A requiem for Workplace by Facebook: The CIO’s leftfield choice
"It became a Fortune 500-heavy, frontline-friendly business by accident. We thought only tech companies would use Workplace, until Clay Johnson, back then CIO of Walmart, told us he wanted Workplace for 100% of their employees"
Some 10 million paying users of Workplace by Facebook and their employers will be looking for an alternative enterprise collaboration platform after Meta decided to sunset the London-based platform.
It was always a leftfield choice over a Teams or a Slack, but Workplace had landed some big wins, including with major corporations like Switzerland’s Nestlé looking to “democratise” internal communications; other big bluechip customers included McDonalds and Zurich insurance group.
“Today we let customers know that we’ve made the difficult decision to discontinue Workplace from Meta. To make the transition as smooth as we can, Workplace will shut down in phases over the next two years,” Meta said on May 14. Customers use Workplace as usual until August 31, 2025. It will then be read-only, until it shutting down on May 31, 2026.
Former Workplace by Facebook VP Julien Codorniou, now an investor, wrote: “It turns out Facebook groups, news feed, profile, and Messenger work just fine for companies/employees willing to build community, reduce distances in the organization, and create a culture where information travels fast. It was not a product for everyone, the investment had to come from the very top (some organisation precisely don't want to build community and reduce the distances), it takes a special kind of leadership to make take that leap of faith (in your employees/culture), but I still believe it gave a competitive advantage…”
“It became an enterprise, Fortune 500-heavy, frontline-friendly business by accident. We thought only tech companies would use Workplace, until Clay Johnson, back then CIO of Walmart, told us he wanted Workplace for 100% of their employees (1.3 million back then). When the Fortune 1 calls, you listen and behave. Then we doubled down on this blue ocean of a market (frontline workers) that is still an obsession of mine, and started selling to CHROs (not just CIOs). PMF [product market fit] was found in the most unexpected market/segment,” Codorniou wrote on LinkedIn.
He added: “It's hard to do B2B when you come from B2C (see Microsoft vs. Google). The best SaaS companies out there are run by dictators who talk to customers every day and turn this into a roadmap and then ARR. It's a muscle that's not easy to build coming from the B2C world. You can't do enterprise SaaS as a side gig…There's a massive book of business to go and get there for hungry software entrepreneurs,” said Cordoniou.
“There are 10M paying users looking for an alternative, right now.”
Meta is encouraging users to adopt Zoom’s “Workvivo” (you hadn’t heard of it either?) Cordoniou suggested customers take a look at YOOBIC (“for frontline employees”) and Haystack (“for knowledge workers”.)
Other leftfield alternatives include end-to-end encrypted Element.. Google is also investing in Workplace, which at 10 million paying users is approximately the same size as Meta’s namesake and comes with a raft of new tools including the not-cheap $10/user AI Security add-on.
