Gisenau: Microsoft rejected a functional Teams app for lacking business value
Hilton Gisenau · Microsoft Launched a Free App That Competes With Ours · Mar 26, 2021 · at 23:43
ChitChattr CEO Hilton Gisenau discusses the hurdles of getting apps listed in the Microsoft Teams store and testing minimum viable products.
0:00 / 0:25exact quote · 25.7s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“We've got a few apps that we've built. One of them never made it to the actual store itself. We went through the entire process, the verifications, there were a few bugs that were raised. We addressed all of those things, et cetera. And at the end of it, Microsoft decided, like literally the last stage in the verification process, they decided that even though it was now technically working to what they expected, they decided that they didn't feel there was enough Business value in the app for them to list it in the store, which I found quite a strange thing.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Hilton Gisenau
Gisenau: Microsoft launched a free app competing with ChitChattr
“We had an incident about a week ago or so where Microsoft have launched a free app, a portion of which competes with an element of our application.”
Gisenau: Users Refuse to Pay Out-of-Pocket for B2B Workplace Apps
“In the B to B marketplace, business to business store marketplace, the dynamics are surprisingly different. You know, there might be an app that I kind of like, On, on, let's say the, you know, my fruity device and I'm happy to pay the 10 dollars a month for i…”
Gisenau: Teams users mistakenly expect marketplace apps to be free
“One of the things we've found, for example, is that users are quite surprised that there's a pricing involved for the purchase of our apps. We've had a number of customers or a number of feedback items, shall we say, from users who've been quite surprised that…”
Gisenau: ChitChattr faced Teams rejections from conflicting internal Microsoft requirements
“We had, for example, portions of our app get rejected because of requirements that were coming through from the main team's engineering team to the store validation team that would like literally just in conflict with one another.”
Gisenau: Building a Teams bot requires mastering 7-8 separate technologies
“One of those, for instance, is building a bot. You might want to put a bot into the store and there are probably seven or eight separate technologies you kind of need to get yourself or your team skilled up on in order to build a, you know, natural language, u…”
Gisenau: Microsoft Partner Center lacks usability and consistency compared to customer software
“The software that Microsoft has that are facing partners as opposed to facing customers is, is, you know, not, not necessarily the same level of usability or consistency or bug freeness or anything like that. So the partner center itself is, is a bit of a chal…”