If We Could Change One Thing About Microsoft

Mitch: Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Make Others Successful, a podcast where we share insights, stories, and strategies to help you build a better workplace. I'm joined with Emma and Matt. Hey, guys. Welcome back.

We are going to dig into a close to home topic for Matt Dressel today. He has been talking to us about this for it feels like maybe a couple months now.

Emma: Mhmm.

Mitch: And we said we need to talk about this. Let's interview Matt and get all of that out. And so we're gonna be digging into that. Emma, why don't you share what we're gonna be talking about and give us our outline?

Emma: Yeah. So today's theme is all about Microsoft. Sometimes we skirt away from that topic, but today we're really going to dive into Microsoft and their approach as tool designers when they're thinking about is this tool for an individual, is this tool for an organization, and how does everything work together? So ultimately, what we're looking at is what is Microsoft's approach to individual versus organizational tools and what is our hot take on what they could do differently.

Mitch: Alright.

Matt: Yeah.

Mitch: So let's start with our kinda overview. Our first segment is an overview of Microsoft's tool ecosystem, and we kinda talk about what that mean what is individual topic or what is individual tools versus organizational tools.

Emma: And before we dive in, I want to get people on the same language loop as us. And we talk about individual where we don't like to use the word personal because everyone tends to think, oh, my personal life. Yeah. Text messages, that type of communication. So individual tools, we're we're just meaning as individual to one single person.

An organizational level is more at that collaborative space. So think of it as more people working together. So we're gonna use those tool those terms a lot in this podcast. So that's what we mean by them. But, yeah, Matt, why don't you give us a breakdown of what are the individual tools and then we'll look at the organizational tools.

Matt: So individual tools, the the the by far the most common ones that everybody knows, email and OneDrive. Right? I have an email box. It's my email. When somebody emails that mailbox, it comes to me personally.

Right, individually as my individual. OneDrive, when I put some something there, it's mine. It's owned by me. When I leave the organization, it goes away. Right?

Those are the probably the quintessential ones, but then pretty much every other tool that Microsoft has been producing has some facet of it that is individual in nature versus organizational in nature. When you think about, MS forms, right, there's individual MS forms and there's group MS forms. When you think about Teams as an application, there's chats which is individual, and you have channel messages which are not. So you you've got these 2 different things both from a a tool. So a tool can just be 1 or the other, but then you also have, like, sub features within them that can be either individual or organization.

Mitch: And sometimes it's a little bit murky as to which you're using when.

Matt: Yeah. Right? Not only is it murky, but it is probably one of the things that we talk about the most that if I were to explain to someone what's the probably the most important thing they learn about Microsoft 365 to make it better in their organization, it's to know this. Mhmm. Like, to understand what those are.

Once you understand what those are, you can start making better decisions about where you're putting data and what you're doing.

Mitch: Yeah. And I feel like just to kinda go back to the Microsoft thing, they don't do an awesome job of delineating that or helping you understand.

Matt: No. They purposely seem to avoid having that conversation.

Mitch: Yeah. And so we're raising a flag of this is really important to know, so here's what you need to know.

Emma: Yeah. So before we move on to those challenges that we're already starting to talk about because I can tell it it's a passionate topic for all of us because we wanna talk about why it's it's not really set up the right way. Let's outline the organizational side of the tools.

Matt: So SharePoint's probably one of the biggest one. If you're using SharePoint, that is an organizational tool. There's not really a good way to use it in an individual way. Teams so the Teams app within Teams, Teams shared workspaces, this is a lot of times what we call it, channels, that kind of stuff. Planner is also that way, Microsoft Groups, Loop workspaces, so not loop components.

Loop components could be either, but loop workspaces are organizational in nature. It's not tied to an individual. So those would be some examples of some organizational tools.

Emma: Okay. So we've got this suite of tools. Some do both. Some are more leaning individuals. Some are more leaning organizational.

On the surface, I can already tell that will likely cause some challenges. So can you kinda give us a few case studies, if you will, of why these can be pain points for people?

