If Steve Jobs had shipped the minimum viable iPhone, might we have concluded that people preferred a keyboard? If Tesla had manufactured the minimum viable car, would anyone still be driving it?

Maybe the reason we don’t have big ideas is because our entire approach to building them is sometimes so frugal with time, money, and belief. Lean startup techniques have revolutionized how we build software, but the lean startup has also turned the a startup’s only initial asset – the conviction that an idea will work — into a villain rather than the hero. This is why we so often see startups pivot rather than persevere.

It also talks about “the beast at the back of your mind always yelling ‘FASTER, FASTER,’ so loud that the little poet in there hardly has a moment to think.” It was the second time we appeared on TechCrunch in December, the first being an interview about Redfin Collections, our new feature for sharing pretty pictures of homes for sale:

Despite coming out late in the day on New Year’s Eve, the post about product design was shared by more than a thousand people, especially designers and engineers, which surprised me since I almost didn’t publish it at all.

A combination of factors, including just being busy with work, the way I feel about the Internet since being on the wrong side of a mob, and the broadening of this blog’s audience, got me a little shy about blogging.

Thanks to Michael Arrington for giving me a little push.

The post Redfin on TechCrunch: The Maximum, Beautiful Product appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

What that means is that there are more Internet startups with massive revenue growth than I can keep track of, and I can keep track of quite a few. It means that when TechCrunch’s Sarah Lacy argues that high-revenue startups like Zynga and Facebook operate in a completely different universe than the rest of Silicon Valley, she isn’t completely right.

We heard the same argument from plenty of folks when we wondered what Mint would be worth now: that the increase in valuations of Zynga and Facebook are totally unrelated to those of earlier-stage startups, because only a few venture-backed Internet companies are generating serious revenues.

What I’m seeing instead is different: yes Zynga and Facebook are in the major leagues, but there is a very healthy farm system with plenty of prospects moving up through the ranks. This is why the broad-based increase in valuations isn’t just  inflation, but the result of Internet startups’ getting much, much better at generating revenue.

What happened? First, at the end of 2008 startups finally stopped listening to the most misinterpreted — and sometimes just wrong — advice in the Internet’s history: Chris Anderson’s insistence, just as Apple opened the iTunes store to software and venture funding hit the skids, that everything on the Internet be free.

To be sure, the idea of a free trial application is a good one, but many entrepreneurs became squeamish about ever asking consumers to get out their wallets. Music was Mr. Anderson’s primary example of a good that consumers would stop buying, but now Pandora, the company with the temerity to charge for music, is going public.

As we’ve argued many, many times before, as early as 2008, a whole new generation of entrepreneurs has learned from Steve Jobs to ask consumers to pay, early and often, for mobile applications like Angry Birds, or virtual goods in Farmville, or actual goods like clothes, textbooks and baby gear:

Startups have turned to the most direct way to get money: from their users. And consumers are ready to buy, buying software fast-food style on the iPhone, and shelling out for premium subscriptions on sites like Picnik and Animoto.

The change has been good, for startups and for the consumers buying their software, the quality of which has improved immeasurably over the past few years. Now, most of the companies that got serious about generating revenues are growing like crazy. It isn’t too stuck-up to call this change a new Internet era.

The first era was the 1990′s Age of Eyeballs, when every website sought to get as many visitors as possible, without regard for the cost of gaining each visitor or the revenues each generated.  The second was the mid-2000′s Age of Acquisition, when Paul Graham encouraged most entrepreneurs to build websites as features of a larger product, and the goal was to get bought by Google or some lesser light. Since big, unsustainable startups had failed in 1990s, small became  beautiful.

Now we are in The Age of Revenues, in which many Internet startups are maturing into big companies with big revenues. We’ll see more companies invest in large tele-sales operations — the whale-hunting salesmen are mostly relics, as small transactions have flourished like plankton — and we’ll see more companies grow, with more accretive acquisitions at much higher prices. And though there will undoubtedly be more ups and downs, we’ll see more public offerings too.

With great revenues come great power: a new generation of Internet titans. After years of insisting that the Internet had matured, nobody now believes that in two years the only Web behemoths will be Microsoft, Google and Yahoo. In fact, folks have begun to doubt that any of those three will rule the Internet the way they once did.

