Recently, I posted a video about my love for the digital screen and how, in an age of hybrid working, it isn’t ‘dead tech’, but a great channel with tons of opportunity.
It got me thinking about other forms of ‘dead tech’ and whether we’ve been too quick to condemn them.
It’s been a tough few years for all of us, but the QR code really came out on top, thanks to prolific use throughout the pandemic.
Now that every smartphone can scan these digital signposts without the need for a third-party app, there’s nothing stopping internal comms folks using them on printed content – such as posters and employee magazines – to direct their people to great digital content, communities, surveys and videos.
“Yammer is dead!” That’s the refrain ringing around the comms corners of the internet. But Yammer is alive and well, just in another guise.
Yammer is now Viva Engage, which means it lives exclusively in Teams – or that’s what Microsoft want you to think, as they’d like more traffic. But it still has the website and mobile app access points.
So, Yammer as a community hub for employees is still very much alive and kicking. Keep in mind, you don’t know any successful online communities that don’t have a clear purpose at their heart. So if your Yammer community is dead, it might not be the tech’s fault … 👀
There’s still a generation of IC people who shudder at the mere mention of the name. But SharePoint is still very much with us and powering one of the most prolific collaborative platforms we know, Teams.
SharePoint’s roots were always in collaboration rather than comms, so it’s understandable that intranets built on it in the past have been a bit wobbly. So let’s stop trying to make that happen. Let’s use the powerful comms tools we have for the comms, and let SharePoint do what it’s good at – keeping our documents accessible, up to date and shareable among our collaborators.
Sometimes it’s not a case of ‘dead tech’, more a case of tech with real potential that never got the chance.
What examples of dead tech spring to mind for you? And does it deserve a revival or a final send-off? Let me know.