Matt: Yeah. So a lot of what we're gonna get into today is the fact that end users don't care to start with. Right? When people start to use the tools, they're like, what's easy for me to use? Right?

The problems that we talk about, the challenge becomes, in our opinion, is that it is far too easy to use and leverage the individual tools and forget everything about the organization tools. Right? We have some reasons why. We have some, like we have lots of conversation we're gonna have about that. But when you open up and want to share a document, it's way easy to send that an email attachment

Mitch: Right.

Matt: And just forward it to the next person for me personally. Now that creates a bunch of problems. Right?

Mitch: It reminds me of an example of what you guys actually taught at a recent workshop, which was when you need to trans transfer information to someone, communicate with someone, your mind immediately goes to what's convenient

Matt: Yeah.

Mitch: And what's most effective. So if they're if you're sitting right next to me, I'm just gonna talk

Matt: to you.

Mitch: So right Yeah. A lot of those individual tools start to feel really convenient and easy, and you kinda just follow

Matt: it to it. Create problems, and those problems are all related to where we come to work for an organization. I don't come to work for me personally. Like, my job is not for me, my me as an individual. It's for my team, my division, the organization.

Like, we fit into a bigger picture and that the value that we bring, the knowledge that we bring to the organization is valuable to the organization, and that organizational knowledge should be stored in a way that's appropriate for the organization. Mhmm. And lots of organization have different ways to do it, but it needs to be moving in that direction.

Emma: And I think what we're trying to drive home here is think about Teams, the app Teams. I might think I'm doing the right thing and I'm meeting all the goals that you're talking about by chatting with you, Mitch, about something that, you know, just came up and I I need to send a quick chat. I'm gonna use this cool, modern tool. I'm gonna chat with Mitch without even thinking about the fact that I probably should've asked you that question more in and out in an open space, which is a channel and organizational level, so that other people could have seen the answer and also gotten that value. So I think I'm doing the right thing because I'm using Teams.

That's what I was told to do, But I'm not doing it at that organizational level, and Microsoft hasn't made it easy for me to understand the difference between Right. Those 2.

Mitch: Yep. Yeah. That's super super common. Something that, yeah, I talk about in my course a little bit too about, yeah, how do you take that knowledge outside of that one to one conversation and put it in an organizational space? When you said storage Yeah.

I immediately there's a a flag that goes off in my head of, oh, no. IT compliance. Like, I don't care. That's the way I'm wired. I don't care where it's stored.

Right? But there's an aspect of how it's stored that allows it to be surfaced in some ways

Matt: Yeah.

Mitch: Where it can't. If you're you wanna talk about that at all?

Matt: What you just said is a big thing. A lot of people are like, I don't I wanna use my OneDrive, and I don't wanna use SharePoint because there's rules with SharePoint that I have to follow.

Mitch: Yeah.

Matt: Right? And there is some truth to that. There is a compliance feature set that and there's a governance feature set that Microsoft has in spades. Right? Like, they do that better than most other competitors that they have.

But at the same time, using it that way can and will almost always be beneficial to the individual user. And actually at the core of what my concern and the thing that I'm frustrated with is if Microsoft spend more time making that scenario where I do put it in this organizational place, and I make it great for the end user. I make it so amazing, so much better than any other individual solution that I wanna use. Everybody would use it. It would be the no brainer thing to do.

Mitch: Mhmm.

Matt: But what they do is they more often than not focus on that individual tool as the starting point, and then the rest of it is an afterthought. And so they break it up into these two things, and they, in some ways, perpetuate the concept that there's IT over here, which just wanna pour water on everybody's fire of wanting to use the new cool thing, and there's users over here that only want cool fancy things. They don't care about any of the compliance stuff. The truth of the matter is everybody they both teams, like, want to work together. They just are struggling to find tools that will let them do that.

Mitch: I feel us easing into that conversate for sure. Really quick before we get too far, just to give people more examples of instances of how they might uncover this loop components you you mentioned here. Yeah. How is that?