It’s an amazing turn-about. 2008 year wasn’t, as Sequoia claimed, the death of good times, but the birth of a new, long-lived era of broad and massive revenue growth. The new school of financiers at Sequoia were right about the global economy, which is still a disaster zone outside of Silicon Valley. They were just wrong about how entrepreneurs would react to it.

The post The Age of Revenues appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

Now this morning, the word is that TechCrunch is for sale. In interviews last week, last month, last year, Mike has said that he is thriving within TechCrunch, and that no one has any plans to sell the company, which now generates more than $10 million per year in revenue. And now today Mike observed that if he were trying to sell the company, he wouldn’t joke about it as an aside on a panel at Seattle University, marketing the company as a worn-out has-been that nobody would really want.

This is undoubtedly true. Anyone who has asked Mike directly about TechCrunch’s future, whether in public forums or in private, knows that the company has found a way out of the usual conundrum facing big blogs, which tend to run the founding editor into the ground, or lose their personality when he hires a team. TechCrunch is now growing happily, with a co-editor, a CEO, and a round-the-clock team of writers with their own bizarre styles.

So why didn’t Mike subject the rest of last night’s panel to a standard-issue TechCrunch sales pitch, blandly reciting how “great” and “exciting” everything is? John Cook can’t understand why a public figure making public statements can’t be taken at his word, and Mike can’t understand why he’s being treated like the CEOs of Motorola and Boeing, who never say anything interesting because their every utterance is, for both speaker and listener, nothing more than a recalibration of their companies’ stock price.

Everywhere he appears, Mike seems bewildered that we have become so earnest: about “entrepreneurialism” as a modern-day priesthood, about TechCrunch as an institution rather than a blog. What he seems to love about TechCrunch — about Silicon Valley and Seattle and all of its entrepreneurs — has always been the idea that we’re making stuff for fun; that the ideas and their inventors matter, not the publicists and the deal-makers; that we care too much and then feel silly about it; that we take ourselves seriously and then not seriously at all — and that everybody knows the difference.

Now TechCrunch is a bigger business than most of the companies it covers. We can stuff Mike into a suit and ask him to act the part, but I for one prefer the original edition: the overgrown hobbyist, the compulsive pot-stirrer, the fur-flying panelist.

The post About Last Night… appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

In a success-disaster, the best-case scenario is so unexpected that it results in a fiasco. The web servers crash under the load. The dog catches the car. The Democrats win Congress. You wear the same outfit Sunday morning as on Saturday night.

Twitter is a good example of a success-disaster. Having a child is another one. You spend all your energy iterating, not planning. Why think when you can experiment? Why plan when it’s faster to fail? As my old partner, the great Joe McVeigh, liked to say at almost any given moment, “MOVE! MOVE! MOVE!”

At Redfin, we have certainly moved, lurching from one success-disaster to another, rarely investing much money in a project until it made money. This is the kind of discipline you embrace after a layoff, which happened two years ago but which we still remember today.

Yet sooner or later you have to hire recruiters, managers, support staff, on the assumption that you’ll continue to grow. Our 2010 plan calls for all sorts of hiring, more actually than we’ve been able to manage. This is a success-success, where you succeed because you assumed you would succeed, not in spite of yourself.

The most dangerous thing a startup can do is assume success: costs get ahead of revenues, growth can become an end in itself, headcount can become the solution to every problem. Your whole business becomes like a truck driving down a gravel road with the windows down; the wind smells sweet until you hit the brakes and the cab fills with everything trailing behind you for the last 20 miles.

But even though real estate has more than its share of ups and downs, we have reached the point where we have to hit the gas. If you plan for success and then succeed, you keep on succeeding, rather than spending the next three months trying to catch up. Like someone running alongside the truck, we’ve spent too much time trying to catch up to our own business.

What this means is that we look good on the outside, but we’re scrambling on the inside. Yes, yes, we received all sorts of accolades Monday for the numbers we just talked about on TechCrunch: the company is generating revenue just now at roughly a $30-million run-rate, on track for profits this year.

Folks from other real estate websites asked if the revenues included the half of the commissions we refunded to our customers (no, of course not). We got the usual questions about investing opportunities (thank you, but our existing investors have bought all the equity we want to sell). It felt great.

But the reality isn’t just top-line growth. I got emails about the TechCrunch video while I was on the phone with a customer disappointed his house didn’t sell this month. Agents are rushing to keep up with demand. Support technicians are racing to bring new computers online. Recruiting and retaining the absolute best people is our biggest challenge.

