfway over and if anything, it looks I’m probably going to get about halfway to that goal.
I’m not going to recap what’s been said—David F. Carr at InformationWeek has already done that better than I could have—so I’m going to offer some informed analysis about what I’ve learned so far.
And what have I learned? Quite a bit, actually. And curiously, it all starts—not with SharePoint—but with the erstwhile competition.
If you can read between the lines, the shadow of Google is everywhere this week. Nobody actually mentions them by name, but from the big, Android-shaped gap in the announcements of mobile apps for Office, SharePoint and Yammer (Windows 8, then iOS, then… silence) to the way so much of the messaging is now geared toward the cloud, you can tell that Microsoft has one real aim for Yammer and Office 365. It’s an arrow pointed straight at Google Apps, and if you ask me it has the potential to be a pretty deadly arrow.
People with thousands more Twitter followers than I have can debate the wisdom of that strategy. After all, Google Apps remains a decided underdog in the enterprise space, and deservedly so, because from both a feature/function perspective and a market share perspective, they’re still incredibly weak compared to Office. Me, I think it’s a good thing, because Microsoft clearly sees Google as a potentially legitimate threat in the productivity space, and it’s moved them to innovate again in some compelling ways.
That’s what the Yammer acquisition is about. It wasn’t about present functionality and the more I hear, the more I’m convinced that it never was. While several savvy observers I know have mentioned that the acquisition took a competitor off the table—and make no mistake, pre-acquisition Yammer was definitely a burgeoning SharePoint competitor and they are now firmly in Redmond’s camp—there’s some other threads here that bear mentioning too.
Make the Cloud more compelling. Yammer’s capabilities for IM, file-sharing, and other core collaboration functionality basically pale in comparison to what Microsoft already had in Lync and SharePoint—however, Yammer’s activity feed and community structure are a step or three ahead of what we see in OfficeTalk, the newsfeed present in SharePoint 2013. Yammer saw Office as “killer apps” to make social more productivity-focused, and Microsoft saw Yammer as a way to take Office into the cloud in a way that adds real value. As a big Office fan, I’m going to watch further developments in this space very closely. Office 365 is clearly the big bet (Remember: Cloud, Mobile, Social) and something for enterprises to think about now, not next year or the year after. It’s ready.
Transform the way they develop the next version. We’ve discussed Yammer’s analytics-driven approach to software development in this blog before, and as I’ve noted in the past, this had a great appeal to Microsoft. Jared Spataro has noted that Microsoft “had a desire to be more bold, to innovate faster”, and the approach Yammer brings enables that.
Open up a new front with grass-roots users. I can’t count the references I’ve heard this week to Yammer’s “viral” or “disruptive” nature, and they’re right. Another popular line has been that “Yammer is in 85% of the Fortune 500”. Well, yeah, because a colony of users here or there has sneaked off to use the freemium version outside the dictates of corporate IT. For Microsoft—a company closely tied in the public perception to corporate IT (fairly or unfairly)—and a company that has been focused on the “consumerization of IT” for the last two years, here’s a chance to finally reach the enterprise via grass-roots consumers.
Sort of like… Apple. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But hey, iCloud works. Who wouldn’t want to open up the same document on a slate while taking the train home— right where they left off on their PC? But nobody’s railing against the iPad here. In fact, iOS apps in development have been mentioned several times. No, the real target is…
Google. Take the points above and it’s obvious they want to take this fight to Google’s turf. Not just the cloud, not just the grass-roots consumer-driven approach to IT, but from an entire cultural and software development perspective this thing has Google written all over it. Another common topic in sessions this week has been the youthful, energetic, confident culture of Yammer. Sound like anyone Microsoft is competing against? Not just for enterprise dollars, but for developer talent and general techie coolness factor?
All in all, I see more optimism, more fire, and more innovation in the above than anything else. I’m excited. And while I still haven’t seen the roadmap, I’ve been encouraged this week, and I’ll be waiting for it even more anxiously now.
Thoughts on “Reading Between the Lines: Yammer and Google at SPC 2012”
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I like the approach you took in this article. One thing that always bothers me about a company that targets products at other companies is the user suffers.
Microsoft has such a huge market in the Enterprise space that they should be setting the direction. Innovate. Don’t just build something so you can say “us too”.
Apple doesn’t do that, everyone tries to copy them. Microsoft has been late to the game on several fronts but has a large enough loyal customer base they can make it up, with innovation, not just these.
Google has a long way to go before their office products are Enterprise worthy. Maybe they have something in development, but Microsoft is ready there.
Thanks, Thom. I think there is a large silent majority that wants to see Microsoft innovating more again, and I think what we’re seeing this week says they hear that. Pretty excited to see how it will turn out.