Matt: So this gets a little bit into the launching the way they get it. Loop components work in both organizational and individual. You can put it so loop components become a file effectively. That file can be stored in OneDrive. And today, it can also be stored in Teams or in SharePoint and be leveraged.

When they launched it, that wasn't the case. The way they when they launched it, the first thing they did was say, you can use it in chat and email, and I'm gonna store it in your OneDrive. And there was a big splash, and they did a big announcement, and a lot of people knew about it. Right? But when that announcement came out, like, you you told you actually were like, hey, Matt.

The loops out. Right? And I went, this is ridiculous. I'm not gonna recommend this to anyone. Mhmm.

This is so terrible. It's just gonna promote people putting files and data in their OneDrive, which will just be another nightmare for all of our customers. I'm not gonna recommend it to anyone. And then silent, no marketing, they launched it in channels and SharePoint. No big splash.

Right?

Mitch: I remember seeing something, but it definitely wasn't

Matt: in the admin center. I know it was in the admin center, but there wasn't a big thing. Right? Yeah. And so then, for me, what that creates is a scenario where I have a bunch of users that I have to be the bad guy poo pooing on their brand new fancy thing Yeah.

Or I have to choose to do something wrong myself and then try to have to clean up the mess later on. Yeah. And I wish they would not do that. So that's an example of today, you can do either one. You can choose and it's fuzzy and whatever, and we can talk to people about what they should be doing.

Do it in a channel. Don't use it in a chat unless you really have to, that kind of stuff. But when they launched it, I didn't have a choice. Microsoft handcuffed me. They the only thing I could say about it is I I probably wouldn't use it.

Mitch: Right.

Matt: I wouldn't recommend it.

Emma: And this is a consistent pattern that we're seeing or have seen over the last few years of other things. So let's give a couple other examples. Let's take Teams.

Matt: Yeah. So in Teams, they consistently launch stuff in chats and not in channels. So being able to pop out chats in channels, k, that you got it in in chats, you didn't really get it until channels till later. Loop components like I talked about weren't available in chats or were available in chats, not in channels. There's just all of this second class citizen kind of situation with all of these tools that are the bread and butter of what Microsoft has done.

Mitch: Channel meetings too.

Matt: Yeah. Channel yes. Exactly. Channel meetings.

Mitch: Who uses a channel meeting?

Matt: Because there's so many features that aren't in a channel meeting that are in regular meetings.

Emma: Meeting. Yeah. Yeah. And then forms is another one that comes to mind because I know I have made the mistake of making individual forms a lot, and then it's really complicated or was to have to, yeah, add it to a team or You

Mitch: used to not be able to Yeah.

Emma: You used to not be able to, so I had to copy it over. Like, I had to recreate it, basically. I I remember having to do that.

Matt: Forbes is a great example because they launched it, and you could do both. Right? Like, they did what I would want them to do. However, they promoted individual forms.

Emma: And so that was typically where people would

Matt: You wanna promote people to do it in a group because if I'm creating this organizational knowledge where I'm gonna capture all this data, I need to share it with other people. It's the organization's data. It's not my data. I'm not doing a survey of my employees as me as Matt. I'm like, I'm not the one doing it.

It's it's my position. It's my organization that's doing this. Yeah. And so they should be promoting, like, the edge case is Matt wants to send out a survey to ask some questions about how they feel about something that he cares about. Right?

Like, that's the edge case, not the primary case. And so then they did it. And then to compound the problem, they didn't have a way to move it from one to the other until, like, I don't know, a year ago.

Mitch: It was years. Yeah. But it

Matt: was not it was just recently.

Emma: And, as someone I remember in that scenario, I was newer to using forms, so I just followed the intuitive way, which was to build the survey, build the form, I sent it out, and then one of you asked me, hey, have you gotten any responses on that? Can you send me over the information? And I realized, oh, you don't have access to this. Like, oh, I wish that I that it would have been more intuitive for me to create this in a group where now I don't have to try to share every it it just made it actually a lot harder on me too. So Yeah.

