Oct 1, 2020
Work Week | Technological Intransigence
| Land of the Fax | Asana Cashes In | Intranets: Workvivo and Happeo Fundings | Outlook Issues |
2020–10–01 Beacon NY | The lead story is a short one, about Japan clinging to the fax machine as a way to communicate. It sheds light on a universal leaning to hold onto what we are familiar with, and around which we have built our patterns of work, even when they begin to hold us back.
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Digital Transformation
Via CIO Journal from the Financial Times:
Land of the fax machine names minister for digital transformation. The move earlier this month by Japan Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga hints that the country may be ready to address “its pockets of technological intransigence,” most notably parts of the business community’s devotion to the fax machine.
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Work Management
Asana Valued at $5.5 Billion After Direct Listing Debut | Crystal Tse reports on the direct listing, where the company does not issue new shares. The stock closed up 6.7% at $28.80 per share.
About 40% of Asana’s revenue comes from outside the U.S. and it’s present in 190 countries, its executives said during the presentation. It has a gross margin of 87% in the first half, similar to 86% in the last fiscal year.
The company reported $99.7 million in revenue for the six months ended July 31, compared with $61.1 million for the same period last year. Its net loss more than doubled in that period to $76.9 million as research, sales and marketing costs shot up.
Net loss doubled, almost matching revenue for the period? Kind of baffling, especially in a work management market that is increasingly going to be dominated by Google and Microsoft, as I wrote about in What is the Future of Work Management?:
Starting now, work management will be just another set of features built into the business operating systems from Microsoft and Google that the great majority of businesses already rely on, alongside email, documents, file sync and share, chat, whiteboards, video calls, automation, and more. Work management will become both infinitely cheaper and infinitely more valuable as an element of a business operating system, and not just some standalone tool.
A good time for Asana to cash in.
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Intranets
Workvivo raises $16 million to reinvent the intranet in the age of Slack and Zoom | Chris O’Brien introduced me to an intranet vendor I was not tracking, Workvivo:
Workvivo has raised $16 million in venture capital as the Irish company prepares to expand its platform that aims to be a hub for all internal employee communications.
Tiger Global led the round of funding, which also included participation from Frontline Ventures and Enterprise Ireland. The Cork-based company, which had become profitable before taking any external money, has now raised a total of $17.5 million.
The platform is envisioned as being more than just a tool for internal communications:
“It’s not an employee communication platform just for the sake of communication,” CEO and cofounder John Goulding said. “It’s been very deliberately designed around the things that are important for employee engagement. And with everybody being remote, engagement is obviously becoming a lot more prominent in people’s minds.”
Sounds smart.
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Happeo raises $12 million to create a more social intranet | Chris O’Brien again, on a fundraise by Happeo, who are also departing from intranet basics to refocus away from administrators:
“We felt that intranets were typically made only from the point of view of the administrators,” Happeo CEO and cofounder Perttu Ojansuu said. “That means they weren’t as easy to use as they should be.”
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While companies have been using intranets for years to distribute internal communications and offer a hub of resources, they are often little used by employees.
There is no doubt that the principal constituency for intranets has been internal comms staff, who have to do most of the heavy lifting. Companies like Happeo are shifting that emphasis, which means a reconsideration of what rank-and-file employees want from an ‘intranet’, or even what an ‘intranet’ is.
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Happeo and Workvivo will be reviewed in the upcoming intranets report, along with a long list of others, like Simpplr, Igloo, and Microsoft (see Prospectus | Intranets).
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Business OS
Outlook is down: Microsoft web outage hits users worldwide | 1 October outage across the world. Like the incident earlier in the week, Microsoft is trying to determine if new code has introduced instabilities.
“We’re reviewing recent changes to our service to further determine the cause of impact. Users may experience problems with various Exchange Online protocols, including Outlook desktop, mobile devices as well as those dependent on REST functionality,” Microsoft said.
The company followed up that message to say it has diagnosed that a recent configuration update to components that route user requests is the cause of the outage.
“We’ve reverted the update and are monitoring the service for recovery. We apologize for the inconvenience.”
UPDATE: At 6.46am ET, Microsoft tweeted to say the rollback has mitigated the impact for the affected features in SharePoint and Microsoft Teams.
“For impact to the Exchange service, most users are seeing recovery and we’re taking measures to ensure full recovery for all our users worldwide.”
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