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Comment by mexicocitinluez | Hacker News Reader

Every product manager at the company in the Windows and MS office products divisions need fired.

They have made so many unforced errors in recent years its hard to imagine serious people currently inhabit those roles.

Office.com, the cornerstone of Office, is now just a prompt. A prompt!!!!

They make it near impossible to manage a small/medium sized company with the unending tweaking, moving, and rebranding of every single portal in that product.

It's absolutely wild that a company as big and important to the business world as they are is playing this fast and loose. I'm quite frankly embarrassed for them.

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Yeah, but...

Did they increase profits and/or stock price or not? That's the only relevant question. Not what happend to Office.com or what you think about their products.

Also, you and me are not the customers. Govs and corporations are.

> Not what happend to Office.com or what you think about their products.

I don't understand this point. Are you suggesting that less people being happy with their product and thus less people buying it is not related to the valuation of the company and their stock?

> Also, you and me are not the customers. Govs and corporations are.

Huh?

I get you're trying to make a point about the bottom line, but that doesn't mean the bottom line is impervious to bad product decisions or that the people who are paying for their products are not in fact their customers.

Parent is pointing at the fact that the relationship between our perception of MS products and their financial success is highly inelastic. The bottom line isn't impervious to bad product decisions, but there can be a large number of user hostile decisions that PMs push through that still increase revenue on the whole even at the cost of user satisfaction, before they move past the optimal point in the payoff curve.

Less people buying don't count much compared to the volumes bought by govs and corps.

Also, windows and office bought by govs and corps isn't the same edition as the one bought (usually) by home users, so they're not as dissatisfied by what they bought compared to home users. In fact, some of the features such as automatic unavoidable updates, are demanded by their usual clients.

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