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Comment by typest | Hacker News Reader

It comes down to the difference between b2c and b2b business. In the case of b2c, you’re selling to consumers, who themselves use your UI and will leave if it’s bad.

In the case of b2b, it’s more complicated. You’re selling to office administrators, whose goal is to score the best deal for the company. Since they aren’t the primary users of the product, stuff like UX doesn’t matter as much as cost.

Best illustrated by Slack, which thought they could sell to businesses based on a beautiful UI, but their market was dominated by Microsoft Teams, which could sell better to enterprises.

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Slack thought right; they did sell to businesses. Microsoft came later to the game, leveraging their size to both undercut them (with a feature rich free plan), and offer an integrated suite with the productivity tools that enterprises are already using (with Microsoft 365).

Which is probably one reason why Slack is looking to sell to Salesforce.

My point being I don't think Slack's positioning was "chat but prettier". The fact Teams is more dominant now seems more to do with bundling.

Doesnt Slack prove the opposite of your point? That building something that end users will like is a key selling point?

Teams dominates because Microsoft gave it away for free to those who were already paying Microsoft.

As a forcéd user of Teams, I have to say this, a thousand times over: it _sucks_, I -- and everyone I know -- _hates_ it and it seems to have been rushed out to crush the competition and integrate into Office online products. I also hate these and don't use them, but unfortunately some of my colleagues do.

But, you know what? Nobody cares about my opinion! You are exactly right: the people who make these decisions about what software the university "runs on" are at a far higher level, and have far more clout. Their incentives are totally misaligned with mine -- I use linux as a daily driver, and write highly mathematical software. I am exactly _not_ the target audience of these things, because, frankly, I can support myself: if something's broken, I fix it -- and don't consume IT's time. The people who _do_ however, are all of the admin staff, many of whom have professional backgrounds elsewhere, and think this is the way the world works. And they get promoted, and end up in managerial roles that make purchasing decisions at a high level. Hence, Teams.

Yep. I hate Teams too. It freezes my system for 30 seconds at startup, and spits out 404 Not Found errors sometimes when I log in.

But hey, nobody was ever fired for using Microsoft.

> stuff like UX doesn’t matter as much as cost

Sure but until the UI is so bad that you end up accidentally sending out money you didn't intend to, it is important.

Separately, In the business UI I used previously with Citizens it was so easy to get locked out of your account (and I had no time for phone calls, which was the only way to unlock it after that) that so many payments were made late because I had no other choice; my schedule was already full and the payment would only be made when I could schedule time for that stupid phone call.

That led to delays and late fees of sorts, and that is money as well, all because of a bad UX.

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