I hear you on the the side of you want this level this knowledge to sit at the level of the organization, but I'm also here to say it'll make your life easier too. Yes. Yes. Because you don't have to jump through all the hoops then of getting it in the the shareable spot.

Mitch: That's sort of what was just going through my mind is we have literally built a business on helping people navigate

Matt: Yeah.

Mitch: This structure. Like Yeah. In a perfect world, we wouldn't need to exist. Right. Because it was so

Emma: It would just seem more intuitive.

Matt: Right. Microsoft would be explaining this to their users in a way that makes sense to them. That's natural. Right? Like, doing it the other way to add some extra steps.

But like you said, if you could if I once a user under like, just on for 2 seconds understands what it is, it's like, oh, of course, I yeah. That makes total sense. For sure, I wanna do that. Right?

Emma: Mhmm.

Matt: Yeah. It's a challenge for sure.

Emma: Yeah. We're not gonna stay fully negative during this podcast, though. We are going to get to some proposed solutions. But let's first talk about what this structure and this design, what impact this makes then on Microsoft's market position. Yeah.

So what what are your thoughts, Matt, off

Matt: the top? So Microsoft's market position, in my opinion, one of the strongest look. We've used Slack. We've used other tools, whimsical, these other things. They have individual an individual focus by default, and they have it in spades.

They started as a scrappy startup, and they were selling to individual people, maybe a small group of people. That's what their that's what their business is. Right? When Microsoft tries to compete on those types of features, they will fail. They'll fail because they have invested entire like, significantly over pretty much as long as they've existed on more organizational level, experiences and enterprise functionality.

Right? If they really wanna compete, they have to throw away some of those old features, or they have to completely redesign them completely to actually compete with those individual user those individual tools. Right?

Emma: Like Slack.

Matt: Like Slack.

Emma: Yeah. Monday.com.

Matt: And and I'm saying Slack Slack now has enterprise features. Right? Like, they've caught up in some ways in what they can do today. But when they launched, they were they're gonna beat you, and because they don't have this baggage that you have naturally. Right?

And you can't really get rid of that baggage because you have such a customer base that's using it, number 1. And number 2, the there's a reason you're a market leader in that space. There's there's a reason that you have those features. Those features are important to businesses across the board, big, small, etcetera. Your problem is you're trying to play to both of those worlds when you do this.

Like, it feels like you're saying, I'm gonna I'm gonna launch these things to individuals because I know I still got these people in compliance, and they're gonna still do it. Right? Like, they're still gonna they're they're gonna eventually or they're always gonna come to us no matter what because we've got that such a big deal, but I wanna get this other market. I would encourage Microsoft to say, stop doing that. You need to focus on playing to your strength and really making that experience so great that those individual people don't care about it.

Like, they want to do this stuff this other way. Right? They wanna use these organizational level features and and tools because they're just as easy as the other ones. So why wouldn't I? Why wouldn't you put all this information in one spot if it was just as easy as you doing it the other way?

Mhmm. So you were asked about market position in particular. I believe my Microsoft's strong market position where they beat everyone else is related to that compliance organizational management, like having everything all bundled into one big thing

Emma: Mhmm.

Matt: That you can use and manage at the organizational level. That's the reason why people buy Microsoft tools. And by doing what they do with a lot of these features, they make it more difficult. They're they're giving away their their people who are on the IT side will just get frustrated, and people on the individual side that are just trying to use the tools go, but it's still not as good as Slack. So I just still wanna just use Slack.

It's like a lose lose situation. Why do it to yourself?

Mitch: Yeah. We're a prime Example. Offender. Yeah. Like, we use Slack.

We've said it before. I think the day is coming.

Matt: Yes. We've been talking about a while.

Mitch: To admit it, but, yeah, it's a struggle. And when you were talking about that, it made me think of you you talked about Slack started from a personal basis, and it was very good. Like, I talked about it previously. It felt like Slack was built for a a person, and Teams was built for the enterprise.

Matt: Yeah.

