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Re:Microsoft to acquire LinkedIn for $26B by douche on Monday June 13, 2016 @09:41AM (#11893765)
I'm still not sure what purpose Yammer serves. It's basically business-y old-UI Facebook, as far as I can see. But I've never understood any of that range of products - Lotus Connections, Salesforce Chatter, Yammer, etc, etc. They feel like solutions in search of a problem.
Re:Microsoft to acquire LinkedIn for $26B by lmm on Monday June 13, 2016 @11:19AM (#11894547)
The problem is semi-persistent group chats. There are a bunch of partial existing solutions, but they all have issues:

* IRC: UX is pretty awful, any persistence of chats is ad-hoc and hand-rolled, plain text only, relatively high burden on sysadmins. * Jabber/MSN/Yahoo/etc.: very poor group chat support * Skype: very difficult to integrate with anything else, no support for self-hosting. * Slack/HipChat - good options, more or less contemporary, very much in direct competition with Yammer. Both more ephemeral though - IME Yammer ends up better than either, because it's just persistent enough that you can find old discussions/documentation when you need to.