Microsoft's entire business model for decades has been to shove shoddy products down people's throats. And somehow, they have figured out how to do it too, because otherwise Teams wouldn't be used by anyone.
Microsoft’s best pitch (and Google benefits from this too) is that contracts are annoying and take forever to execute. If you can sign a deal for Outlook and Teams it’s so much easier than separate contracts for Outlook and Slack. You’ll get very far with that logic alone.
Most companies I’ve been at that use Teams over Slack is not “We can’t get contract for Slack” but “We have Teams included, why would we pay for Slack?” - Accountant
I guess Microsoft lost this battle, at least at some companies, because I'm now at one that uses Slack and Google, with no dependency on Microsoft Office.
Microsoft won this battle if you check the numbers. Last I saw it was 85% Microsoft vs 15% Google which seems right with my experience. Current company is Google Worksapce while last 3 were Office365.
Teams was clearly never meant to be used as a standalone product. It was a pretty effective defense play. Block other competitors from gaining a foothold.
Thats the whole point. The only people using Teams are the ones who are already committed to Microsoft 365. Companies on GSuite mostly use Slack, I doubt there is a single one using Teams.
Its all about Excel. It really is the best spreadsheet, and everyone knows how to use it. But that comes in an Office bundle that includes Teams. And that is why we must suffer.
Was certainly the case in the early years of Google Sheets. For me, the gap is entirely closed. I'm willing to believe that Excel still has the better platform for extreme power users but I've done some pretty slick stuff with Google Sheets and that was four or five years ago. It must be even better today (though I'm not currenlty doing much with spreadsheets).
Has google sheets filled out the lambda helper functions yet? If so that could narrow the gap.
Passing around vba based xlsm is really awful, so if google sheets has lambdas they can probably get a lead with google sheets queey language over filter.
Groupby and pivotby are the new excel alternative, but if they filled out lambdas, then does that keave VBA and power query as the only reasons for Excel?
Not sure what lambda helpers are. But you can write Google AppScript which is just JS and do some pretty cool stuff, including define custom functions and fully integrate with Google APIs. I've used to to send emails, or create calendar events for example.
I agree with it, but it's a wild world we live in when the best spreadsheet has default behaviors which will fuck your data pasted into it when you're not paying attention.
Yeah, its also awesome when you open a CSV with long numbers like tracking numbers or IMEIs and they get converted to scientific notation and lose "precision" when saved in Excel format...
I think the expectation of software quality in consumers has completely evaporated, and so people expect appallingly bad software and think it's normal. This isn't just the case for Microsoft - look at the baby-ification of macOS UI (let's make it like a children's iPad), any Google software offering (very poor performance) and the majority acceptance of web-browser-in-a-window-is-a-desktop-application software development. They accept things like Slack and Teams (awful software) but also put up with Skype getting worse in the decades before.
Office 2003 and prior were quite good, but then people think Google Docs is somehow equivalent to the functionality of Word.
Admittedly, Active Directory was afflicted by impossibly tiny windows for the management tabs, but the functionality worked (and you could write your own extensions to the LDAP tree and COM-based UI interface for them) as proven by the rehashing of part of the functionality into Google's "organisational" offerings (sign into Chrome and receive restrictions from your organisational (company) overlord, the new Group Policy).
It's a real pity. If we showed software today via a time machine to ourselves 25+ years ago, we'd be shocked at how slow and ineffectual it was and deeply distressed that this was the norm worldwide.
I'm guessing the broader demographic of users simply don't think the software is crap. My buddy working in water transportation was just raving about Teams to me the other day. His praise basically boiled down to being integrated with his organization, providing him easy access to his department-resources. I suppose it does serve my buddy well.
Could be because I use a Mac, and I do most of my work chatting in Slack, but I don't hate Teams. It has my calendar, it has chat that is shitty but good enough during meetings (although finding which room you have unread messages in can be confusing), and it has video meetings with transcripts and great Exchange integration.
Ditto. The more interesting part is how many people will defend it. Presumably some mix of post-purchase rationalisation and inherited assumptions about what's "standard" even when those assumptions stopped being true ages ago.
I find it infuriating, but that's how the system's supposed to work. It's the definition of a monopoly and they're in the extraction phase. When there's no competition (and eventually there's always going to be a winner) you don't need to make good products anymore.
They've successfully indoctrinated whole generations to use Windows/Office. Here in Brazil using a computer was (probably still is) synonymous to using Windows/Office. Everyone had their pirated version of Windows and many don't even know that alternatives exist. When those people open companies they'll use what they know.
Software companies have to build for the most popular OSes and most can't justify anything else. Which then means most software only works on Windows and people can't leave it even if there are better alternatives (see Adobe). Finally, any non-closed computer comes with Windows so the cycle continues forever.
My theory is that they deliberately make Windows so shit to filter out anyone with taste. Once you have a userbase of people who don't know better, you can sell them any old crap. Like Teams.
