I am confused by this comment. Was your startup not affected by the previous 10+ years of Microsoft chat products? Examples: Office Communicator, Lync, and Skype for Business. I fail to see how Teams was the "nail in the coffin".
Plus, you use your market incumbency to stifle competition in other ways (e.g., putting advertisements for Apple Music in settings).
I think you meant to say not WORSE than Spotify.
The product has gone to hell, they need to fire all the product managers. I don't know how you fuck up a music UI this badly but...
You wrote:
> The product has gone to hell
Open a random play list, start playing a track.
Close the client, try to get back to the track you paying right now... Pick a big list will it get you back to the track. There used to be a few ways to do this, now there is one (and it's ugly).
Is there a rhyme or reason to show or not show the tracks of an artist that I have liked/followed? Is that display consistent?
Why are we mixing liked artists and liked playlists now. Why is "like" some global list. Albums, songs, Artists are not the same thing. Globing these preferences together is like telling the waiter you like ice cream when he asks for your drink order, at breakfast on a Tuesday.
Why do I have to click into an album to find the publish date of a track? They have this whole right panel now with half assed track info and nothing useful.
The UI needs burned to the ground and an adult, who likes music needs to tell them what they need to show...
edit: should be this one: https://github.com/tombonez/noTunes
What will it take to make these companies realise I'm perfectly happy with my current music streaming service and I don't want theirs regardless of the price it's offered at? I find it very disrespectful as a user when software can't take 'no' for an answer; my 'no' isn't 'maybe if you wear me down with enough nag screens' it means 'no I'm not interested please go away'.
Often times they won't stop even if you are a customer as in the case of Microsoft insisting that I backup all my files to their OneDrive that came bundled with Office. I get constant nag notifications to "finish setting up backup" even though I have alternative backup solutions and only want to use OneDrive as an offsite storage, not as a sync system.
I would love to tell the software to "never bug me again", but instead we only have options of "Yes!" and "Not now, please bother me again".
Unless his startup was VC funded and was already seriously penetrating enterprise and then couldn't get round C of financing because their 100+ person sales team couldn't make the high growth math make sense.
Otherwise usually your value prop can't be closely tied to *relatively* minor accounting decisions in the early days or you're already DOA when facing an entrenched opponent whose team can easily undercut you well beyond generic bundling deals (whether via strong existing relationships, making wider non-standard sweetheart deals that wouldn't be under regulatory scrutiny, and marketing budgets).
Don't get me wrong this can harm markets generally, and megacorps should be held to higher scrutiny, but usually it's not that simple.
My best guess is that the pandemic is what happened — if this story is true.
The bundling didn’t matter when no one needed a large amount of seats for an in-office workforce.
But during COVID and currently, there was no better pricing than what Microsoft is offering for all the things (ex. Azure + 0365 + GitHub).
The market shifted from Slack, Zoom and <insert anything else here> to Teams for large enterprises when they recognized that no one was coming back into the office.
Source: I bought enterprise software for a Fortune 20 during COVID until I launched my startup.
Whether a small European startup would have won out locally without Microsofts market position + price advantage idk. But without details I'm not sure the financial decision making of a Fortune 20 matters in this conversation which was part of my point.
Once your sales team is competing on price vs Microsoft it's basically over for young companies. Your value prop has to be much more than that until you're a mature business.
There's degrees to market manipulation and market position where this sort of explanation would hold water as being the root cause of death knell.
Since the OP refused to provide any further details or answer any questions people sent towards him, I tend to believe it's the latter.
Enshitification ramps up after the competition has been destroyed.
I don't think MS Windows ever shipped with these.