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> "Teams could soon be a digital platform as important as the internet browser." - Satya Nadella Every person reading this should be scared, because he's not w

by 015a 6y ago

> "Teams could soon be a digital platform as important as the internet browser." - Satya Nadella Every person reading this should be scared, because he's not wrong. Ever since the pandemic started, 90% of our B2B SaaS platform customers (current and prospects) have asked "do you have a Teams app". Its sudden; it was not like this a year ago. Its an "end the conversation" question for maybe half of them, similar to how not having SSO was/is an "end the conversation" issue in B2B. Thankfully, Satya is only right in the domain of B2B. The web browser is critical software for any use-case, B2C and B2B; Teams will probably never breach B2C in a meaningful way. Worth saying, developing apps for Teams is quite literally the most garbage-filled process we've ever been through. We've dealt with Google Play and Android, we've dealt with Apple and iOS; this is not an overstatement, Teams is a magnitude worse than both of those combined. At their core, most apps are just iframes for a website. But their reviewers actually give a shit about how your website looks. But, they give a shit in the typical Microsoft phone-it-in inconsistent half-assed way. It took us four months to get our app approved, and we're an official "Teams Partner" (whateverthehell that's worth, it means you get a contact at Microsoft who rotates every three weeks and is woefully undertrained and only capable of giving abstract, vague advice on getting through reviews). This wasn't "pandemic four months", this was "dozens of back and forths with a brick wall". We'd submit the package, they'd complain about a dozen things, we'd invest dozens of person-hours fixing half of them, dispute the other half, they'd cave, then come back with a half-dozen totally new things. Repeat. For. Four. Months. We'd model user experiences after their own apps; nope, against design guidelines. We'd build one Teams SSO flow; they'd deprecate the library. We'd make a change; their guidelines would change. It doesn't help that 80% of the devops tech they use to "help" with Teams app dev (App Studio being the big one) literally doesn't work. The VSCode plugin breaks all the time. The quality of the entire ecosystem is bad even by Microsoft standards, which are already so low they could win an olympic limbo tournament. We finally made it through, and two of the primary engineers on the project put in their two weeks. I laughed and wished them well, and then I realized that this 1:1 with my boss that just popped up is likely him passing ownership of the project to me. At which point, I will also put in my two weeks. We have 11 engineers total; Teams single-handedly killed a quarter of our product development team. If you're ever asked to work on Teams; RUN (if you can). If you're ever asked to use Teams; RUN (if you can). It is deeply cursed; it is fundamentally, to its core, anti-user, anti-developer, and only benefits Microsoft and the so-called "Global AD Administrators". If Teams had existed in 1949, there'd be a page in the Geneva Conventions categorizing it as a Weapon of Mass Destruction and banning its use during wartime.

propogandist 6y ago
Good intel. They've been throwing throwing in Teams as a free service and building a massive enterprise moat that will be impossible to disrupt. Slack, which started out with a NY Times full page advert welcoming Microsoft Teams, ran to Salesforce unable to compete. Imagine Microsoft being able to connect your Teams activity, Edge browser activity and Windows 10 usage to your linkedin profile, github profile (all owned MSFT properties) using a singular Microsoft account, within an enterprise. Microsoft, as a corporation, will have the ability to see the inner workings of a company and build an inter-enterprise social graph. A very ripe target for NSA fusion technology.
- 015a 6y ago
  The only reason I'm not bullish on Microsoft is because I don't know where else they can expand to. Teams is growing in Microsoft shops. There are a LOT of these; if these shops had real-time chat, it took the form of either something like Skype (useless) or a half-dozen siloed Slack servers started by employees (no company-wide benefit). So, they add on Teams; usually its already in the plan they're paying for. Suddenly they realize how alluring real-time chat can be. I'm not convinced its actually more productive for what people use it for, but that's irrelevant to real-time chat's ability to fool you (and the administrators) into thinking its increasing productivity, and that's all that matters for usage. But how does Microsoft reap that into something meaningful? They're not monetizing the app store (that I've seen); they're not monetizing the entire product; maybe it increases lockin, but most of these companies are so lockedin anyway they were never leaving. The argument for data sharing is interesting, but: I hate Microsoft with a feverish passion, and even I'll admit that if they were sharing/correlating significant employee data beyond the firewall of some AD/Teams/whatever instance, they'd have a lot of very angry customers on their hands. I don't see them doing that. I'm biased, but I'm still bearish on them just because their reliable revenue centers are becoming less and less diversified. Yeah, Azure/365. What else do they have? Windows is more and more irrelevant. Browser; lost the war. Github; an expensive side-business. Xbox; a billion dollar money pit with their leaders at the top praying for Halo Infinite. Consumer hardware; nothing. Linkedin; its like Facebook, everyone hates it but everyone has one. If all of their revenue growth is in Cloud, that's still a ton of growth to reap, but I'm not sure it justifies a valuation previously assigned to the 2000s-era multi-disciplinary conglomerate Microsoft was. Amazon is fully capable of (at least) keeping pace with Azure's growth here, and they're also the biggest retailer on the planet with an unassailable operations network. I think, over the next five years, it'll be increasingly "weird" how those two companies are priced so similarly.

by 015a 6y ago

propogandist 6y ago

Good intel. They've been throwing throwing in Teams as a free service and building a massive enterprise moat that will be impossible to disrupt. Slack, which started out with a NY Times full page advert welcoming Microsoft Teams, ran to Salesforce unable to compete. Imagine Microsoft being able to connect your Teams activity, Edge browser activity and Windows 10 usage to your linkedin profile, github profile (all owned MSFT properties) using a singular Microsoft account, within an enterprise. Microsoft, as a corporation, will have the ability to see the inner workings of a company and build an inter-enterprise social graph. A very ripe target for NSA fusion technology.

015a 6y ago
The only reason I'm not bullish on Microsoft is because I don't know where else they can expand to. Teams is growing in Microsoft shops. There are a LOT of these; if these shops had real-time chat, it took the form of either something like Skype (useless) or a half-dozen siloed Slack servers started by employees (no company-wide benefit). So, they add on Teams; usually its already in the plan they're paying for. Suddenly they realize how alluring real-time chat can be. I'm not convinced its actually more productive for what people use it for, but that's irrelevant to real-time chat's ability to fool you (and the administrators) into thinking its increasing productivity, and that's all that matters for usage. But how does Microsoft reap that into something meaningful? They're not monetizing the app store (that I've seen); they're not monetizing the entire product; maybe it increases lockin, but most of these companies are so lockedin anyway they were never leaving. The argument for data sharing is interesting, but: I hate Microsoft with a feverish passion, and even I'll admit that if they were sharing/correlating significant employee data beyond the firewall of some AD/Teams/whatever instance, they'd have a lot of very angry customers on their hands. I don't see them doing that. I'm biased, but I'm still bearish on them just because their reliable revenue centers are becoming less and less diversified. Yeah, Azure/365. What else do they have? Windows is more and more irrelevant. Browser; lost the war. Github; an expensive side-business. Xbox; a billion dollar money pit with their leaders at the top praying for Halo Infinite. Consumer hardware; nothing. Linkedin; its like Facebook, everyone hates it but everyone has one. If all of their revenue growth is in Cloud, that's still a ton of growth to reap, but I'm not sure it justifies a valuation previously assigned to the 2000s-era multi-disciplinary conglomerate Microsoft was. Amazon is fully capable of (at least) keeping pace with Azure's growth here, and they're also the biggest retailer on the planet with an unassailable operations network. I think, over the next five years, it'll be increasingly "weird" how those two companies are priced so similarly.