Last year I wrote a post complaining how Teams has become a perfect example of bloatware, and was gratified to see the response: basically a concurring pile-on of messages and comments, with literally only one or two people trying to defend it. Lots of horror stories to share.
But as I wade through some recent unasked-for and largely meaningless “upgrades” to Office 365, Teams’ big sister, such as color scheme changes, automatic and unwanted change in the position of the Quick Access toolbar, etc., I’ve been thinking: What if the problem with Teams – and by extension too many other SaaS products, is really just an extreme example of what happens when features are added to a SaaS product that aren’t sold as standalones and therefore don’t need to offer any intrinsic value, or at the very least pass a basic “sellability” test?
Maybe this lack of a need to prove an actual dollar value for an important new feature is emblematic of a larger problem in the SaaS market: Too many SaaS vendors have decided to err on the side of embracing an upgrade/update cadence that favors newness over quality, and frequency of updates over actual need. Or usability, desirability, and bug-free performance.
The result is that much of the SaaS market has embraced a continuously elastic 80/20 rule, where an ever-increasing 80% of users desperately try to stay on top of an increasingly large 20% of features that they actually want to use. With a twist: the 80% are more and more obliged to hide from, work around, and otherwise try to ignore the impact of that growing number of ill-considered and ill-tested new features in order to get their work done.
That can’t be good for customer satisfaction, customer centricity, or customer retention, can it? Captive audiences tend to dream of freedom, not more captivity. Amiright?
And yet this mindless march to feature bloat is the norm in the industry, particularly when it comes to mass-market enterprise software like – picking on Microsoft here – Teams, Office 365, and Windows, which keep trudging forward despite the fact that a lot of customers would prefer a little stasis to the current cadence of mindless updates.
Microsoft is of course hardly alone. Apple gets a nod for the frequent nonsensicality of its iOS updates. Greg Bensinger from the New York Times summed it in up a Tweet following a recent upgrade to iOS that put the search bar at the bottom of the Safari screen instead of at the top. To paraphrase: Exactly what problem does putting the search bar at the bottom of the screen solve for? Indeed. HP’s latest upgrade to its tragicomically named HP Smart printer app requires logging into an HP account to use the scanner – a “feature” that was added in the couple of months since I regretfully bought a new printer from this customer-hostile company. And shall we discuss the dead mass sitting on my Windows SSD called iTunes, a poster-victim of the Peter Principle of software upgrades: iTunes on Windows successfully upgraded itself until it reached a level of incompetence so incompetent that it has become utterly useless.
It’s important to really consider the impact of changing how software functions – a statement that should go without saying, and yet here I am saying this for the thousandth time – because that usually means the user experience has changed. And as we all know (right?) the biggest impediment to innovating business processes is the change management problem. It’s the proverbial blame-the-victim third rail of technology: all technology would always be perfect were it not for the fact that those darned humans have to muck it all up and actually use the tech. In other words, we as a species hate change, especially change of the sake of change. Which is what a shit-ton of software updates and upgrades seem to be mostly about.
Teams is sort of the posterchild of this rant, because it simultaneously occupies two separate layers of upgrade hell: a layer reserved for those products that are upgraded continuously without considering the impact on user experience; as well as special, lower layer reserved for products that are upgraded continuously and are free!
Judging from what a mess Teams is, it turns out free isn’t necessarily as much a bargain as it would seem. Which means it’s time to point a damning finger at the whole concept of continuous “free” upgrades for SaaS software, of which Teams gives us an excellent object lesson.
First, some history. Teams became part of the Office 365 family in 2017, and unlike stalwarts like Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, Teams was never sold as a standalone product. It was at some point intended to be a competitor to Slack as well as a replacement for the eminently replaceable Skype for Business. (Skype for Business, aka Lync, aka Stync, was even more unstable and clunky than Teams. The fact that one clunker was replaced by a second clunker is actually one of those “fool me twice, shame on me” moments, which also describes the Windows Phone OS disaster. So it’s not like Microsoft has no experience truly mucking things up for consumers and ought to know better.)
