An e-mail sent broadly within a company is the 21st Century’s internal memo. It implies a level of importance that probably limits people from communicating as much as they would.

A Yamm? ;-) is much lower investment… it is both easier to produce and easier to ignore than a company-wide e-mail. Arguably a Yamm is just as important for routine tasks although any particular Yamm may only be interesting to a single person at most.

My guess is that Yammer will sell enterprise filters or social features on top of the platform after they get some usage to let workgroups communicate effectively. It appears to me to be an adoption play right now for them.

I love this… simple idea and yes there are replacements, but these guys will get some traction especially in tech savvy companies. Nice post Kevin.

Chris

Here are a few reasons why email isn’t the answer. I can’t control who emails me very well. I can’t know if I’ve copied too many people or not enough. I can’t opt out of a conversation easily. Probably the #1 reason I advocate reducing 98% of email volume: I can’t search someone else’s inbox to see if they have valuable information I need.

Kevin – what about wikis? How does that fit into your communication options?

I’ve just been writing about why Yammer isn’t Twitter for the enterprise, and from my perspective in a big company the admin price is too high, and the maintenance of approved individuals too onerous.

Most BigCo types could create something equivalent internally; my own company has been playing with a trial for some months (not quite such a pretty interface, it has to be said.)

I wish Yammer good luck, as at least they have *a* financing model.

A worker in the Big Corporate Racks division would be receiving Yammer messages from the staff in the African Translation division and Software Development branches.

I would much prefer an email mailing list or an RSS feed.

I also agree with Marcelo that Yammer provides nothing more than current email technology does.

Better yet, isn’t Yammer just a missing feature of Email or IM? If so, then is not a great product, just a great feature.

I don’t think anyone’s disputing the value of the communication model, but I think there are some very valid questions around their business model.

For many things apps in the cloud are perfect, but I’m coming to the realization that you can’t shoehorn companies into a cloud model when it comes to their confidential information and data. Especially if you’re a startup, you just don’t have that level of trust.

For example, I highly doubt any company that needs government security clearance or SOX compliance will let their employees use anything like Yammer.

But like I said this is a business model problem. There’s an easy solution: distribute a premise-based solution.

Jason

37signals has also done a couple takes on this, with both Campfire and the Backpack Newsroom