Microsoft Ditches Yammer Brand and Goes All-in on Viva Engage

Microsoft has confirmed that it's finally killing off Yammer, the enterprise social network it procured more than a decade ago for $1.2 billion. From a report: Yammer was initially created out of San Francisco back in 2008, with cofounder David Sacks formally launching the startup at a TechCrunch startup event. The company went on to raise north of $140 million in funding before Microsoft swooped in with its billion-dollar bid four years after its launch. In many ways, it's surprising that the Yammer brand has lasted this long.

Despite Microsoft's best efforts to bring Yammer to the masses by integrating it into its core Office suite of products, Microsoft has set about developing tangential communication tools such as Microsoft Teams, which the company integrated with Yammer in 2019. And then two years ago, Microsoft launched Viva, pitched as an "employee experience platform" that was something akin to the corporate intranet of yore. In the intervening months, Microsoft has been turbo-charging Viva, and last year it launched Viva Engage, which it said at the time was an "evolution of the Yammer Communities app."

Does anyone know either?

[Opportunist]

I mean, yammer, viva... Even zune was more well known.

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[Anachronous Coward]

Yammer is essentially Twitter for the enterprise, mostly used by rah-rah corporate types. I never saw the point of it.

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[Gilgaron]

It's like internal comms stuff but more interactive than the corporate homepage. But yes, there was certainly a lot of overlap with Teams Channels so I can see why it would die, but not why anyone wouldn't just use Teams Channels when it does go away instead of importing stuff into Viva (which will surely be abandoned for some other startup acquisition of identical functionality in a few years)

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[Pascoea]

Yeah, I didn't even realize Yammer was still around either. Viva is the annoying "helper" in Outlook now. Stuff like "Hey, you're sending this outside of the recipients normal business hours, do you want to schedule it?" or "It looks like you forgot to attach a file, care to check?" kind of stuff. I think it also digs through your messages and find action items you may not have responded to yet. Pretty "meh" at this point.

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[jbengt]

I think it also digs through your messages and find action items you may not have responded to yet.

Yeah, Viva gets that wrong all the time.
It rarely tells me I may have forgotten an attachment that I really forgot. It more often tells me I may have forgotten an attachment just because the word "attached" or "attachment" is in the body of the e-mail, regardless of the fact I wasn't referring to anything that was supposed to be attached to the e-mail.

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[kaatochacha]

I still have, and use, my little Zune HD. Tiny device, beautiful OLED screen, built in radio. Too little, too late for it.

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[DarkRookie2]

Great device. Minus the shit cable and software.

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[kriston]

Best traditional earbuds ever, though.

Huge bass without plugging up your ear canal. I bought up several spares at the end of the Zune HD era but the foam pads are all dried up in new/old stock.

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[Darinbob]

It comes with Microsot's online suite of crap. Some people at work use it, it's not rally used for "work" but more of a "look what our team did this weekend when we went hiking!" I get the update mails that say there are new yammer messages but I can't be bothered to log in and look. There's literally no point to it.

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[Opportunist]

But it promotes team spirit! And company cohesion! And everyone will be interested in what the other groups did (or, rather, forced their members to participate in to show how much they are "group oriented" even though everyone, including the managers, were desperately looking for excuses not to do it)!

And whatever else the MS markedroid bullshitted your boss into believing.

Reread your own title then try again

[sixminuteabs]

All that is gone is the brand. Your summary suggests the product is dead. Itâ(TM)s not.

I wonder why

[CEC-P]

AS I READ THIS, I'm attempting to write a mail flow script to block the malicious spammer and adult themed yammer group invites my company keeps getting. So yeah, maybe just delete the whole thing.

Would it kill you to mention what Yammer was?

[TheNameOfNick]

What kind of sucky eulogy is this? Apparently Viva was pitched as an "employee experience platform", whatever that means. Maybe it is a game that lets people experience what being employed (by Microsoft?) is like. I don't know. But the topic is Yammer, which is being killed off. Can't you at least tell the world what it was.

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[kaatochacha]

Viva's just a visible reminder of the creepiness that MS ( and others) are selling to business customers. Want to know what your employees are doing ALL THE TIME, collate that data, use it for performance , etc? We can do it for some $$$

Who was this product for?

[DrSpock11]

Iâ(TM)ve worked in the Microsoft ecosystem with Microsoft products for over a decade and Iâ(TM)ve never seen or heard of any company using Yammer. No idea who the target audience was. SharePoint has always been Microsoftâ(TM)s main intranet solution. Prior to Teams, Skype for Business was their corporate chat client. So who used Yammer? And who is âoeVivaâ for?

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[The-Ixian]

We use Yammer. There, now you have heard of a company that uses it.

We surface a Yammer group in a web part on the company's internal SharePoint home page. It's the source of a lot of positivity, information and feedback.

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[UnknowingFool]

I have never heard anyone use Sharepoint and positivity in the same paragraph before especially those that have to manage Sharepoint. :)

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[tijgertje]

My previous client had it.
I logged in maybe 3 times in 4 years? Not worth my time.

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[kriston]

I saw it on the online Microsoft Office menu next to Sharepoint before they rebranded everything Microsoft 365. Then it appeared in Microsoft Teams for some reason.

Even after reading the article I still don't know what it's for (or Viva Engage, for that matter).

Never heard of it

[DarkRookie2]

I have never heard of these products. Either the one they are killing or the one it got replaced with.

Yammer is well named

[tbuskey]

I was at a company that used Yammer (& got an award for best use of).

If you're in Sales and want to see industry stuff, I suppose it was ok. Anyone else had to wade through it to find critical announcements that the company made. Imagine the a TV network with just ads lasting 30 seconds. Randomly there would be a few 10 second spots about natural disasters that might wipe out your home and family if you missed them.

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[thegarbz]

Yammer is amazingly named. It sounds similar to "jammer" in Dutch which means "unfortunate" when translated to English, which is I suppose how all users feel when told to use it.

Confusing? Great! Do Teams/One Drive next!

[Delicate Cybertron]

"[...]and having two similar brands that did much the same thing was confusing." -- Fantastic! Wonder what they think about Teams / Teams for Office/School, Skype / Skype for Business, One Drive and One Drive. Please Microsoft, stop this nonsense and merge your platforms, or split the names completely for business and consumer.