Yammer is like a corporate version of Twitter; it has a lot of potential to replace the clumsy back-and-forth that happens on email about projects, meetings, etc. It works off a web browser and there’s also a stand-alone application. Which apparently uses Adobe Air.
The application has been hung up for a week or so, so I investigated and found it was begging for an Adobe Air update. I tried updating Adobe Air but it wouldn’t install because Yammer couldn’t close, and Yammer couldn’t close because Air wasn’t working. I finally had to use Task manager to find that yammer.exe was running, and kill it. Five or six administrative clicks later, Air was updated.
How exactly most corporate users would navigate this administrative chess game is beyond me. I’d love to know what the IT support cost works out to be, but another cost is that promising applications wind up not getting adopted or accepted, resulting in a hidden cost of lost opportunity.
Someday Adobe will create an application whose only function will be to fail to update itself. Oh wait; that’s all of them.