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Meta Is Shuttering Workplace, Its Enterprise Version of Facebook
- netr0ute 2y ago[flagged]
- CPLX 2y agoFor those not familiar this was actually a pretty impressive product. It's what Facebook used internally for employee communication and engagement. They might not have it in their DNA to run a HR-focused SaaS startup within the organization but if you're just familiar with the headlines alone, this thing was actually much more robust of a tool and product than you would guess without looking into it.
- pdmfz 2y agoI actually really liked the product when I worked at Meta. Wish we had something like this at Google.
- nicolashahn 2y agoI'm at Meta, I like using it for the most part. The chat could be improved upon but overall I really like having Facebook-like Groups and I don't think any other platform has something like that.
- Trekkie101-B 2y agoWe use it at work, and I really like it - it's a fairly simple product. The only thing that seemed odd, is development on 'Work Chat' was significantly behind Facebook Messenger. A shame really. It was clean and useful.
- zeroonetwothree 2y agoGroups is great but chat isn’t so good. I’m not sure it made sense to have both together.
- basil-rash 2y agoHow did this compare to Yammer? (“Viva Engage”, if we let the PMs have their way)
- rdm_blackhole 2y agoThinking of Yammer makes me shiver... I never understood what it was supposed to be.
- CPLX 2y agoIt was designed to give David Sacks something to talk about at parties presumably.
- skinkestek 2y agoIt is "the other social network" where our colleagues from certain other countries can share their inspirational quotes, certifications, work anniversaries etc without messing up Teams, Slack or Workplace for the rest of us. That's my understanding at least. (Yes, we use all of these at work.)
- whimsicalism 2y agoThere's a country for MBAs??
- skinkestek 2y agoNot in Norway ;-)
- lkozloff 2y agoI rolled this out when it was "Facebook at Work" at an education non-profit I was working at in Cambodia. It was generally successful and useful for doing the type on internal storytelling we were trying to do. Particularly because teachers and staff didn't have, need or want Slack. It was loads better than Google+, which we had tried before. These days I suspect things like Slack started to take over here, but for that particular time and place it was a great fit.
- j45 2y agoSlack feels a bit different than a social platform. Organizing chat in different ways is still chat. And it's stretching chat a great deal in some use cases. Much like a social feed is still a social feed. I tried Muddy recently and it feels like a genuine step forward in distributed collaboration.
- eitland 2y agoFor anyone like me who are about to start trying to figure out what Muddy is, it seems to be this thing: - Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40309342 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40309342 - homepage: https://www.feelmuddy.com/ https://www.feelmuddy.com/
- j45 2y agoThanks! I forgot to include a link.
- whimsicalism 2y agoteams is taking this space over more than slack. think HN bubble might not realize how much teams is crushing slack right now
- rco8786 2y agoI've never used (or even seen) Teams, but I've seen the userbase graphs. Teams is killing it. Kinda like how Apple Mail is the most popular email client. I've literally never used it and don't know anyone who does. And yet...
- goalonetwo 2y agoWho would seriously trust Facebook/Meta with any internal proprietary data? I'm sure the product must be OK but they did this to themselves by completely disregarding basic privacy.
- zeroonetwothree 2y agoI think the market is just too small to bother with.
- mateus1 2y agoThe idea of having a “work social life” is abhorrent to me. Call me if you need me, email me if you don’t.
- zeroonetwothree 2y agoWorkplace was never about “work social life”
- darby_eight 2y agoI'm legitimately confused why anyone would log on to it if not to use it like social media
- etrautmann 2y agoDo you genuinely think that reflects most people’s views about work life?
- mateus1 2y agoI don’t know. What I don’t need is a virtual place where I pretend to be excited about the company, my coworkers or my boss.
- pavlov 2y agoAre calls and emails not social interactions? Sounds like you have a digitally mediated social life at work, you’re just choosing to use 1980s technologies.
- umeshunni 2y ago> Workplace will be phased out over the next two years and will remain operational until the end of August 2025 > Workplace had as many as 7 million total paying subscribers in May 2021. This is a suprisingly short period of time to shutter a paid service used by a large number of enterprises (and have them migrate to some other system and potentially lose data in the process).
- moralestapia 2y agoYeah, the issue with trillion dollar scale companies is that they're already on at the extreme end of the diminishing returns curve. At its current subscription price, Workplace was bringing in $28 million in revenue. Not bad for me and you, but just 0.0025% of Meta's cap. Crazy.
- zeroonetwothree 2y agoand that revenue only supports ~100 eng salaries. I wonder how many were working on workplace
- umeshunni 2y agoThe $28M is monthly revenue.
