EnjoyTech

Confirming what we already knew, today Microsoft announced they are acquiring Yammer for $1.2 billion in cold cash. Here's a blog post by David Sacks , the CEO of Yammer. Microsoft doesn't report a revenue breakdown for their individual products but SharePoint is believed to be one of the fastest growing products with annual revenue of more than $1 billion. Regardless of how Microsoft markets and positions SharePoint, it has always been collaboration software and not really social software. Microsoft does seem to understand the challenges it faces in moving their portfolio of products to the cloud, including SharePoint. Microsoft also understands value of having end users on their side even though SharePoint is sold as enterprise software. Microsoft's challenges in transitioning to the cloud are similar to the ones faced by other on-premise enterprise software vendors. But, I really admire Microsoft's commitment by not giving up on any of these things. Skype's acq...

Today Google announced  Google Buzz . Watch the video: The chart below shows the spectacular adoption failure of Google Wave as a standalone product. This was predicted by a lot of people including myself. As Anil Dash puts it  Google Wave does not help solve a "weekend-sized problem" . Besides the obvious complex technical challenges there are three distinct adoption barriers with Google Wave and Google Buzz has capability to overcome those: Inseparable container, content, and collaboration: Changing people's behavior is much more difficult than inventing or innovating a killer technology. Most of the people still prefer to keep the collaboration persisted separately from the content or not persisted at all. Single task systems such as email, Wiki, and instant messaging are very effective because they do one and only thing really well without any confusion. Google Wave is a strong container on which Google or others can build collaboration capability but not giving an o...

I get this asked a lot – How do I calculate ROI of Enterprise 2.0? Bruce Schneier says , “Security is not an investment that provides a return, like a new factory or a financial instrument. It's an expense that, hopefully, pays for itself in cost savings. Security is about loss prevention, not about earnings. The term just doesn't make sense in this context.”. Similarly thinking of Enterprise 2.0 as an “investment” looking for a return does not make any sense. At best it is the cost of a lost opportunity. If you are a CIO looking for a detailed ROI metrics or a simple checklist for Enterprise 2.0 you are probably out of luck. However you could adopt a two-pronged approach. Convince the business that the organization needs Enterprise 2.0 by showing whatever resonates with them e.g. sharing files help reduce email quota, Wiki makes people productive by X percentage, giving them a copy of The Future of Management by Gary Hamel etc. Once you do get a green signal for Enterprise 2...