Facebook at Work to compete with LinkedIn, Google and Microsoft
Users can keep their personal and professional profiles separate if they prefer
Facebook is working behind the scenes on a new website dubbed "Facebook at Work" in a bid to compete with social business and collaboration platforms from the likes of Google and Microsoft, as well as professional social network LinkedIn, according to the Financial Times.
The project, which was first reported by TechCrunch, aims to enable users to chat to colleagues online using a similar tool to Facebook Messenger, connect with professional contacts and collaborate over documents, sources told the newspaper.
The new site, which will supposedly look like Facebook, would allow users to keep their personal and professional profiles separate. The FT suggested that the new website was already being trialled internally and being piloted at a number of companies ahead of an official launch.
The social network, which has been banned by many organisations because of fears over its impact on staff productivity, will be hoping that companies will decide to unblock the website if their employees can better collaborate and work using the site.
Tristan Rogers, CEO of enterprise collaboration process provider Concrete, believes that Facebook's alleged bid to become enterprise friendly was inevitable, particularly with the likes of Dropbox, Box, Slack, Asana, Microsoft and Google all preaching about enterprise value of collaboration tools, but he cites Yammer as an example of a tool that may not have worked.
"Microsoft bought it for $1.2bn with revenues of around $20m, generating a circa 60x multiple. Why? Because it had 100 million users and some schmuck at Microsoft thought that $10 CAC (customer acquisition cost) was cheap, when actually it was CACK. And this is because a user account is not worth anything unless the user that it belongs to is using it and deriving value from it," he said.
Rogers added that driving value was the "billion dollar issue with enterprise software".
"If there is no value then switch it off or stop using it and that's what happened to Yammer and it could happen to 'Facebook for Work' unless it can work out what the value proposition is for the enterprise."