upvote

points

by itopaloglu8313 hours ago |
comments
upvoteby mort9613 hours ago|
next
[-]
Microsoft absolutely doesn't need it, but I'm guessing the weather app team (or the core filler apps team or whatever team is responsible for it) needs it to juice a metric to make some middle manager happy.

And it makes the middle manager happy because it lets that middle manager report better numbers to their superiors again.

Etc.

It's why all large dysfunctional organisations do self destructive stuff like this.

reply
upvoteby SlightlyLeftPad12 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
“What value are you bringing to the company?” translates to “if you’re not printing money, you lose your job.”
reply
upvoteby dasyud12 hours ago|
parent|
next
[-]
I once worked on a project where the goal was to improve the reliability of MS Teams. The skip level manager was not happy when we said we cannot estimate what the revenue gain would be because it can't be measured.
reply
upvoteby mpyne9 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
This risks getting into the Fisherian/Bayesian stats wars again, but it would be possible to project a revenue gain, even in advance of making the change. You'd do this in terms of improved customer retention, lower cost of future customer acquisition, increased price a Teams license could sustain based on a rep for higher reliability, etc.

Obviously it's not a change that you'd be able to pin a specific human decision-maker (who was marginal on Teams) down as to this change being the difference between a sale or not, but nor is the change in revenue going to be a random number uniformly distributed in (-∞,∞).

If the change was revenue-neutral, the skip level would probably have been justified in seeing if the teams working that project could have found something to do customers actually care about instead.

reply
upvoteby dasyud9 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
[dead]
reply
upvoteby mapontosevenths12 hours ago|
parent|
prev|
[-]
Any manager who doesn't push back when given a perverse incentive should be fired. They are not leaders, they are followers... And not even very good followers.
reply
upvoteby mort9612 hours ago|
parent|
next
[-]
Yet they're the ones who get promoted because their KPIs are the best.
reply
upvoteby anonymars2 hours ago|
parent|
prev|
[-]
Fired by whom? Where do you think these perverse incentives are coming from?
reply
upvoteby WakeUpPeople13 hours ago|
prev|
next
[-]
> What’s next? Ads on the start menu?

They already exist: https://www.howtogeek.com/windows-11-start-menu-ads-how-to-t...

reply
upvoteby Zopieux6 hours ago|
parent|
next
[-]
Patent was being sarcastic. Everybody heard about (or had the displeasure of seeing) those ads.
reply
upvoteby _trampeltier12 hours ago|
parent|
prev|
[-]
Don't they even had it earlyer and even let the DNS expire, so someone else could spam the startmenu?
reply
upvoteby ColdStream5 hours ago|
prev|
next
[-]
Yeah it is actually really sad when a company the size of MS still bows down to the great god Advertising!

Avert ye eyes for there are no morals in these bad lands of Redmond!

reply
upvoteby bossyTeacher12 hours ago|
prev|
[-]
They do. Never forget, Microsoft's goal is to squeeze as much money from you as possible.
reply
upvoteby dabinat11 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
That’s the goal of every publicly-traded corporation in a mature market. Wall Street demands ever-increasing returns and they can’t grow their customer base much so cost-cutting and fleecing existing customers are the only levers to pull.
reply