I would not be surprised if some PM at Microsoft heard about that and made it a box to check without understanding why the Midjourney Discord became so popular/remains so popular (I've heard it is basically a "Gen Z meme farm" and full of nonsense even "worse" than the term "Microslop"; so far I've managed to avoid that Discord and have only heard second-hand tales).
Oh, hello, climate change fan club :>
Not quite the same, but recently I was recently looking around for communities centered around Claude Code for discussion about people's workflows as well as discussion about what plugins people are using and if they notice it making a significant difference.
Since the technology is still evolving, having an active community can help you discover new patterns and explore the space more effectively.
Watching from the sidelines (not a Microsoft user), I've completely lost track. Between this, the Azure 365 cloud whatever stuff, I have no idea what many of the products even exactly are any more.
Series is a real weird word to use there. But it also doesn't help that the versions are extra complicated because with "PC-like compatibility" in everything after the Xbox One playing just about the entire same library you need a bit of a matrix to figure out which is best for you if you don't care about the "latest and greatest".
Weirdly it only has 8GB of internal storage...
Which I could add is "the only AI approved for use by IT" because they hate us.
I'm pretty sure Clippy and Rover had a child and it got bit by a radioactive LLM.
It's highly reminiscent of "IBM Watson" a few years ago. Basically the add-on brand to make them look cooler.
That's a lot of what big corp america strategy boils down to -- copy your competitors.
Don't get me wrong, creating a passionate community around a product is a great strategy for many reasons, but microsoft never had passionate users in the first place.
And it is telling that they are banning humor and criticism form their community, it shows they do not want have any criticism for their product, which is one of the benefits of community (fast and honest feedback loops). Its sort of like north korea where saying anything bad about the "great leader" or else. That's not a fun community, that is a community people want to leave but can't bc they will get shot at the border.
I stopped paying attention after a while as they get repetitive.
I haven't used the Discord, but having a place to ask for help using it doesn't seem farfetched.
The friction comes from having to sign up for different forums or services. I'd wager fewer people use (or even like) Teams than Discord among the tech enthusiast types who are willing to give them feedback on their product.
I'm not even sure if there is a way to have a team/channel for external users that they don't need to be invited to (I know you can jump through hoops to make it so they don't need to be guests in your tenant at least) or that there should necessarily be something like that in the first place.
(Microsoft _actually_ encouraged 'fans' to have Windows 7 Launch Parties...)