So, this is an attempt to give some helpful feedback about Stack Overflow for Teams, and explain a bit of why I think it's falling behind lately.
I was also very upset and mildly drunk at the time I wrote this. Apologies in advance for the rambling.
First things first: Teams does its job just fine. It isn't bad by any means.
It just can't beat other tools that are already in the wild with more features - some of them not even designed for the workplace.
Case in point - Discord.
Discord has improved leaps and bounds over the last few years. Besides being a free chat tool with voice and video, it has built in Forums, that can serve quite well as wikis, Threads, that allow for very fast collaboration around a topic when a need arises, Events, that allow you to schedule and set up meetings as needed, a robust role-based system, and the possibility to automate things via bots with ease.
The pricing is far more lenient - If you want the premium features, they scale not the number of users you have, but the features you want. A 7-boost server costs the same, no matter if it is 10 or 100 users.
It does everything. It replaced Microsoft Teams and Stack Overflow for Teams out of the box, with just the basic features. With some minor prodding and botting, we managed to hook it up to GitLab and to TeamCity.
It has a feature-complete mobile app.
I can get a release version of our software by typing "/build release" and letting our bot do its thing.
I can get reports on my phone every time a build breaks, or a customer notifies us of a bug.
And it is just Discord. It wasn't made for this. We aren't professional Discord Bot developers or anything. We cobbled together in the span of a week a pretty good development process that blew everything we had before out of the water just by re-purposing the funny game chat app. And it didn't cost us a dime.
Oh, and, by the way - it has screen-sharing features too- because why not...
Why would I use Teams? What does it do for my software process that I can't get from another tool with far more features? As is, Stack Overflow for teams is a very difficult sell. It is very expensive when we take into account what it does for our team, and it doesn't come close to having the complete suite of features other services offer. Sure, it is very good at what it does, but it isn't doing anything special anymore. Everything it does can be replicated by someone else, with less money and with less hassle, and often by getting more features on the deal.
Stack Overflow for Teams had a big selling point, which was the fact that the community loved the company Stack Overflow. You were the good guys! If our boss came to us a few years back and said "Let's use that Stack Overflow thing", we wouldn't bat an eye and would be quite hyped for it.
Now, though?
Stack Overflow isn't a name of respect, it isn't a brand that entices us, as a dev team. It is that place that does weird stuff and just had a bunch of layoffs and stuff. It is the place that fired well-liked CMs and did some very horrible things to some of its users in the community in the past.
The power that the brand had is no more. It lost its best selling point.
It's like Twitter - back then it was a force. Now it is a joke - it even lost its name!
Would you buy software from "X"? Do you still trust that brand?
You lost the trust of the community, so we're looking for tooling somewhere else.
And we're finding it. Teams isn't special, it isn't unique. Not anymore, at least.
If you guys want to sell Teams, you need to make the community endorse you as a provider of good products. We'll then say to our bosses "Yeah, that's legit", instead of "Eeehs, they're doing a lot of layoffs, I'm not sure if we can trust them..."
It's not rocket science.
The community and your clients aren't two separate groups - we are your clients, or the employees of your clients, and if we are upset with the "free" part of the site, why would we will pay for your tools? Why are we going to ask for tooling that we don't trust?
The same goes for OverflowAI. We're not entirely sure how useful or polished the tool will end up being in the future, but things got to the point that we as a community don't care. The tool is already dead on arrival for the largest part of the community because of what it symbolizes, and because of what was sacrificed to make it happen. We, as a community, won't vouch for it when it comes for our employers asking if it is useful or not, because we don't trust the company selling it. We'll either tell our employers that we can find the same results for free with other AI's in the market, or that AI results need human verification and aren't that useful to begin with, since they just mask low-skilled colleagues instead of helping them actually develop as professionals.
Bing chat is incredibly powerful as of now - and I don't believe for a second you guys will be able to restrict Microsoft's access to Stack Overflow's data, when they are one of your SofT's biggest clients. Right now it can already spot answers on Stack Overflow, give back code samples, and offer insight about documentation - all properly sourced. Will OverflowAI ever be able to compete with it? Not just in features, but in acceptance - I for one would prefer to use Microsoft's tooling that the one provided by Stack Overflow, just because I'm quite unhappy with the company at the moment. And I'm sure I'm not the only one that feels that way.
Don't underestimate the amount of spite developers can hold. Our buffers are quite large.
Please rethink your routing, your priorities, and what you want from your business. As of now, endorsing SO's products is very difficult, and it will only get worse if the community keeps getting more and more upset with you guys.
Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated in any way with Discord. I just think it is a great tool and a great example of something that helped us far more than a lot of other SaaS tools out there.
