Am I being cynical in thinking there are probably plenty of enterprise suppliers out there providing similar creepy "user insights" information to dodgy managers, but just aren't in the spotlight like Microsoft?
I would be highly surprised if there weren't. However, it'd far worse if Microsoft provided such features, because that would mean there'd be much less friction for an enterprise to adopt them (since pretty much all of then already license Office). At least with those other suppliers, a company would have to have decided it wanted worker surveillance and seek it out, rather than getting it out-of-the-box by default.
Especially with remote work on the rise.
This is one thing I hope all of us continue opposing vehemently.
It's a huge privacy concern and companies have too much incentive to want to monitor this kind of data.
In Sales, this means meetings, calls, deals, etc. In Service, this means satisfaction scores, handle times, etc.
All of those are well understood employee productivity scores.
I think this scares people because no one is sure how it’ll be measured and used. At first blush, it just looks like a proxy for identifying luddites and/or people who hate chat — regardless of their actual job performance.
And given the nearly 100% penetration of office its much more serious.