They are right to be surprised.

Why is Azure popular? Not on its own merits, it's because there is a pre-existing relationship with Microsoft.

Why is Teams the most widely used chat tool? Certainly not because it's good.. it is, again, pre-existing business relationships.

Seems odd for a company that survives (perhaps even thrives) on these kinds of intertwined business reasons to, themselves, understand that they should go for merit instead.

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mikestorrent 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Yep. Similarly, Microsoft Entra... if you want Office, you're getting it anyway. Might as well use it for SSO, right? And here's your free Teams license... how can you justify paying for Slack when we've a perfectly good chat client at home?

	▲	dijit 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I tried for a while to get Entra working with an external identity provider (Google Workspace). The other way around worked (Google could use Entra) but it was basically impossible to backend Entra from Google. Weird.

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vehemenz 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Except nobody chooses M365 Copilot over ChatGPT or Claude, so clearly the usual reasons aren't working. In this case, improving the product via integration is a last resort.