Microsoft has confirmed it is finally killing Yammer, the enterprise social network it bought for $1.2 billion more than a decade ago.
Yammer was originally founded in San Francisco in 2008, with co-founder David Sacks formally launching the startup at a AapkaDost startup event. The company then raised more than $140 million in funding before Microsoft came in with its billion-dollar bid four years after launch.
In many ways, it’s surprising that the Yammer brand has been around for so long. Despite Microsoft’s efforts to bring Yammer to the masses by integrating it into key Office products, Microsoft has begun 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 resembled the corporate intranet of yesteryear. In the intervening months, Microsoft has been boosting Viva, and last year it launched Viva Engage, which it said at the time was an “evolution of the Yammer Communities app.”
Confusing
It was becoming increasingly clear that there was little room or need for Yammer in Microsoft’s range of products, and it was confusing to have two similar brands doing much the same thing. And so the brand is now being completely phased out and going all in on Viva Engage instead.
“Over the past few months, we’ve heard your feedback that having two apps with similar experiences and the same services and content has created confusion and made it challenging to drive adoption and bring clarity to end users,” said Viva and Yammer chief vice president Murali Sitaram in a blog post.
Long story short, Yammer will be completely swallowed up by Viva Engage, with branding changing for the products incrementally over the course of 2023. This includes changing the existing Yammer mobile apps to Viva Engage starting in March, followed by a transition for the Yammer web app starting this summer.