Exactly two years ago we wrote this post "It's about the adoption, stupid!" to stress how much simplicity was gaining importance to have Enterprise Social Networks adopted by employees.

I quoted analyst Alan Lepofsky that "2012 would be the year where employees will start hating the social tools".

It took a bit longer, but we are there now.

Have you noticed how complex a product like Yammer got over the last 4 years? There used to be one general feed with all your updates chronologically ordered. See below how easy and simple Yammer was back in 2009.

Yammer in 2009

Today you have the main activity stream with 3 different views, the "Recent Activity" stream, the "Inbox", the "Online now box" and the new "Yammer Now" messages. Plus… you still keep getting default email notifications about everything!

This is the complexity you get today:

Yammer in 2013

Not to tell you what happens if your company wants to "integrate" Yammer with SharePoint. Then your social conversations are in Yammer, but your documents will be stored in SharePoint. Kafkaesque is an understatement here.

What if your company thinks out-of-the-box SharePoint social is good enough? In that scenario your employees have to deal on a daily basis with that cluttered "ribbon", the "community" site and other infamous half-cooked features? You will find out what hate means.

But it is not just Microsoft. We hear similar stories from other social platforms like IBM Connections or Jive.

At Beezy our obsession has always been to fight complexity. With every new functionality that we implement, we need to make sure we don't compromise the inherent simplicity of having less features.

More than ever our customers are very satisfied with our long-term bet on simplicity. If we were to make a New Year resolution for 2014 it will be to keep things as simple as possible. Keep growing our product, but always with improved simplicity.

A Happy Simple 2014 for all your employees!