Microsoft Affinity Score (Productivity score?)
When people feel insecure, they try to fall back to their core competency. Let’s keep this post jargon free.
Microsoft Affinity Score (Productivity score?)
Surprise, surprise! Microsoft has chosen to fall back to its strength again: Office apps or
productivity applications as they are called these days. When collaboration software products like Zoom, Box and Slack began to threaten the market share of MSFT, the latter responded by launching a measurement system called productivity score. Maximum attainable value of this score is 800, let the race begin. (cough, CIBIL/ TransUnion score, cough cough)
Check out the recent AMA here: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-365-
ama/bd-p/microsoft365ama
The productivity score creates fatal addiction to the Microsoft’s walled garden of software
applications. The final score of each employee is arrived at by measuring the usage of products under Office 365 like SharePoint, Skype, Yammer, Teams, Office products including OneDrive. I think we should call it Microsoft Affinity Score instead of productivity score. Take an example. If Jessica uses only one tool for collaborating within her organisation, she will get a poorer score. She can however increase her productivity score by increasing the number of tools she uses to communicate.
So why am I putting up this post? As Microsoft embeds Teams with Office to attract corporate users, organisations need to be diligent while using proprietary products. Azure ML services will improve significantly after ingesting this data which traditionally used to stay behind an organisation’s firewall. At that juncture, organisations will be locked into an ecosystem.
Organisations may find themselves able to migrate some or all of the data to a rival, but they will face high inertia to maintain status-quo from their stakeholders. That will reveal something that was popularised by Prof Scott G and Kara S in their popular podcast. Bundle. Rundle. A recurring bundle of products and services.
Enterprises when locked into rundle tend to pay more than the expected investment of building a product. I recommend that such organisations, though few in number, should focus on creating in-house AI solutions for the purpose of measuring usage of tools and platforms, and consequently, productivity.
Pluses for Microsoft: this exit barrier mechanism will bring incremental revenue to MSFT. Office already contributes to $46.4 billion productivity and business processes segment compared to $48.37 billion from Intelligent cloud and $48.25 billion from personal computing. This segment despite showing growth of 17% in FY20 Q2 was a laggard to Intelligent Cloud which grew by 27% in the same period.
Unsure of how this might pan out: in future, Microsoft might offer to integrate 3rd party
productivity applications like Dropbox, Box, Slack, Zoom and Google Drive, so that the
employees using them can also ingest their usage for productivity calculation. But I believe
that the 3rd party applications will not appreciate their business rival sending crawlers deep
inside their product ecosystem to glean usage data to generate productivity insights.
Open source does have its task cut out.
Typed on Microsoft Word.