Mitch: And they missed out on the person. I think Microsoft is almost taking a small piece of Slack strategy of, let's do the individual stuff and then add on the enterprise stuff after the fact as an afterthought as opposed to going at it from the other way. Is it just because there's more it's more difficult, there's more politics to navigate through. Like, why?

Matt: I it's a great question. If I had to guess, part of it is because of usage. Like, it's a kind of a self fulfilling prophecy. More people use Outlook and OneDrive and those types of tools at an individual level than use Teams when in Teams shared workspaces or Microsoft Groups or whatever. Right?

Well, the reason that is is because it's not as easy to use the other tools, and you don't promote it, and you put your new features in the individual tools.

Mitch: This is our hypothesis.

Matt: So then you use those tools tools and then more people use those tools, and so then Microsoft wants to do and it's like a self that's one thing I think is going on. I I think there's a component of that is that. Another piece is it takes more work. Like, it's more effort trying to figure out the it's hard to do this at to think about it and use it in a organizational level. It's expensive to do that.

Right?

Mitch: Mhmm.

Matt: But that's your market. Yeah. Like, that's what you're trying to do. That's what you've sold. That's what your foundation is.

Your bedrock is. So for me, it's like, yep. I get it. It's hard. Yeah.

It's expensive, but it's what you're doing. Because in almost all these cases, it's not like they don't do the organization level 1. It just comes second or is a little bit less full featured or is a little bit less whatever. Right? It's not like they're not solving the hard problem.

It's just not the first problem they're solving.

Mitch: Yeah. We've gotten to know some of the product people over the years and all great people. Like, on an individual level, like, I feel for them a little bit because they're trying to roll out new features, and they're like, this seems like the fastest path to getting something in front of someone.

Matt: Feedback.

Mitch: So they yeah. And it's there is a a paradigm, like, design thinking paradigm, which is, yes, please, get that in front of people as soon as possible, but it creates that fork in the road that is really hard to get back to the other side.

Matt: Yeah. The thing that I would encourage them to think about if they're listening is your these other tools, these tools that are individual in nature in the future really should be thought of as the secondary scenario. Right? When you think about implementing a feature, that's the one that should be like, if that comes later, that's okay. Because at least I covered the one that most people are using, most people are doing.

Now I recognize that's not the reality of today, but the reason it's not a reality of today is, like I said before, it's just they haven't done a good enough job at it yet. But the reality is if they don't solve that problem, Slack, Whimsical, all of these bigger Google, all these things, they're gonna get better at these things. They have gotten better at these things, and they'll beat you to the other piece of it. Right? Because you're giving them an opportunity to beat you on both sides.

You're giving them space to do that. Whereas if you would focus on it and make that stellar, be it, like, as good as Like the gold standard. Everyone else. The gold standard. Yeah.

Nobody in the world would care that you don't I can't do the same thing in OneDrive. Nobody would care that you can't do it for a month before you actually have it. Right? Everybody would be like, this is so amazing. Everybody's gonna love it.

Everybody's gonna love it.

Mitch: Yeah. And what comes to mind for me is, like, planner. Like Oh, yeah. And if they could just nail down that core feature set and avoid this draw to these other tools that are knocking it out of the park, where I have to tell someone, oh, it'll be better in the long run if you don't go do this. Yeah.

The integration isn't as good, so stick with planner and then you gotta fight through that pain.

Emma: Mhmm.

Mitch: It's hard sometimes

Matt: Yeah.

Mitch: To and we don't have a crystal ball. We don't see what the path of the road map of these things are, and so we're taking a little bit of a guess, like, an estimated guess, but it's Well it's hard.

Matt: Right now, today, the warts are worth it. Right. Right? Like, the benefits that you get from a compliance management, organizational data, organizational collaboration, etcetera, are worth the hoops and the, oh, yeah. I know that doesn't quite work right.

Oh, yeah. I know that doesn't quite work right. Eventually Biden nickel. That won't be the case, and the other tools will be equally as good, and my case for it will be different. Right?

