[hansef]

The famous "everything that can be invented has been invented" quote attributed to Charles H. Duel, a late 19th-century commissioner of the US Patent Office, is apocryphal (http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2011/01/tracing-the-quote-ev...) but remains a comically potent response to this sort of short-sighted bullshit.

There will always be new problems to solve. There will always be better solutions invented to existing problems. And solving problems experienced by a lot of people, and solving them well, will always be worth a lot of money.

I run a 20-person webapp design and development consultancy, with employees all over the US and no central office. Group communication is a constant problem for us: we use Campfire rooms for most project communication, but frequently have to drop into Skype for ad-hoc video calls. I wind up in Google Chat several times a day with employees and clients as well. Campfire is great for realtime-ish team conversations, but if you want to ask a question like "hey, anyone want to go in on a house for SXSW?" you're probably better off sending an email if you want everyone to see it and have a chance to respond. We keep a lot of company docs in Google Docs, stuff which would really be more useful in the company wiki we don't have setup currently. I could go on, but the gist is that our communication tools for project teams, the company, clients, and 1-on-1 conversations are pretty fragmented.

Theoretically Yammer should solve this problem. It doesn't. We've experimented with it in the past, and it's a poor fit in a thousand tiny ways. We're a bunch of geeks living all over the country designing and building software products, not a division at Big Co.

But, y'know, everything's been invented. ;)

[michokest]

Right, the market is full of point solutions that keep focusing in only one aspect of the communication problem. Sort of like UNIX command line tools: great at doing one thing, but loosely coupled with other apps you use.

Yammer is great at microblogging, falls short for the rest. Email is great for 1 to 1 messages. Campfire does chat really well. Asana or Trello do tasks. But your data still lives in a dozen places.

I started a company around the very problem you mention, trying to bring together all the tools I used, and we're now close to 250k business users. And, despite the big guns like Yammer, we're seeing our revenue double every 4 months. Take a look if you're curious, it's called Teambox (http://teambox.com) and it brings together tasks, GDocs, chat, wiki-like notes, etc.

[jordibunster]

Disclaimer, I work at Yammer.

I'm not going to plug our product's features here, but I'll say this: microblogging is not an accurate portrayal of what it is anymore, and hasn't been for at least one and a half years.

[notyourwork]

Care to elaborate on what it is? At work we looked at Yammer, some people use it and others don't. However, my impression awhile back was "great another facebook but for work". (I mean no offense to it, I am honestly interested in how you view yammer.)