There’s so much to do that I feel a little self-conscious watching myself yuck it up with Michael Arrington, who by the way, is one of the toughest, most probing, aggressive and fun interviewers we’ve ever faced.

So we wanted to give thanks — thank you, thank you, thank you — to all the people who helped Redfin grow this far – past and present employees & partners — and to those grinding away on problems even as you read this. What makes Redfin glamorous isn’t always glamorous. There is still plenty to do. We still don’t know how the story of Redfin will end.  But the real story isn’t in the TechCrunch video. It never is, it never could be. It is bigger, more scary, more complicated, more fun than I can ever properly tell, even in the wide open spaces of this blog.

The post The Success-Disaster & Redfin's TechCrunch Video appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

Redfin’s Matt Goyer read it first, to make sure it wouldn’t offend anyone. Matt’s an insightful soul, so I knew he would also appreciate the nuances of my argument.

When he was done, he looked up and said, “So you’re saying I should be a ***hole.”
“No,” I said, “I’m saying you should be a sensitive ***hole…” We stared at each other. “Or maybe not an ***hole at all.”

It’s a tough balance. As the CEO of InterContinental Hotels Group said of himself in a recent New York Times profile: “I’m very sensitive to how people are thinking and feeling at any given moment.”

But he also described himself as a super-action hero, boldly acting on his own in ways that surprised everyone. And this is what’s nearly impossible: to know how a decision will make everyone feel, then to make that decision anyway. It’s why many great technology entrepreneurs have mild forms of Asperger’s syndrome: it frees them to act, to decide, to drive people without much emotional friction.

If you don’t start that way, maybe that’s how you end up. Last week, I saw the “September Issue,” a documentary about Anna Wintour, the head of Vogue Magazine, and her efforts to publish its phone-book-sized September 2007 issue. It was moving to see so many flamboyant, talented people work so hard to make something irrevocable, definitive and perfect; many are undoubtedly now unemployed.

The entire movie consists of Anna walking into one room after another, picking one skirt or photo out of 50, and leaving the creators of the other 49 absolutely annihilated.  Time and again, she is asked how she feels. She mostly answers with the warmth of a bare steel table.

For some, it is necessary to be this way. The historian Edmund Morris described a day he spent with President Reagan, starting just outside the elevator with an unscripted photo opportunity alongside a police officer, blinded in the line of duty. This meeting and the ones that followed put Morris through the wringer; the sensitive writer was exhausted by lunch.

But Reagan, famous for momentarily failing to recognize his own son in a handshake line, deftly moved from one emotionally drenched encounter like this to another without apparently feeling a thing. Morris concluded that this detachment was the only way Reagan could make any decision affecting millions.

I don’t know if the choice is that stark for all of us. In the mostly dreadful Wim Wenders film, “Wings of Desire,” the angels can hear the thoughts of everyone in a train, on a street or in a cafe. The film is a near-unbearable cacophony of mortal thoughts that gradually becomes a comforting hum. When one angel forsakes his heavenly powers, he enters a cone of silence, unable to know what anyone is thinking but now able to act in the world. He can’t believe how lonely it is.

This loneliness is all well and good if you’re Ronald Reagan, or Anna Wintour, or an angel, who knows just what to do. But for the rest of us, the cacophony is essential to making a decision.

We engage people because we have to in order to figure out the best course of action. This is what makes deciding in the end so painful: that we’ve identified with a point of view completely that we then have to reject. It is hard to be emotional and then unemotional. It is hard to lose yourself in your company’s mission without occasionally forgetting the feelings of the  people on the mission with you.

But I have never given up on the idea that you can — and you have to — strike a balance between empathy and decision.

The post The Sensitive Orifice appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

Mike blames everyone for it, including the New York Times, citing a conversation he and NYT editor Damon Darlin had before last summer’s Naked Truth, when Damon said he reads Michael’s writing every day. Mike appreciated the compliment, but in today’s essay he worried that it easily leads to the New York Times’ taking a TechCrunch story and re-writing it for the NYT’s broader audience. I am not sure this is theft — when an article appears in the New England Journal of Medicine or in TechCrunch, the New York Times can reasonably conclude that my mother didn’t see it — but we can all agree with Mike that theft is wrong.

