Microsoft has announced that it is closing down Yammer the corporate social network it acquired over 10 years back at $1.2 billion.
Yammer was first created in San Francisco back in 2008 when co-founder David Sacks formally launched the company at the TechCrunch event for startups. Yammer went on to raise upwards of $140 million in capital prior to when Microsoft joined in with a billion-dollar pitch four years following the company’s launch.
In many ways, it’s awe-inspiring that Yammer has survived for this long. Yammer brand has survived for this time. Despite the best efforts of Microsoft to make Yammer users by insinuating it into its Office suite of applications, Microsoft has set about creating tools for communicating that are tangential, like Microsoft Teams, which the company integrated with Yammer in the year 2019. Then, two years ago, Microsoft launched Viva, described to be an “employee experience platform” that was similar to the intranet for corporate use of the past. Since then, Microsoft has been turbo-charging Viva and, in the last year, it unveiled Viva Engage, which it claimed at the time was an “evolution of the Yammer Communities app.”
Confusion
It became clearer that there was no room or demand for Yammer in Microsoft’s plethora of offerings, and having two brands doing exactly the same thing was confusing. It is discontinuing the brand entirely and focusing on Viva Engage instead.
“Over the past few months, we’ve received your feedback about two apps offering similar experiences, and sharing the same content and services caused confusion, making it difficult to encourage adoption and to create an understanding for the end user,” noted Viva and Yammer chief executive Murali Sitaram in a blog article.
Short story, Yammer will be completely swallowed by Viva Engage, with the branding evolving incrementally across all products through 2023. This includes switching the current Yammer mobile applications into Viva Engage in March, which will be followed by the transition of the Yammer web app, which will be launched this summer.