Reminds of an research article from Microsoft!. It detailed on why scam emails about `Nigerian prince` are so obviously dumb. The reasoning being it specifically need to target only those who can fall for it. Anything more sophisticated and they would get people who wouldn't fall for scam in subsequent communication.
Except it makes no sense because as a scammer your goal is to get as many people as possible in contact with you so that you can scam them. You can only score on the goals you attempt so cutting out any person, no matter the reason, is illogical.
You’re assuming that there’s no cost involved in moving a potential victim through the pipeline. I’m sure AI has changed the game, but the general idea was that beyond the initial blast of spam you would have someone actually responding to those who fell for it. Putting in signals that it was a scam filtered out individuals who would waste scammer time because they would eventually figure it out before falling victim. By selecting for people who literally can’t pick up on obvious signs of a scam, you save yourself a lot of time and energy.
Keep following through the logic... You manage to hook someone who absolutely knows you're a scammer, and they keep responding to you taking up precious time you could be spending with someone who is actually likely to give you money. So, what is the upside to getting a response from someone who is never ever going to give you anything?
Occam's razor says they are just bad at English grammar because it isn't their native language/dialect and their education probably wasn't that great.
This is easily demonstrable by conversing with the scammers and noting that their actual English ability is the same as exists in the initial letter. Even when they have no chance of the scam succeeding and have been outed they write the same way. You can see plenty of evidence here:
Occam's razor says the sun orbits the earth, everybody dies from Sudden Unexplained Death Syndrome, and the correct way to spell Occam's razor is Okams Raza (in all languages, because lavishes other than English are difficult).
It's literally a platitude. It's like the saying 'when the going gets tough, the tough get going': it's reallyemorable and descriptive and is maybe a good guideline in many situations.
But using it to evaluate the tensile strength of various metals according to their velocity would be wild, because it had never pretended to be anything like a rule. It's not like theory of gravity or 'I before e except after c', which are based on actual analysis and results.
Legit assuming that everything is as simple as it can be, that the most obvious idea to occur to any untrained observer is the most accurate, is literally a guaranteed way to go though life without understanding anything, at all. Using it to argue with people who appear to obvious what they're talking about (and there are so, so many undisputed studies on the exact reasons scammers do what they do: it's too filter people or. There is no debate, academically) is a pretty slippery slope to 'anybody who doesn't think and act exactly like me is lying, because no reasons or facts exist unless I personally hold or after with them', and it's definitely a thought process worth challenging.
Although to be fair, its best application might be re. online arguments that you don't really care that much about. So if you just meant that the previous poster had given a reason and you were going with that because it's easier, my bad.
>"Microsoft's entire business model for decades has been to shove shoddy products down people's throats."
I remember this one. In the 90s MS reps would come to our company and sing about how their Visual Basic was superior to Delphi. When pointed to countless features that proved the opposite all they were able to say is that the MS has bigger dick.
Their recommendation was to have 2 developers instead of one we had. One would code GUI / front end in Visual Basic and the other write DLLs that would do all the meat.
I once worked at a company that wrote their UI in Delphi but then wrote their logic in C++ using boatloads of COM and MFC (for non-gui elements; the std library with containers was "new" at the time) so they ended up with 20 years of development baggage to talk to SQL Server over ODBC whilst implementing their logic on a repeated basis in C++ (COM loves you implementing interface functions you can't remove), calling from Delphi.
They were trying to port it to a "modern" system and modern compiler so had millions of lines of code to fix, and their UI was MFC-based (so another shot in the foot).
Microsoft's entire business model has been tying. Countless millions are forced to use Copilot because their IT department has contracts with Microsoft, and those same contracts are why they use Office, Teams, and so on. Their developers use Visual Studio, deploy to Azure, and run it all against SQL Server. Their email comes from Exchange.
It has been an incredibly lucrative strategy. We all herald some CEO's prowess in growing revenue when they've been doing the same playbook for decades now, and have been running on the inertia of Windows dominance on the desktop. Every new entrant is pushed out through countless incredibly lazy IT departments that just adopt whatever Microsoft shits out.
It's actually surprising that the one and only area where this really failed was as they tried to lever tying to the mobile market. A couple of missteps along the way are the only reason every office drone isn't rocking their Lumia ExchangeLive! CoDevice.
People here are mostly too young to remember but the original Microsoft business model was this:
Find a software market currently addressed by high price products; create a reasonably good product for that market; sell it for significantly less than the incumbent. Sell much higher volume of said product than the incumbent, thereby make much more profit. Repeat/rinse.
The Windows lock-in, embrace extend etc came after this. You can't lock in customers if they didn't already willingly buy your product.
No the original Microsoft business model was to get the incumbent (IBM) to bundle your product (DOS, bought from someone else) onto their product so that you had a near-monopoly, then use that to sell your other software onto that, occasionally making technical changes to make it difficult for your competitors.
>Microsoft, which needed an operating system for the IBM Personal Computer,[9][10] hired Tim Paterson in May 1981 and bought 86-DOS 1.10 for US$25,000 that July