If you if they don't do anything, that's what will happen eventually. The last thing I wanna say about it is that planners of that what you just talked about is a perfect example. There's now planner premium, which is organization based, and planner, which is team organization based because it's gotta be in a group. And now there's roster plans that you can make in loop that aren't organization and but they don't talking about it and, like, it's another example of a weird just a weird Yeah.

Mitch: They have personal plans.

Matt: Which has a bunch of cool features in it that people want. Like, I know you. We love them. We love those plans because you can visualize them and loop really cool. Yeah.

But they're not really organizational really, really all the way. Yeah. It it

Emma: feels confusing for the end user because you're not actually sure what the ideal

Matt: Solution is.

Emma: Solution is or really, like, again, back to my example about the forms is what should I do? And that's all people wanna know is, like, Win Planner, how should I be creating a plan? That'll work. Yeah. That that that will do all the things I want or create the plan and loop.

How how should I go about it? What's the best way? Versus here are 3 different ways. Choose your own adventure. Yeah.

All are equal. Yep. It's just very confusing.

Mitch: Yes.

Emma: Okay.

Mitch: I'm gonna give a moment to shout out.

Emma: Yeah.

Mitch: We were just working with Emma earlier about developing some products and services around this space of, like, planner, project management, task management stuff. We'll leave a link in the show notes for we're collecting feedback. Yeah. Do you wanna share anything?

Emma: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, given the example that I just gave of lots of times in Microsoft, it's confusing about what tools to use or there's just a number of challenges. Whenever you're managing a project or a process or trying to get your team aligned on just a new work initiative that you're working through. If these are common challenges that you're having, I wanna hear about them because we're creating a course and just a service that we'll offer to help people really apply our knowledge to the Microsoft 365 Suite to make doing all of those things a lot easier.

But if you have feedback on just what's been challenging at your organization or your own journey with Microsoft 365, I would love to hear it. So we've got some questions in that form, and if you fill it out, it would help us create the best, yeah, solution.

Mitch: Link down below.

Matt: Link down below.

Emma: Okay. So speaking of solutions, let's get into the more positive side Yeah. Of what can people do? Obviously, we can't all go work at Microsoft and change their minds. So what is there to do, and what can organizations, come together to do?

Matt: One of the things that we do, and it's one of the primary things, as Mitch said, we've built, part of our business, part of our offerings, and our explanations is all about explaining to people the difference between these things so that they understand what they're doing. Most people, as you said, they're left with the choose your own adventure, but they don't have any knowledge that is required or context to choose make a good choice. You should understand it a little bit. Do you have to understand all the technical details of every no. But, usually, what I do is when I look at a new feature so when Microsoft launching a new feature, I'm looking at using something, I ask myself, where is this gonna go?

Like, where is this gonna get stored? And if the answer is OneDrive, my my Outlook, my like, something that's individual to me where I have to click on my name to get into the thing that I'm trying to do, I go, can I avoid that? Is there something I can do to make it not that? No? Okay.

Is it worth me using this tool? Like, the benefits, does it outweigh the challenges? Because the challenge I'm gonna be creative with is now it's mine. Isn't it it's not mine. It's not the organization's.

It's mine.

Emma: And if you're a complete beginner to learning how things are in storage, because I was, a quick way to do that is if you hover over and you click the share link or anything, you can look in the URL. And if it says OneDrive or if it says your name

Matt: Yep.

Emma: Yeah. That is where Matt is talking about. Yeah.

Matt: 100%. That's a great way. And if it doesn't have like a my or a my being m y or your username in it, then you're probably pretty safe.

Emma: SharePoint or your

Matt: SharePoint, whatever. Yep. Then you're pretty safe from it.

Emma: Those are the clues to look for.

Matt: Yeah. So for me, that's the big takeaway. Like, people need to understand what those are and make good choices that will work for them, and that doesn't and we had this conversation actually just in some recent work that we have with some clients. That doesn't mean we're saying don't ever use OneDrive Mhmm. Or don't ever use email.

