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Comment by Nevermark | Hacker News Reader

> sneaking its way into where it's not wanted

This. After a generation of social media sneaking its surveillance, manipulation, and noisy ads into our home, work and mobile lives, it is very obvious that having something "smart" shoved into tools where it wasn't asked for isn't some noble attempt at improving lives.

Users are tired of being continually and transparently abused.

All Microsoft would have to do to shock the world and get months of good press is announce they were never going to opt anybody into anything by default any more. At this point that would be considered astonishing.

And suddenly, internal incentives would be to create useful, conflict-free capabilities users actually choose for themselves.

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> All Microsoft would have to do to shock the world and get months of good press is announce they were never going to opt anybody into anything by default any more. At this point that would be considered astonishing.

One can dream. I manage M365 where I work, and MS never opting tenants into anything by default again would save me many hours of work on a seemingly weekly basis now.

The fact that they can abuse even their enterprise customers and still retain them is what blows my mind.

> The fact that they can abuse even their enterprise customers and still retain them is what blows my mind.

The large org dependency on 365 and microsoft is a serious info-security and national security risk. 0 interest in improving because they know they won't ever see competition

> they won't ever see competition

Not that Google is any better, but I really want Google to put more effort into Workspace/GSuite and bring it up on par with M365 and all it includes, at least make Microsoft sweat a little bit that one day there might be a possibility for a competing product that can lure enterprises away. Workspace needs better DLP controls, and more of the enterprise-y things that MS wins at, and a bundled MDM that can manage all OSes, and better identity.

Even if the behemoths won't switch due to re-training & switching costs, MS desperately needs a competitor in this space. Barring that, they need to be broken up and forced to sell each bundled product separately and priced appropriately. Otherwise, who can compete with getting MDM, Identity, 2TB personal storage, 2TB sharepoint storage, Teams, DLP, EDR all for $22/user/month.

It doesn't matter if Googles office suite was better, everybody still would go Microsoft. There really isn't anything all that special about Microsoft Office to begin with.

It's less the office suite that matters (outside of Excel & PowerQuery/DAX stuff). It's everything else in M365 that Google has no answer for, or a subpar answer for.

I manage M365 too (well part of it because we're a big company). And yes Microsoft really screwed us over when they suddenly offered "free promotional access" of SharePoint Copilot to our users.

We hadn't certified this and weren't planning to offer it any time soon but they just switched it on and included a setting to turn off off again. But by the time we did users had already used it and were complaining.

Working with Microsoft is tedious. They're always trying to sell stuff and undermine you. I consider them more of an adversary than a trusted vendor/partner.

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