- darby_eight 2y ago> 0.0025% of Meta's cap Surely yearly revenue would be more interesting here—presumably pretty much any financial metric you can select in a given year will be dwarfed by market cap.
- moralestapia 2y agoYes and yes.
- mritchie712 2y agometa doesn't have any other enterprise products, so they don't give a shit about them.
- cajunboi34213 2y ago7M users * $4 / user / month * 12 Months / Year = $338M ARR. Not interesting for Facebook.
- zeroonetwothree 2y ago7m was the peak so maybe it went down as well?
- cajunboi34213 2y agoI'm sure the churn rate is pretty high. But slack supposedly had ~5M users and ~$300M in revenue when it was bought by Salesforce for $27B
- wmab 2y agoMeta is becoming more like Google in it's wide ranging products in disparate markets and ultimately shutting them down one by one. Unlike Google they seem to be more focused and therefore it's good to see the shuttering of Workplace given it's not a strong contender in it's market. For most large businesses in order to move the needle they need to be making really large bets in a few really large markets to keep growth. A Slack alternative would never move the needle for them, given the most successful (Slack) sold at the top of the market for a "large" amount of money, which was $28B (only ~2% of Meta's market cap today).
- smt88 2y agoI still find it incredible that innovation at Meta and Alphabet is so bad that they haven't built a highly profitable product at either company in their entire histories. They've only ever hit home runs with ad businesses.
- immibis 2y agoI've heard before that Google has never created a useful product, period - all the Google products that are worth using - Android, Gmail, formerly Search, ads (for advertisers), Reader - were acquisitions.
- whimsicalism 2y agoi feel like these comments are motivated by anti-tech animus more than the facts. who did Google acquire gmail from? who did Google acquire Search from?
- wmab 2y agoI think it goes to my earlier point that they're so massive now that they need to ship huge bets to move the needle even a little bit. Gmail and Search both are valid, but to an earlier point are now decades old. Both of these businesses have used inorganic growth for their needle movers - the acquisitions that changed the game for them: Meta was Whatsapp and Instagram; Google was Youtube and DoubleClick.
- dep_b 2y agoOh Workplace. Where HR types were sending messages that would not lead to any notification via e-mail or phone while everybody useful was on Slack. No I didn't get your message. It looked fairly competent and unobtrusive the few times I did use it though. I mean some people are forced to use Teams. Got to respect that.
- ethagnawl 2y agoTrying to find anything within Workplace was an exercise in futility. Half the time, the content was just not indexed/searchable and the other half it was something that you were tagged in but didn't have permission to access.
- swozey 2y agoHR teams fascinate me. My entire company aside from HR uses Notion for all of our documentation. Even our Legal team uses it to interact with Engineering. "Are we allowed to buy this software, contact, yadda yadda." If you have an HR question? Directly DM someone in HR or ask in their public slack channel. No living documentation anywhere. The same questions asked over and over again in their slack channel. And most of the time the question winds up going to DMs after initially being asked in Slack, so then nobody else sees what the answer is (assuming not a private matter, of course).
- navane 2y agoHR is not there to answer your questions, it's there to answer questions about you. Their mere presence to you is a facade.
- yoyoyoyop 2y agolol seeya, really disliked using this product at work
- ChrisArchitect 2y agoAvoid syndicated content. Actual article: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-14/meta-is-shuttering-facebook-workplace-its-social-network-for-the-office https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-14/meta-is-s... TechCrunch source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40356516 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40356516
- kjkjadksj 2y agoWhy not? If its syndicated bloomberg still gets paid and I don't need to pay for their paywall.
- immibis 2y agoHacker News is owned by the same general class of people who get paid when you pay for paywalls.
- kjkjadksj 2y agoExactly why I avoid paying paywalls, these folks are rich enough and I am not.
- karaterobot 2y agoThis comment is genuinely confusing to me. I think the people who get paid when you pay for paywalls are largely media companies and content creators. I think the owners of HN are, broadly speaking, investors. I think these are two different groups, and I don't understand the equivalence you're drawing.
- kjkjadksj 2y agoWho do you think owns media companies? Investors, broadly speaking.
- karaterobot 2y agoMaybe if you zoom out really far. But they're not getting paid if you subscribe to Substack or the New York Times, at least not in a way that is more meaningful than investors getting paid when you buy an apple at the grocery store, or rent a hotel room, or pay your phone bill. What' the difference, and why draw the line at paying for news articles and not something else?
