Heard The Microsoft CEO Teams Recommendation?

Well, thankfully we learn the definitive word on this via WSJ [sub'n req'd]. Reporting on the Nov '23 OpenAI coup.

Tech types gleefully lathering up in the Silicon Soap as the ChatGPT top dog was toppled. Major funder Microsoft threw a foam party for opportunity. With Chief Exec Satya Nadella apparently keen to sweeten the deal with the most honeyed of carrots, and at the same time burn the most sour of sticks. All aimed at ensuring the crème of the team jumped ship. Here's the flavour;

Microsoft prepared to give those engineers everything they needed to continue their work: a floor in LinkedIn’s offices, plentiful cloud-computing resources, Apple laptops. The trillion-dollar company’s employees assured their potential colleagues that they wouldn’t even have to use Microsoft’s workplace-communications app Teams.

Let that last part sink in.

They Wouldn’t Even Have To Use Microsoft’s Workplace-Communications App, Teams.

You may know I beat this drum quite a bit. Yet now it bears a Ringo re-banging.

If you are serious about video meetings - distinctive, more productive and shorter video calls - then you ought not use Teams.

Whatever your IT colleagues say.

Now, we have proof.

When even the company that makes it, realises the very same, where does that leave you?

Or as Harry Wallop yelped in The Times [London, paywall];

Oh, wow. Imagine working for Teams. Your product is so bad that even your own chief executive tells a bunch of highly paid engineers fleeing from an inferno of a company that they do not need to use your software.

Indeed. The 'best', namely here those ᴀɪ whizzes at the arguably the world's hottest unicorn, expect the best working environment. And that explicitly does not include Teams.

In the end, the Board rebellion failed. No en masse office move followed.

The afore-cited columnist has also developed a loathing for Teams.

In fact, he hates it.

From when joining, its 'wheel of death'. With your calendar, 'its heavy-handed tyranny'. In general, that 'it rarely works'.

More besides, too.

One of many further crucial observations should spark ideas;

"The simplest research call to check one fact is now, de facto, a bare minimum 15-minute video conference, which in fact is 18 minutes because of the three-minute firing up ... Nine times out of ten these meetings could and should be basic telephone calls."

I sometimes say as a throwaway line, that I can 'help you have the best meeting you never had'. When guiding someone through video performance mastery, one aim being counter-intuitively to help them make less video calls. And the above paragraph shows but one scenario how.

By the way, an overlooked cousin of this being when staving off an interminable email thread by a short, sharp video call. Which will also give you the bonus of less video minutes incoming overall.

If it isn't already, it should be getting clearer. In our solution sell arena, particularly across environments, Teams is not video calling. You don't have to be held back by it. And that's a trillion-dollar answer.