The Final Straw: Why Companies Replace Once-Beloved Technology Brands
functionize.com
functionize.com
You have to have a pretty good reputation for discretion to get them to really talk, but I noticed a pattern in those who would.
You tend to hear their list of grievances in reverse chronological order. The last straw comes first, but if you keep them talking long enough the first straw eventually comes out.
Some of those first straws are often something pretty avoidable. The final straw can be harder to avoid but recency bias makes us focus on it in ways that don’t seem to line up with the experiences of the person who feels wronged.
I can’t say for sure if they accumulate linearly or not but it does seem like fixing the easy ones does result in longer times to last straw. But they seem so minor to the team that it can be difficult to get movement on them. And it sometimes only applies to new “customers”. Some will forgive you for things they had to deal with if nobody else has to, but that would take a lot more data points than I have to say for sure.
I worked at company where the projects I was working on kept getting cancelled. And sure, that's business, these things happen. But couple that with also being reassigned well outside of my comfort zone or job description while they looked for something new (and all of the proposed projects that would be back in line with my job title were also getting cancelled before development could even begin), I began to see a pattern.
The final straw, such as it was, was the announcement that they could no longer purchase milk for coffee in the breakroom, in an effort to save money. It wasn't that "I can't work at a place that can't afford milk for coffee", it was "this company is so bad at planning for the future that it can't even find a way to purchase milk for the breakroom, let alone drive a massive development and manufacturing effort to completion".
It does seem to be that the later the clock starts the better things go.
But analogies aside, it’s also that first incident of “did I make a mistake coming here?” And that can start with dumb logistical things like they knew you were showing up on Wednesday and they didn’t have a desk or maybe a composter ready for you.
The Gottman Institute thinks that the only emotion a relationship cannot endure is contempt. So far I haven’t encountered any meaningful counterexamples.
Either Microsoft has managed to get it "just right" for more than three decades, or there's something else at play, too.
Principal-agent problem. The dumbass that is buying Teams for your company isn't the front-line grunt that has to use it.
This is exactly what got me to stop using Spotify (for their insistence on spamming podcasts on the home screen, when I'm there solely for music) and music streaming as a whole (for my playlists randomly losing songs). Buying the audio files and maintaining them on my own hardware is less BS.
I am paying your most expensive subscription and if you would have had a more expensive / premium one I would have paid more explicitly for the service to not include ads anywhere, under any possible curcumstance. Aparently that was impossible.
Never looked back and I should have done the switch years before.
Capitalism wins again!
But it's still easier to stick with the provider (Microsoft) than to look elsewhere.
This covers *so* much ground. It's utterly not predictive—but in retrospect, it often explains everything.