Socialcast

» see socialcast.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

VMware bought Socialcast on 31 May 2011 and did not buy it in order to run it. The plan announced that day was to take the company feed and push it out through everything else VMware owned, so the news of an organization would surface inside the tools people already had open. Seven thousand customer companies came along with the deal. The thing described never got built, and the product stayed where it landed until somebody switched it off seven years later.

Underneath the pitch it was an internal social network. One feed for a whole company, with the same posting and commenting any public site gave you, plus groups for teams that wanted their own corner. Tim Young built it in San Francisco out of a company that had been called Event Robot until the tail end of summer 2008, and the argument fit in a sentence: email buries the work inside private threads and a feed does not.

The money was modest by the standards of what came after. True Ventures led a $1.4 million Series A in April 2009 and another $8 million followed in March 2010 with Menlo Ventures alongside, which is close to ten million dollars for a company sold fourteen months later. By the sale it had more than 7,000 customer organizations. Nokia and Philips were among the named ones, and so was VMware itself, which is how the buyer got interested in the first place.

What made it enterprise software rather than a website was that you did not have to hand your company's conversation to a startup. Socialcast shipped as a virtual machine you could drop onto your own servers and run behind your own firewall, which in 2010 was the only version of this a bank would agree to look at. A second piece called Reach let you drop the stream into other applications, so a discussion could sit against a customer record instead of living in a separate tab.

An internal social network has a head count underneath it. The premise is that you work somewhere large enough that you cannot know who else works there, and the feed is how you find out what the far end of the building is doing. That is a Nokia problem. It is not the shape of the engineering places I have worked in, where the organization fits in your head and the news arrives from whoever walks past the desk on the way to the kettle. The product was sound. It needed an employer I have never had.

~ the chronicle ~

~ a feed with a staff directory ~

The design was borrowed openly and there was no reason to hide it. You got a stream with @ mentions running through it, and a profile with your job title on it. What the consumer sites did not have was the directory underneath, so every name in the feed resolved to a real person with a manager and a department. Socialcast leaned on that hard. It integrated with Outlook and SharePoint because that is where the work of these companies actually sat, and it shipped apps for iPhone and BlackBerry back when the second one still mattered to a corporate IT department.

The category was crowded and short-lived. Yammer was the one everybody remembers, bought by Microsoft in 2012 for $1.2 billion and dissolved into Office over the following decade. Salesforce built Chatter into its own product rather than selling it separately. Almost none of these survived as their own thing, because the enterprise social network turned out to be a feature of a suite rather than a business, and the companies that bought them all worked that out at roughly the same time.

~ what vmware wanted with it ~

VMware in 2011 was trying to buy its way into being something other than an infrastructure vendor. Zimbra had come the year before and SlideRocket six weeks earlier, and Socialcast arrived at the end of May into a program that was being sold to analysts as a workspace for the post-PC era. The words used at the time were a social layer running across the applications people already work with.

It never assembled. Zimbra was sold on to Telligent in 2013 and SlideRocket went to ClearSlide the same year. Socialcast was the piece nobody bothered to move. It kept shipping and kept renewing its customers, owned the whole time by a company whose sales force sold hypervisors and had no idea how to price a social network. Nothing dramatic happened to it. That is the part worth recording, because a product with seven thousand paying organizations does not usually die of being ignored.

~ a year of notice ~

The end-of-availability notice landed in 2018 and set two dates a year apart. Availability ended on 17 May 2018 and paid licenses kept their support for another twelve months, to 17 May 2019. The free communities were decommissioned in between, on 1 August 2018. Customers were told to start investigating replacements and to export their community data before the door closed, which is a better ending than most of what is buried on this site, and it was still an ending nobody in that customer list had asked for.

Igloo Software ran a campaign that same month offering Socialcast customers somewhere to land, and the fact that a competitor thought this was worth a press release tells you how many companies were suddenly holding a decade of internal conversation with no home for it. VMware's own reasoning was not really about Socialcast. By 2018 the office had already picked Slack or been handed Microsoft Teams, and an enterprise social network bought in 2011 had nothing left to say for itself.

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