A few moments later on that day last summer, I asked Mike why stolen music, stolen images, stolen television didn’t bother him when presumably theft from TechCrunch would. Mike didn’t miss a beat. He said stealing from TechCrunch was fine so long as there was attribution:  spammers often take TechCrunch content word-for-word and re-post it under their own name, as if they had written it. I smiled, because it was an argument based on pride, not money: sometimes I think Mike is an artist posing as an entrepreneur. Even when you steal U2, Mike argued, you know it’s U2. It was a good point, but I still wondered if artists less wealthy than Bono would agree that this is the main point.

Now it seems that Mike, one of the most influential thinkers in technology and media, has broadened the scope of his concerns, to journalists who re-write his essays, not just those who re-post them. The problem, Mike now says in this morning’s essay, is that quality and originality are irrelevant when the “portals and search engines” “force feed” people whatever content is most profitable to display.

The argument that these Internet portals and search engines hold all the power has been dismissed as so much whining, even by TechCrunch earlier this month. In this morning’s essay, Mike cites AOL for linking to its own sub-par content, often re-written based on original reporting from TechCrunch and elsewhere. But he may as well talk about Google too, which only links to content that drives Google’s content-must-be-free business model (in Google’s defense, it’s algorithm rewards quality whereas AOL does not). In both cases, Mike can’t afford to opt out of AOL or Google, and bravely says he would rather use the Internet’s fire than fight it.

Hear, hear! But just noting that we should use that fire for good — and not cheer as it burns down everything in sight — is a huge step in the right direction. For years, artists, photographers, film-makers, writers and musicians have made less money so YouTube, EZNews, Napster & Boxee can make more. Sometimes we have been distracted by debates about whether once-bloated newspapers deserved to live or die, which allowed us to avoid the fundamental question of whose side we’re on: the creators or the distributors.

Theoretically, when Blogger eliminates the printing press and YouTube eliminates the movie studio, writers and directors should make more money, directly from their audience. It can still work out that way, and I believe it will, but the first step is to admit that it’s a problem that those who create are getting fleeced — to a greater degree than the publisher, record producer or studio executive ever could fleece them — by the technologies that distribute their creations.

Another way of saying this is that if AOL keeps screwing Mike, he’ll eventually stop taking the time to write such good stuff. And when he does that, the world will be a much poorer place… not just for Mike, but for all of us readers and for AOL too. My guess is that before that process is complete, the best and brightest in tech will start working for the artists, and not just the aggregators and distributors. A little balance in this regard will do us all a world of good.

(Photo credit: Randy Stewart, blog.stewtopia.com)

The post A Media-Tech King Contemplates Anarchy appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

Others will say that it’s another Kelman case for building Death-Star-sized startups rather than operating on a more hand-crafted scale.  This is a bit truer, though I’d like to think that a company can get big without selling its soul. We just believe that the funnest thing in the world is to take something small and make it big. Growing is better than not growing.

And of course being capital efficient is better than dilution, so we’re not trying to persuade anyone to raise money. But even if you don’t take investors’ money — especially if you don’t — it’s useful to take their mindset, at least for the five minutes it takes to read what we learned while raising money from Greylock.

Because no matter how hard I try, I get into the weeds at Redfin and forget to think strategically about what we’re becoming. The process of raising money is an antidote to that tendency. While I sometimes resented having to spend a few weeks on Sand Hill Road explaining our story, by the end of it I had decided it was a good thing to be a little scared while talking to really smart people about basic strategic questions. You have to think everything through all over again, confirm some decisions, reconsider others, and come out ready to execute like a wild animal.

Hopefully we simulated that experience in a way that is useful to you. While writing the essay, I began to reflect on how my attitude had changed about VCs.

I used to think of them as the Wizard of Oz. As a 25-year-old raising money for Plumtree in the ’90′s, I often found myself hyper-ventilating in a rented Ford Festiva parked off Sand Hill Road, saying to myself THIS IS IT, THIS IS THE BIG ONE. Back then, I looked to Greylock or Sequoia as more than just a source of money or good advice, but as the only remaining dispensary of prestige or meaning — a Harvard that could reconsider my application, an Oracle capable of anointing our little startup as The One.

