We had a fundamental disagreement regarding the role of technology in business operations. In my view, technological change in an enterprise exists in tension between the business desiring a solution that perfectly fits their process and the flexibility of a technology package to approximate the business requirements in a cost-effective way. Ideally, technology should fade into the background so that you don’t even notice or think about it as it facilitates your work.

Microsoft seemingly disagrees.

My specialty is telephony, a space that Microsoft has only recently ventured into with a competitive and cost-effective, if feature-poor, offering in Teams. Telephony is a complex topic and the way telephones are used in business today is varied from people who barely use their phone (but want it when they need it), to people who depend on specific telephony functionality to do their work.

The meeting I had was in a beta-user group for new tech in that space, it was me and about 40 other admins from a variety of large businesses and a team-lead in Microsoft product house. Basically, it was a group of customers becoming increasingly exasperated at the arrogant ignorance of someone in charge of developing telephone technology at Microsoft who didn’t only have limited experience with enterprise-level telephony, but insisted that business units conform their processes to fit what Microsoft was willing to develop, and I want to emphasize here, that the audience was more than willing to meet the vendor halfway here, it was Microsoft insisting that people didn’t really need basic things like busy-indicators.

I spent about an hour getting more and more angry to the point where I just wanted to get rid of everything Microsoft, but I couldn’t torpedo Teams at work, so I went home and installed Mint on all my PCs (and later switched to Garuda).