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> Samer Baroudi, senior product marketing manager at Microsoft, insists this is for your own good. > > "This offers a safer alternative to other bring-your-own

> Samer Baroudi, senior product marketing manager at Microsoft, insists this is for your own good. > > "This offers a safer alternative to other bring-your-own-AI scenarios, and empowers users with Copilot in their daily jobs while keeping IT firmly in control and all enterprise data protections intact," Baroudi explained in a blog post. whew. they seem to be confusing exactly who the customer is here. they think their target customer is the everyday windows user, but in reality the customer is every company's internal IT and infosec teams. theyre trying to persuade regular users to use the product, bit these users will in turm need to persuade their IT teams before this product can be used. big mix up for microsoft.

thewebguyd 1y ago
Microsoft enables self service trials and purchases on 365 tenants by default. Every new feature they deploy is on by default. This new personal account thing is also enabled by default. Microsoft has been hostile to internal IT teams for a long time. They burned that bridge with me and my peers a long time ago. Unfortunately, MS knows it’s a captive audience and enterprises aren’t rushing to exit Microsoft anytime soon so they continue to get away with it. MS hopes that users will start a trial for something, become reliant on it, then convince managers to override the IT teams and buy it. Just like how other SaaS products market to individual users instead of to IT departments. It’s scummy. No one should do business with Microsoft anymore at this point. That includes NPM, GitHub, VSCode too don’t forget. MS will get away with anything they want unless people push back and dump them.
- Silhouette 1y ago
  Unfortunately, MS knows it’s a captive audience and enterprises aren’t rushing to exit Microsoft anytime soon so they continue to get away with it. That is the traditional spin but if they pull many stunts like this how long will it continue? Corporate IT teams are infamous for being slow and unwieldy but that's not entirely fair because the corporate IT teams are usually also the ones on the hook if anything goes wrong. Screw up some sort of data protection or regulatory compliance issue and that can have serious and lasting implications for the entire business. Move fast and break things is not what you want when x% of your global turnover is at stake if a regulator decides to make an example of you. Letting anyone else play with your toys is definitely not what you want in that scenario - why else do Windows Enterprise and Education editions not try to force the same hostile measures onto their customers as all the lower tiers? This looks like a huge misstep to me - the kind of mess that could actually be big enough to move the needle. And for Microsoft the greatest danger is probably the needle moving enough for everyone to see it. Once no-one ever got fired for buying Microsoft except for that guy who just did it really could be the beginning of the end for them. Microsoft also seems to have just abandoned one of the most powerful brands ever - Office - in a move that I can only assume was intended to show that Musk wasn't actually the craziest PR guy in the world when he renamed Twitter. There seems to be an outbreak of delusional thinking in Redmond and if this stuff doesn't get backtracked quickly I don't see a happy ending for MS here.
  - pixl97 1y ago
    Who are these companies going to go to? Moving away from MS products is notoriously hard for larger enterprises.
    - Silhouette 1y ago
      Apple for hardware. Maybe a few orgs even try PCs running Linux as we've seen in some governments looking to save $$$. Google or countless smaller but established services for all the online stuff. The days when all businesses used Windows and Office for everything and the competitors were half-baked also-rans are long gone. There is no lack of IT companies that will take your money if you're willing to move out of the Microsoft bubble. This is a momentum problem not a lack of competition problem.
      - thewebguyd 1y ago
        Apple hardware can work, so long as the business isn’t dependent on any legacy desktop windows stuff (but there’s always VMs or RDP in that case). But it is still somewhat a competition problem. Google workspace has better collaboration/live editing IMO but still lacks in some areas. Microsoft’s compliance/DLP stuff is better, InTune while not the best has actually shaped up to be a pretty good MDM and works on all OSes both desktop and mobile (including Linux), and you get endpoint EDR bundled as well as zero trust VPN (global secure access). Google has no answer to a big chunk of what locks big enterprise into M365, but workspace is fine for medium and smaller companies that don’t need all of what MS has. But I think those smaller companies are where the disruption will start.
      - pixl97 1y ago
        Ah yes, killed by Google... Google is a pile of its own risks. For all the problems MS has they keep backwards compatibility running for years if not decades.
        Silhouette 1y ago
        MS used to be legendary for its efforts to maintain backward compatibility. I think it has lost a lot of credibility after the way it has managed Windows forward compatibility and support recently though. It is apparently scrambling to offer extended support schemes right now rather than deal with the inevitable fallout of forcibly retiring Windows 10 on so many still-functional devices with no upgrade path to 11 even available. It hasn't been very long since it forcibly obsoleted the Windows 7/8 generations that were also still in use on a significant number of devices at the time but did not include the level of control (or intrusion if you prefer) that Microsoft evidently wanted of its users' devices. The difference this time is that it's showing contempt for even large customers' control. Corporate IT departments with all those externally imposed constraints can resist compromise and surrendering control much more strongly than most home users or small organisations.