That's not what we're saying at all. There's tons of scenarios that those make perfectly good sense, but that should be, like, maybe 20% at a high end of the scenarios. By far, the scenario that would should be used the most when you're working as an employee for an organization is to use these organizational tools.

Emma: My hack on that when I don't always understand if it's a new tool or something new to me, I always try to originate things within Teams if I can, within a Microsoft Team, within, yes, within a channel. As much as I can, use those tabs, store files there, originate as much as I can from a Microsoft Team versus the browser situation just going to the tool because that's usually where I fall prey to the UX design of, oh, just click this plus button.

Matt: Excuse me.

Emma: And, yeah, it created the thing. And then you have that mistake once or twice and you realize you have to copy everything over and super painful, especially when that didn't exist where you could just transfer it. So I haven't made the mistake, thankfully, much past that. But if you originate things as much as you can within Teams, you're usually pretty safe. So that'd be my other thing.

Mitch: And I wanna maybe encourage someone listening. People can learn this.

Emma: Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Matt: Yeah. It's not that hard.

Mitch: Yeah. As soon as you understand the concept of this is mine, this is the organization's, you can start to pick up on clues like what Emma was just talking about of, oh, yep. I need to go this way.

Matt: Yep.

Mitch: I wish you didn't have to Mhmm. And that there is so much friction around that stuff, but it is an important thing to teach your people Yeah. And people can learn it.

Matt: Yes. A 100%. It is not rocket science. It is not crazy difficult to understand. It takes it does take a little extra mental work.

Mhmm. But you personally and the organization will be better for it if you can do it.

Emma: So I think those are our tips on proposed solution. Any other thoughts on that side of it?

Matt: Just to be transparent, we've given this feedback to Microsoft.

Emma: Yeah.

Matt: In in our capacity that we can, it's not like we're heavily involved with all of the the teams. I would encourage you if you have an opportunity to have a conversation with Microsoft to encourage them and let them hear that as well. They respond do respond to users' feedback. That is something that they do, especially in a lot of, like, Teams and Loop, and these teams are looking for feedback from end users.

Mitch: They look for volume.

Matt: Yes. Yeah. How much you're talking about it.

Mitch: Yep.

Matt: And so one of the problems that we have with our voice is we're one of some of the only people talking about it in the way that we're talking about it. Many times people complain about a particular feature that's going on. They don't like this one feature. They don't like that one feature. Mhmm.

But they don't boil it down to the reason they don't like it is because of the way Microsoft is storing these things, organizing, and how they're focusing. If I we can get more people talking to Microsoft about this particular problem, about the way that they're approaching these features, organization versus individual, I think we can start to see a change in how they behave, and it's and I think it'd be better for them. I think it'll be better for us. I think it'll be better for everyone involved.

Emma: Yeah. So what have we talked about today? I'm gonna recap and we can give last thoughts. Obviously, the thread through the whole thing is as Microsoft creates tools and adds new updates to tools, they tend to approach things with the individual in mind and not on the organizational level. So we've talked through what that looks like in Microsoft's tool ecosystem, email, Outlook being very individual, SharePoint being very organizational, and what are all the other tools and how they fall into those groups.

We've talked through the frustrations that these can create, how it's very not very intuitive for the end user, and then really how that impacts Microsoft's market position and, again, adds confusion to the end user when all these other tools are coming out in the marketplace by other companies, Slack was an example, who are doing it just much better than Microsoft and Microsoft is losing out in that market share. We talked through some solutions about what you can do. Number 1, educate yourself to understand the differences and the nuances and really understand how you can use the tools to the best of your ability within the design that Microsoft has made. So there's light at the end of this tunnel. Unfortunately, I don't think Microsoft is going to change super quickly.

That would be my final thought, but I think from my experience of learning these tools and being able to apply that lens of understanding, am I doing this individually or am I doing this organizationally, Just bringing that into my daily work, that has helped me use the tools and leverage them to the best of their, yeah, capability.

Mitch: Yeah. I wanna give maybe a prompt for Matt here. We were considering calling this something like if you could wave a magic wand and

Matt: it would all be fixed.

