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Jan 14, 2022 at 8:23 comment added Lundin The whole Teams project seemed like one big flirt with the Queen (Microsoft), for the purpose of creating a commercial product that would seem to be the next big thing with potential, so that the company could be sold to some other King/Queen. It wasn't something the peasants (existing customers) asked for. Collectives seem to be the same deal business-wise, implementing features to target big tech companies or rather creating a good-enough sales pitch to tell it to them. Rather than increasing the value of the SO product long term or creating something that can be sold to the peasants.
Jan 13, 2022 at 18:04 comment added Jon Ericson @Lundin: Love the analogy, but I'm not sure it fits. In my (admittedly limited) experience with Stack Overflow's customers, the motivating factor is sometimes the need to spend a departmental budget. So when SO focused on hiring, the Talent platform was another place for HR departments to spend money in hopes of getting a few extra candidates. My sense is the current Collective customers have bought into the idea that SO can connect them to developers and have a budget to spend on that promise. (Might be a Marketing budget or a developer advocacy budget. Doesn't much matter.)
Jan 13, 2022 at 8:28 comment added Lundin It's like running a bakery in medieval France and you have thousands of commoners eager to buy bread in every direction you look, but you keep pushing them aside on your way to the royal castle, insisting on only trying to sell the bread to Queen Marie-Antoinette, who has never eaten it and prefers cake. And then wonder why the commercial services never quite seem to kick off and become big profit makers.
Jan 13, 2022 at 8:20 comment added Lundin I'm an engineering manager myself, someone who is in a position to sign up for the various commercial services offered, if I had any faith at all in SO the company. Which I don't, because it continuously keeps treating "users" as some annoying noisy bunch that keeps distracting the from profit-making, instead of (potential) customers. ->
Jan 13, 2022 at 8:19 comment added Lundin Lots of good points here, but there's one detail the company never seems to grasp: there is little to no distinction between the company's customers and the site users. The overwhelmingly most likely target audience to ever use SO's commercial services are the existing, long-term users of the site. Not some outsider who just happened to stroll by and sees "Oh, look Collectives! (Careers/Teams/...) That sounds nifty, lets pay for that." Not everyone using the site is a student begging to have their homework made, or a nameless click entering the site from Google. ->
Jan 12, 2022 at 19:45 history answered Jon Ericson CC BY-SA 4.0