thewebguyd 1y ago

Microsoft enables self service trials and purchases on 365 tenants by default. Every new feature they deploy is on by default. This new personal account thing is also enabled by default. Microsoft has been hostile to internal IT teams for a long time. They burned that bridge with me and my peers a long time ago. Unfortunately, MS knows it’s a captive audience and enterprises aren’t rushing to exit Microsoft anytime soon so they continue to get away with it. MS hopes that users will start a trial for something, become reliant on it, then convince managers to override the IT teams and buy it. Just like how other SaaS products market to individual users instead of to IT departments. It’s scummy. No one should do business with Microsoft anymore at this point. That includes NPM, GitHub, VSCode too don’t forget. MS will get away with anything they want unless people push back and dump them.

Silhouette 1y ago
Unfortunately, MS knows it’s a captive audience and enterprises aren’t rushing to exit Microsoft anytime soon so they continue to get away with it. That is the traditional spin but if they pull many stunts like this how long will it continue? Corporate IT teams are infamous for being slow and unwieldy but that's not entirely fair because the corporate IT teams are usually also the ones on the hook if anything goes wrong. Screw up some sort of data protection or regulatory compliance issue and that can have serious and lasting implications for the entire business. Move fast and break things is not what you want when x% of your global turnover is at stake if a regulator decides to make an example of you. Letting anyone else play with your toys is definitely not what you want in that scenario - why else do Windows Enterprise and Education editions not try to force the same hostile measures onto their customers as all the lower tiers? This looks like a huge misstep to me - the kind of mess that could actually be big enough to move the needle. And for Microsoft the greatest danger is probably the needle moving enough for everyone to see it. Once no-one ever got fired for buying Microsoft except for that guy who just did it really could be the beginning of the end for them. Microsoft also seems to have just abandoned one of the most powerful brands ever - Office - in a move that I can only assume was intended to show that Musk wasn't actually the craziest PR guy in the world when he renamed Twitter. There seems to be an outbreak of delusional thinking in Redmond and if this stuff doesn't get backtracked quickly I don't see a happy ending for MS here.
- pixl97 1y ago
  Who are these companies going to go to? Moving away from MS products is notoriously hard for larger enterprises.
  - Silhouette 1y ago
    Apple for hardware. Maybe a few orgs even try PCs running Linux as we've seen in some governments looking to save $$$. Google or countless smaller but established services for all the online stuff. The days when all businesses used Windows and Office for everything and the competitors were half-baked also-rans are long gone. There is no lack of IT companies that will take your money if you're willing to move out of the Microsoft bubble. This is a momentum problem not a lack of competition problem.
    - thewebguyd 1y ago
      Apple hardware can work, so long as the business isn’t dependent on any legacy desktop windows stuff (but there’s always VMs or RDP in that case). But it is still somewhat a competition problem. Google workspace has better collaboration/live editing IMO but still lacks in some areas. Microsoft’s compliance/DLP stuff is better, InTune while not the best has actually shaped up to be a pretty good MDM and works on all OSes both desktop and mobile (including Linux), and you get endpoint EDR bundled as well as zero trust VPN (global secure access). Google has no answer to a big chunk of what locks big enterprise into M365, but workspace is fine for medium and smaller companies that don’t need all of what MS has. But I think those smaller companies are where the disruption will start.
    - pixl97 1y ago
      Ah yes, killed by Google... Google is a pile of its own risks. For all the problems MS has they keep backwards compatibility running for years if not decades.
      - Silhouette 1y ago
        MS used to be legendary for its efforts to maintain backward compatibility. I think it has lost a lot of credibility after the way it has managed Windows forward compatibility and support recently though. It is apparently scrambling to offer extended support schemes right now rather than deal with the inevitable fallout of forcibly retiring Windows 10 on so many still-functional devices with no upgrade path to 11 even available. It hasn't been very long since it forcibly obsoleted the Windows 7/8 generations that were also still in use on a significant number of devices at the time but did not include the level of control (or intrusion if you prefer) that Microsoft evidently wanted of its users' devices. The difference this time is that it's showing contempt for even large customers' control. Corporate IT departments with all those externally imposed constraints can resist compromise and surrendering control much more strongly than most home users or small organisations.