You need someone to look up to. When your first job out of school is at a startup, you stop believing in the 68th-floor executive suite, the older gentleman in the bespoke suit, the whole adult world that seemed so magnificently ordered just a few years before. You’re surrounded by dingbats just like yourself. There is no Star Chamber, only a series of poorly carpeted rooms that you will progress through for the rest of your professional life. By 24, the great chain of being had become so discombobulated for me that I was no longer even sure Coke was better than Safeway Select.

Since then I’ve become more of a humanist in my career, taking comfort in the idea that we can each decide what is meaningful or prestigious for ourselves, that there is no one to believe in or beseech except other well-meaning folks like ourselves.

But I’m still a little puzzled by VCs, who now sometimes seem more like the precogs in “Minority Report,” confined for most of their lives to a sensual-deprivation chamber, lightened at one end by the flickering of an endless PowerPoint preso: formidably gifted, carefully consulted, unsplattered by the muck of Redfin’s everyday reality, and yes, still tinged with my own feelings of reverence. It wouldn’t be a job I’d ever like — I have a bet with Madrona’s Greg Gottesman that I’ll never become a venture capitalist, he doesn’t know much emotion I need to put into and take out of a job —  but even after all the ways I’ve become disillusioned about what not to believe in, it’s a perspective I value a lot.

Photo credits: Neato Coolville on Flickr, Warner Brothers, 20th Century Fox.

The post All the Stuff That Wouldn't Fit in Redfin's TechCrunch Essay appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

But the author sort of misses the point. He worries that Google is using its power to screw Yahoo, AOL or Microsoft (where he probably works), not the consumer. He talks about sinister scenarios where Google arbitrarily refuses to run an ad, or dongs companies that don’t advertise from its search results. These scenarios either don’t seem likely or worrisome to me.

And more to the point, we don’t have to imagine such abuses of power; the Internet has already changed in literally billions of ways to accommodate Google. Overwhelmingly, Google has made the Internet a more organized, consumer-friendly place. But any mass of that size operating at the center of the Internet, however sunny and life-giving it may be, can’t help but deform it in unnatural ways, too.

This is a concern we first raised in April, arguing in an essay about how newspapers compete in the Google age that Google’s ability to shape the Internet is far more complete and long-lasting than Microsoft’s supposed monopoly of the desktop. I hope Bing will begin to change that, though I have been less impressed than others by its 8% jump in traffic, simply because some of that has been driven by one-time press hits and ads.

The fact is that every day, people make web pages dumber so Google can index them. At last Thursday’s Naked Truth, Jonathan Sposato talked about how Picnik is largely invisible to Google because Picnik is coded in Flash, a platform that allows you to do magical things to photos from a web browser  – but one which Google’s robots still don’t really understand. What this means is that Picnik in some ways is too smart for Google –and pays the price, getting very little very traffic from search. It should come as no surprise then that fewer and fewer web applications have followed Picnik’s suit, even though as consumers we often wish they would.

For our part, Redfin just had a debate on Friday about whether to optimize our site for consumers or for Google. At stake was how to provide home-buying tips within our search application. One option is as a link to a separate web page. The other option is in-line, so that users can click on a control to see more information within the context of their search.  The first option is Google-friendly, because the indexing robot doesn’t know how to click for more info, it can mostly only follow links. The second option is user-friendly, because most consumers don’t want their search interrupted while another page loads.

I think we’ll end up choosing the user-friendly option this time, but really the conversation shouldn’t even be happening. And it happens all the time, at Redfin and everywhere else. Just last year, we argued about how many similar listings to show on a given listing web page; users would prefer to see five similar listings but Google doesn’t mind if we show 20 or 50. The more similar listings we show, the more probably can get indexed. Today, we show 10 similar listings.

The differences go beyond how information is presented. Google doesn’t like websites that charge money, or limit information only to registered users. To show some broker’s listings, Redfin has to register users. Google’s robots can’t sign up for a Redfin account, and never see or index that information.

Some websites, like ZipRealty, register users to see details on every listing, so that Zip can follow up with a sales call or email. And I am very happy to report that Google punishes them for it. This is one reason why Redfin has  been growing traffic faster than Zip. And it’s one reason that newspapers haven’t been able to charge users money, because Google won’t index content that it can’t show for free. This makes me unhappy, because some information is worth paying for.

