Microsoft has a problem: lack of demand for its AI products

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.

I find it fascinating how they are able to sell their crap software.

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.

> And somehow, they have figured out how to do it too

You say this like it was a mystery to start with. When you own 90+% of the user base, you can create trends with any changes implemented

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.

It's the oldest trick in the IT book - focus on the buyer persona and ignore the user persona.

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.

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.

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.

That's exactly what I was thinking of!

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

>the original Microsoft business model

From 1981

>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

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.

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.

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?

>"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 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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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?