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So it looks like Microsoft are entering the telecoms market. Teams is now everywhere. A lot of our resellers are coming back to us saying "hey we tried selling a phone system to this company but all they kept talking about was Microsoft Teams". Basically a combination of changing trends and corona virus have suddenly resulted in a lot of the small to medium businesses that would have normally bought a phone system are now using Microsoft 365 for everything and they really don't see the point in buying a separate phone system. Microsoft have also made it clear they have every intention to take over the small business phone system market with Teams.
The above in combination with apps taking over for ordering food/taxis and basically every interaction with a business or service I think spells the writing on the wall for what was our main cash cow for 5 years. What I'm trying to do now is convince my idiot partners who seem to have this blind optimism to stop pissing all our current profit away on pointless feature development and to just cash out while the going is good. I reckon we probably have about 5 years of profitability left then things are going to tank hard. I'd like to have extracted what money I can before then but I fear my partners are going to push on with this development death march and end up just making a bunch of devs rich instead of ourselves.
You see I have my fingers in other pies and would like to capitalise on those opportunities before they too get swallowed by the winds of change. My partners on the other hand are older and I think see this as their last rodeo and were hoping it would see them in to a comfortable retirement. I think I'm going to have to break some bad news to them.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 19 2020, @12:18PM (2 children)
One small ray of hope is that, given time, MS usually manages to screw up everything good they have.
My recent experience with MS Teams was very good--this was a test lab setting where engineers were off-site (at home) while a skeleton of techs ran the large physical testing equipment. My role was customer representative, I live nearby and was on site with PPE and distancing, another customer representative was several states away. Testing went on for 2 shifts straight and Teams only dropped a connection a few times. The lab staff mentioned that they had already tried Zoom and WebEx with many more problems. Since they were already an Office 365 customer, Teams was a no-brainer.
Back to my initial point, since Teams is part of a SaaS package, it won't be possible to just keep the current version that works well. MS will soon start pushing "improvements" and that could be your last opening?
(Score: 2) by sonamchauhan on Wednesday May 20 2020, @10:54AM (1 child)
"Testing went on for 2 shifts straight and Teams only dropped a connection a few times."
Curious: Was this automated soak-testing and what were ballpark numbers like?
Was it more like 10 dropouts per 10000 calls, or 10 dropouts per 800 calls?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 21 2020, @09:50PM
Sorry for confusion--hope you check back. Our test lab work (mechanical testing) had nothing to do with MS-Teams, we just used Teams to coordinate activities with several people sheltering at home. The Teams session was open for ~16 hours straight with 6-to-8 people on the video conference. A few times someone was disconnected and had to re-connect. No idea what caused the disconnections.
The tech at the test lab who set up the Teams conference call reported trying to do the same thing (in previous weeks) with other conference software--and experienced a much higher level of disconnects.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday May 19 2020, @01:30PM (1 child)
Pivot to other competencies now, but maintain and update your current skill set. Microsoft will likely do exactly as you say, but maybe they'll fuck it up, and if they do, you'll be in a good position to jump right back in. As a bonus, you can tell them you never gave up and were planning for exactly this to happen :)
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 3, Informative) by DannyB on Tuesday May 19 2020, @06:13PM
<no-sarcasm>
Microsoft may very well screw this up.
There is also another possibility. Remember back to, oh, about the late 1990s. I'm not going to google it, but Microsoft was looking to acquire Quicken and take over banking. All of a sudden regulators got a backbone (or some palms got greased) and there were all sorts of noises of antitrust (this was before the DOJ vs MS lawsuit which actually did happen).
There was real scrutiny. Microsoft backed down.
Hopefully this could happen again.
</no-sarcasm>
If a minstrel has musical instruments attached to his bicycle, can it be called a minstrel cycle?
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday May 19 2020, @06:04PM
The advantage of this to all humanity is that we could finally end up with true competition!
Imagine several gigantic, competing phone systems, all fully incompatible with one another! None of their parent companies willing to budge a single inch. It would be wonderful.
With each new cloud phone service, everyone on the planet would have to install yet another app, and hope it is offered on their preferred devices.
The future is finally arriving!
If a minstrel has musical instruments attached to his bicycle, can it be called a minstrel cycle?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Bot on Tuesday May 19 2020, @06:05PM
When it's time don't just close it down or accept ridiculous buyout offers. Try planning a free software version with the main features on commodity hardware and a vaporware commercial version or commercial services as a fake business plan. Github a beta. MS will know. Then hope MS comes to snuff you out with a decent offer. Even if you fail you will have hurt em a bit. This is the true spirit of capitalism >:D
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by sonamchauhan on Wednesday May 20 2020, @11:12AM
Yes - Teams is Microsoft gathering the low hanging fruit before Zoom/WhatsApp/Facetime/Google-Whatever move into Enterprise.
But there's plenty of room at the top! Plenty !! - multi-device/multi-viewpoint call integration, mediated replay (a la TiVo) and calling joining, feature extraction (e.g. track face only), mediated scheduling and callbacks.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Friday May 22 2020, @10:47AM (1 child)
What is it with people and Microsoft? It's almost as if something hasn't been invented until Microsoft does it.
Google is doing it too, now. Zoom has become very popular (for no apparent reason, other than the groovy name?) The dreaded WhatsApp, owned by Farcebook too. There is also another popular videoconferencing suite called Bluejeans, which I've used at work, and of course, the FOSS jitsi (you can run your own server apparently).
Some of us don't like video conferencing. I like the feature of things like Webex, Jabber, Jitsi, Bluejeans etc. where you can share your desktop to do eg presentations or to show something you're working on.
Is there some sort of Open Standard for video conferencing? There must be. People have been doing it for years. And what about mobile phones? When Mrs Turgid and I got our first 3G phones nearly 15 years ago we were able to make video calls on those like normal phone calls.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by NickM on Friday May 22 2020, @09:18PM
I a master of typographic, grammatical and miscellaneous errors !
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday May 27 2020, @06:26PM
The CEO of Slack says that Microsoft is 'unhealthily preoccupied' with 'killing' the company because it threatens email
https://www.businessinsider.com/slack-ceo-microsoft-unhealthily-preoccupied-competition-email-stewart-butterfield-2020-5 [businessinsider.com]
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