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Comment by chasing | Hacker News Reader

I would say that they seem to recognize that they need to appeal to the users of their products and not just those users’ managers. And that means playing ball with the ecosystem and not just trying to crush it. Baby steps, I guess.

But a lot of their product line remains a mess. (Although the Xbox shouldn’t be discounted — that was a consumer success.)

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I would say that they seem to recognize that they need to appeal to the users of their products and not just those users’ managers

Some of them recognize it, but not everyone. The company also seems to be pretty heavily invested into monetizing users to the hilt with telemetry and advertising. This is the sort of approach that will slowly drive people away from the platform, as users gradually tire of the ever-increasing intrusiveness of the ads.

> I would say that they seem to recognize that they need to appeal to the users of their products and not just those users’ managers.

Someone forgot to tell the Teams team.

The definition of SaaS is basically where the buyer is not the user. The managers write multi year six and seven figure checks not the user.

It's not that simple. Look up "product-led growth". It's why Figma made Adobe eat $20b.

And Figma’s revenue was only $400 million before it got acquired.

Games consoles are a strange consumer product. They live and die on the ability to make deals with third parties and only a small number of companies have ever had sustained success.

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