Regardless, and dangerously so for Microsoft, Teams has never had to prove itself in a competitive market because it’s been a free addon to O365 since its inception. If someone is an O365 subscriber, and just prefers Zoom, they just don’t have to use their free Teams account, no harm, no foul. Which sets up a perverse dynamic: As no one ever gets a bill for Teams, and as there’s no revenue stream for the Teams product team to create or defend, what’s the incentive to make it something a customer would actually buy? Or enjoy using?
Perhaps even more importantly, I doubt that any of the 100s of millions of O365 customers ever cancelled their account because Teams crashed one too many times – which is one its most reliable characteristics. Which means that, absent an explicit incentive to get Teams right, there’s no particular disincentive to getting Teams wrong.
ABSENT AN EXPLICIT INCENTIVE TO GET TEAMS RIGHT, THERE’S NO PARTICULAR DISINCENTIVE TO GETTING TEAMS WRONG
(Sorry I shouted, it’s just that, well, it felt good to get that off my chest.)
This makes Teams the ultimate “you get what you pay for” software in reverse, as in as long as you’re not paying anything, you can dial your expectations way down to the nothing setting as well.
At least Teams hasn’t crapped all over customers the way iTunes for Windows has. In a classic it could be worse scenario, iTunes for Windows simply can’t play movies in a customer’s iTunes account. I only found out how bad the latest version was when I rented and then tried to watch a movie on a recent business trip. (Remember business trips?) The app was an utter failure, and as I hadn’t downloaded it on my phone, I couldn’t watch a movie I had paid for, meaning Apple made money even though its freeware crashed and burned. (Which, admittedly, sort of undermines my thesis that if you have no incentive to make a feature worth something to someone the feature doesn’t have to actually work. Apple figured out how to make some freeware useless and still get paid for it. Good old Apple, always the maverick.)
While we’re at it: Windows 11, anyone? As they say in the Twitterverse: That’s the tweet.
This is why I think there should be some effort to force all new features to at least stand a decent chance of being sellable even if they will only ever exist as a free add-on to an existing subscription. If you’re gonna add that amazing new feature – search bar at the bottom of the screen instead of the top – you’ll have to build a business case for why you’re doing it. In fact, anything that changes the user experience enough to elicit a WTAF? response when a customer first encounters it should have to justify why confusing the customer is worth it. Too much to ask? How about at least ensuring that upgrades should work as intended without breaking something else along the way.
That’s not asking too much, is it? Looking at you, HP, Apple, Intuit, Teams – and on and on.
While I’m in remedy mode, how about SaaS companies stop upgrading willy-nilly and really focus on making sure existing customers are happy, satisfied, and getting the most value possible out of the services and features they’ve already subscribed to. It’s a radical idea, I know, but I believe there’s something to be said for putting a moratorium on feature upgrade bloat and hitting pause on the constant, unbridled, and unavoidable upgrades customers are forced to endure, regardless of whether they want or need the new features being offered. Because, as the bloatware upgrade problem continually reminds us: Free does not imply there’s an intrinsic or extrinsic value. It just means there’s an absence of cost. And actually, considering the frustration and annoyance factors involved, there is a cost in customer experience and customer satisfaction to pay.
Whatever way you look at it, poor quality upgrades undermine an important feedback loop in enterprise software, and market capitalism for that matter. While we know from long painful experience that the race is not necessarily won by the swiftest, nor is market share dominance the birthright of the most technologically advanced product, there is an implicit understanding that if you’re trying to sell something at quality level X and your competition is selling at quality level X-plus, you’re going have to do one of three things: double-down on quality, be doomed to an ignominious end, or try to stave off the grim reaper by challenging the better product in a price war race to the bottom.
Microsoft Teams and its ilk live in a delusional world where they think they’re doing the second option – doubling down on quality – when they’ve really chosen the third option, and are basically hoping that “free” will compensate for the vast limitations and inconsistencies in its user experience. It’s really unnecessary, and, frankly, a waste of everyone’s time and energy. It shouldn’t be necessary to put a dollar sign in front of every innovation in order to prove its worth, but it also shouldn’t be necessary to remind companies like Microsoft, Apple and the rest of the “ilk” that change for changes’ sake isn’t just a dumb idea. s
It’s really really really really dumb idea.
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