Mitch: Let's do an exercise. Close our eyes for a minute. Let's say we wake up in 3 years from now, and it's all fixed. Yeah. What does that look like?

Matt: Oh, oh, people, the market share of how much people are spending time in these tools that are organizational in nature is way higher, and people's satisfaction is way higher with what how they're working with people, collaborating with people, and people are more satisfied with the technology that they're using. I think there is a a significant amount of people who are dissatisfied and that dissatisfaction this dissatisfaction comes from this this underlying thing that I don't think anyone's focused on because they're too focused on the features. Yeah. I don't know. Does that answer the question?

Mitch: No. You're forced through the trees a little bit. We think this is why there's so much friction.

Matt: Well Do you

Emma: wanna answer that same question, Mitch?

Matt: Yeah. I

Emma: kinda wanna get your thoughts.

Matt: Yeah.

Mitch: I don't know that I have something, crazy different, but, yeah, I think there's, like, this walled garden, like, of Microsoft, where you only get, like, this little view into what's going on. I would I understand the complications, but in a perfect world, I woke up. It is here's what's coming, here's what's going on, here's our thought process behind this, here's a little bit of vulnerability. Mhmm. We're figuring things out.

We want your feedback. Something that we we can actually say, this is taking us a little bit longer because we wanna build it for an organizational use instead of personal. Mhmm. A little bit more of that as opposed to things just show up or things

Matt: just

Mitch: happen and

Matt: We actually experienced this. There's been conversation that we've heard from Microsoft about. They talk about we're focused on the IT people. Right? Like, before we were focused on end users, and now we're focused on IT people.

I want them to be like that, and that when they really understand when they really talk about that behind the scenes, it's like when they talk about IT, they talk about organizational stuff. When they talk about individual, they talk about that changes to be when I talk about users, I'm talking about what's best for them holistically, not about what they care about in the moment, but what they care about holistically. And they and it resonated with what you're thinking about that we are taking this and using this. We're doing this organizational thing.

Mitch: Mhmm.

Matt: It's not about IT. It's about we're doing this because your organization as a whole, this is what's best for your organization and how they work, and your organization will work better.

Mitch: Yeah. Yeah. Because they can't feel that benefit right now. Like, it Yeah. Because there's so much disparity.

Matt: And they but they but I some of that is because Microsoft is only thinking about it in the context of I have IT admins that I need to this my market is IT admins and end users, and I'm like, no. Your market is the organ is a business. Yes. Which have IT admins and it has users Yes. But it's the business.

You need to think about it as a whole thing.

Emma: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So we shared our experiences and, yeah, just our thoughts, but we wanna hear all of our listeners' thoughts as well and their experiences.

So Yeah. If you're listening to this and you've had similar experiences or super different, we would love to hear either. So either fill out that form for my thing Mhmm. But also, yeah, leave comments or Yeah.

Mitch: YouTube, you can leave a comment. I think there's new comments on Spotify, actually. Sweet. You can actually leave a comment on Yeah.

Matt: Or reach out on LinkedIn. Episode. Yeah.

Emma: Yeah. And if you have other topic ideas for podcasts, you wanna get our thoughts or our hot takes on Microsoft tools, let us know. We're always looking for new topics to to chat about.

Matt: Yeah. Cool.

Mitch: Yeah. Thanks a lot.

Emma: Yeah. Well, thanks for listening today. We enjoyed this conversation. And although I know we can be a little negative on Microsoft, we do love their tools, and we love helping organizations use those tools to make their work life easier. So thanks for listening, and catch us on the next one.

Mitch: Hey. Thanks for joining us today. If you haven't already, subscribe to our show on your favorite podcasting app so you'll always be up to date on the most recent episodes. This podcast is hosted by the team members of Bulb Digital. Special thanks to Eric Veeneman for our music tracks.

If you have any questions for us, head to make others successful.com, and you can get in touch with us there. You'll also find a lot of blogs and videos and content that will help you modernize your workplace and get the most out of Office 365. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you next time.

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