So to Google, you’re either a media company, a website that displays information like a media company, or you’re somewhat invisible. Another way of thinking about this is that Google forces every website to be the braun — providing different types of information in a simple format its robots can understand — while Google itself is the brain, acting as the central hub for people to find their  way to information. When we optimize our site for Google, we are enthusiastically out-sourcing more and more of our brain. Another way of saying this is that as more and more people access the listings on Redfin’s site via Google search, our home page is increasingly not  a Redfin page, but a Google search page.

In many ways, I think this is a good thing, as it gives consumers the freedom to move from site to site using Google as a well-known guide. But we should at least acknowledge that all websites are now building themselves to be understood by one search engine. If you have to choose one company as the least common denominator for the entire Internet, you could no better than Google, but it is after all still only one company.

The post Is It User-Friendly or Google-Friendly? appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

The premise of the post isn’t that Redfin has found our way out of the woods yet, only that we’ve been in there longer than others; the housing bubble burst a year before the market did. So far, the essay is steadily climbing the del.icio.us charts.

It was originally going to be a top-10 list of tips, but Redfin’s professorial Chris Glew told me that, when interviewing for his first job at Redfin, he had surmised from my blog posts (for DIY PR,  financial modeling and startup hardships) that all of his answers should be in the form of a top-10 list.

So, I made a top-9 list instead.

Thanks to Wes, Sylvia and Marc for giving the post a going-over, and to a loyal blog reader — why can’t I find his comment? — for asking why startups are so conservative, which became the point of departure for this latest effort.

The post Redfin on TechCrunch: The First-Time CEO's Recession-Survival Guide appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

Of course, Dan was only being polite: the appeal of Yammer’s business model is that anyone can start using it (Redfin only has to pay to control it). And even if I’d said no, another Redfin employee would have started using it anyway.

So I said yes. And then thought: what does this mean? And what have we done? 

What Does Yammer Mean?
What Yammer means to me is first that there’s a new model for selling enterprise software, and it resembles nothing more than George Soros’s efforts to undermine the Soviets by air-dropping fax machines behind the Iron Curtain: tools are downloaded and used, with executives & IT only later having to accommodate the facts on the ground. The whole question of whether Yammer is actually productive is beside the point, because it’s so easy and fun.

Yammer also means something more, that email is broken: overwhelmed with spam, cumbersome to open, with responses feeling like an obligation rather than an option. If you want to deliver a message to someone, almost any other medium is more likely to get noticed: IM, Facebook, Twitter, RSS.

What Have We Done?
But the bigger question about Redfin’s use of Yammer is what have we done?

While I am glad to try a new technology — Dan is such a fearless pioneer — I worry that Yammer might be worse than work, and worse even than no-work. At least when you’re browsing ESPN.com, you feel bad about it. Yammer happens at work, and it sounds like work — you can always tell when someone is writing an email, IM or Twitter, because their typing is so much faster and noisier — so people think it is work, with one crucial exception: it may not get work done.

I’m not sure I buy the talk about collaboration. I’ve seen passive-aggressive arguments happen over email and (less over) IM — Skype’s workrooms are the exception; they’re awesome — that could have been avoided or settled in a few minutes face to face; will Yammer be much different?

As it is, I have elaborate fantasies about outlawing the whole Internet for hours at a time, or even for an entire workday. When I marvel at how a historical colossus like Theodore Roosevelt (definitive naval history of 1812, four-volume history of American frontier, a staggering number of slaughtered animals, U.S. President) or Honore de Balzac (dozens of coffee-fueled novels, written from midnight – 3 in the afternoon, while standing up) had time to accomplish so much, I usually attribute it to talent, servants — and no Internet.

Staving Off a Coup
But whether a shot at greatness is in anyone’s cards, I don’t have the guts to pull the plug on email, IM or Yammer for even a minute: there would be a coup, and Cynthia Pang would mount my head on a stake outside the Dexter-Horton building by the end of the day. I think a lot of executives who are asked about IM or Yammer agree to it for the same reason: they don’t want to seem like Scrooges or Luddites, and they’re not sure they could stop anyone anyway. And truth be told, we want our Yammer too.

Gentle reader and Dan Fabulich (who is, by the way, mutantly productive and far less curmudgeonly than I am) what do you think? Is Yammer good or bad for actually getting work done? Once we actually start using Yammer, we’ll report back on the results. Right now I’m not sure — but I’m excited to use it anyway.

(Flickr credit: soldiersmediacenter on Flickr)

The post Should Yammer Really Be Called Crammer? appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.