Markets Both Benefit and Constrain

Years ago I was in a conversation with someone who was asking some curious, albeit weighted questions around the subject of using the Office365 product suite over GSuite. It was a decision made in this organization prior to my coming on-board, but honestly I felt it was a good decision and supported it. One train of questioning was about some feature set related to cloud first solutions and collaboration features. The unfortunate part of the conversation is that, unless there’s a genuine intellectual curiosity about the subject, going into all the ins and outs of cost analysis and directionality is generally useless since it won’t be heard well.

It didn’t matter that the year was 2016, Satya Nadella had just started 2 years prior, the consent agreement that constrained much of their product development had ended only 5 years previously, and they were consistently retooling towards a cloud first posture. It didn’t even matter that the O365 was, even then, a greater ROI in terms of cost/feature comparable to GSuite. The person did not understand the market situations that led up to that moment and were just trying to get through their job.

It makes sense. So many times i’m in the same boat and judge a tool harshly without knowing further context into the whys and hows.

Obviously, we’re in a different world now. Not saying Microsoft is THE way, that very much depends on individual use cases. It is A way, and their innovation chops have been proven over the past decade. Full disclosure on my cards, in terms of use i’m at a 50/50 split. There are 2 organizations I work in that use GSuite and 2 that use O365. There are specific reasons you would use one or the other but none of those reasons are that one is better than the other.

Here’s the big idea: judging a product maker without a further understanding of the market dynamics that drove their product in one direction or another doesn’t help you understand something in a nuanced way where you can capitalize on it for greater returns. At the end of the day, a hard stance on a product isn’t the job. Making good decisions and understanding the nuance of those decisions in order to produce value for an organization is.

I’m interested in who else has run into this problem. Is there a “succesful” tool (good TAM, SOM, SAM) you look at that you think is THE WORST that you might need to re-underwrite?