- gordon_freeman 2y agoNot a fan or a user of Workplace but I do not understand the reason of shutting it down to external customers if it is going to be used internally for Meta workers anyways? I mean Meta can keep it available if customers want to use it without doing massive marketing, sales or support. Can someone help explain what kind of cost savings Meta can have by shutting it down for external customers?
- kleinsch 2y agoUsed to work on Workplace a while ago, not at Meta anymore. What Meta needs to prioritize for themselves is very different from what they need to prioritize in order to compete with Slack, Teams, Zoom, etc. This is also not a product that sells or supports itself.
- zeroonetwothree 2y agoExternal customers require extra sales, support, ops, eng building specific features, etc Internal support can be much more limited and targeted. Consider cooking your family dinner vs running a restaurant.
- rdednl 2y agoI really liked this product (used when working at Meta). What I found interesting is that it's very similar to Facebook, but it optimizes for the opposite values. While Facebook newsfeed seems to try to maximize your time scrolling, watching ads, clicking, useless notifications; Workplace was continuously suggesting changes to maximize productivity, such as "you have not interacted with this type of notifications, stop receiving them" or "this group doesn't seem interesting to you, unfollow group" or even "set a productivity block to stop receiving notifications". Same company, probably same underlying codebase and structure, but opposite reward optimization for showing items in the news feed and maximize productivity/time spend on feed.
- anotherhue 2y agoI'll be impressed when it recommends you logout.
- psunavy03 2y agoThat speaks volumes about how they value their devs as opposed to their users, and frankly doesn't surprise me. They don't have any interest in hacking the brains of their employees . . . or perhaps they do, but in a different direction.
- CactusOnFire 2y agoSpeaking what might be obvious, but I would love a social media experience optimized in a similar way to this: Least amount of time & attention spent on the platform while facilitating the most in-human contact.
- munificent 2y agoSo far, no one has figured out a business model for that that works, unfortunately.
- paulddraper 2y agoThey optimize for their customer base. Which are advertisers.
- Lammy 2y agoThe best Workplace instance was FBAnon — RIP
- nikolay 2y agoIt was an expensive service. Not sure who in their right mind would have used it. Not to mention, it was not linked to Facebook and that was the biggest missed opportunity.
- ethagnawl 2y agoTo their credit, they seem to have used it extensively internally.
- nikolay 2y agoFor free.
- jonathankoren 2y agoNot linking it to public FB was a decision because most people don't want their work and personal lives mixed.
- nikolay 2y agoI didn't say that, but connecting with coworkers with their accounts would have been nice. It's a social network, after all!
- jonathankoren 2y agoNothing stops you
- nikolay 2y agoSearching for them how? By name? I'm talking about an unambiguous interface. Also, job verification by being a member of a workplace, etc. In the past, TheFacebook had similar features about colleges, work, then they got rid of those - not sure why. And then they launched a separate product, which was doomed since launched.
- dom96 2y agoThis is such a shame. I have missed Workplace ever since I left my job at Facebook and even tried to influence my current company to adopt it... It truly comes really close to eliminating the need for emails without sacrificing you learning about what's going on at the company. Important announcements just get shown to you via the news feed and it works so well.
- dkuntz2 2y agoi still can't believe this is a real product they were able to get companies to pay for
- mv4 2y agoThis makes me sad. I loved Workplace, it was a great productivity tool for program/product mgt when I was at Meta.
- 7952 2y agoBit off topic but I think there is lots of potential for corporate use of WhatsApp as a way of onboarding new employees and as an backup channel when other systems (like teams) fail. It could be a mix of bots, HR and other employees. Something that is better than phone/sms but lighter than the full corporate system.
- someonehere 2y agoIt was being planned and talked about internally in ~2010. They had this idea that because everyone knew how to use Facebook and they already had your data, why not provide an HRIS system built around that.
- abustamam 2y agoThe startup I work at used Workplace when I joined. It's been a few years since we transitioned to Slack (and we now use Discord) but I remember Workplace being a royal pain. Team members would routinely not get messages sent via DM, requiring a hard reload of the app to get them. It was not uncommon for folks to send a message, and if no response 5 minutes later, send a text to that person asking if they received that message. Stuff like this is pretty unacceptable for an app intended for use at the enterprise level. And we were just a team of ~10.
- sayaaugustin123 2y agoHey there! I work at JustCall, a startup offering a solid alternative to Meta Workspace for small businesses. We're currently providing a 3-month free access to JustCall Workspace, including white-glove onboarding. Would you be interested in checking out Workspace?