- Alexa users who are Amazon Prime members are reportedly being automatically upgraded to Alexa Plus.
- Users who have been upgraded can revert to the old Alexa by saying, “Alexa, exit Alexa Plus.”
- One user claims that they were “flooded with ads” after downgrading back to Alexa.
They probably need to show investors that the money spent developing it is worth it. “We’ve added X amount of users this quarter alone!”
It worked for Microsoft. The month after they started to force install Teams in windows they published user numbers showing how teams had sprinted ahead of Slack by that metric, and the tech press mostly ate it up.
Maybe, but how do they respond to the followup “Nice! How?”
That’s probably not a question that’ll get asked, unfortunately. What will get asked is why those numbers dropped off abruptly the next quarter.
Why would it not get asked? It’s the most obvious, logical followup
As a shareholder, you are financially incentivised to not question narratives the company presents if they supposedly present the company in a good light.
Suppose you do ask, the narrative unravels and the share price tanks. Congrats, you’ve just lost a buttload of money. Why would you do that?
No, best option is to applaud loudly, tout it in the press and watch useful idiots buy your shares at inflated prices.
The people who do ask the questions are the people the company doesn’t feel obliged to answer.
That doesn’t make any sense. Nothing unravels, numbers moved from one chart to another. The big number didn’t actually change.
Large Shareholders some care about how the line goes up, just that it does. Constantly. Every quarter.
Then they wouldn’t even be the people getting told this information about subscription numbers, so I’m still not sure how it’s supposed to work
Subscription info is definitely part of the information provided to investors. The raw numbers may not be in the financial documents, but revenue from subscriptions most definitely is and will give a general idea of changes even if the company doesn’t give the numbers directly.
Right, but again, if they’re that birds-eye-view, then the bump in subs in one spot is negated by the drop in the other and the net result they’re looking at is what they care about.
Shareholders are dumb panicky creatures. As long as the numbers aren’t terrible and you say some nice things most of them take it as gospel.
Spinning shit as a positive is a full time career in the corporate world after all.
Not usually. These people tend to be really stupid. There’s a reason why businesses degrees are made fun of so much.
I mean, do you have any examples of companies trying to pull this? Where they automigrate one base of users to another tier of whatever it may be, and then successfully pretend it was organic growth?
I’ve worked in many corporate settings where projects have to show their results and that sort of thing would never make it past the middlest manager.
Microslop and automigration to the copilot containing 365 sub rather than the default lower priced sub.
They automatically moved customers to a tier that cost them more money than it did for them previously?
Yes, at least in Europe they did. Went from 59€/y to 99€/y
When was that? I can’t find anything about it in a search.
Last year, anyone that had the base tier office 365 got automigrated for the tier including copilot. No one in my circle uses 365 anymore after that, I bought office LTSC 2024 licenses for all on the grey market and Microslop just lost thousands of € yearly in revenue. It’s my contribution in the war against Microslop.
You’re talking internal accountability. That doesn’t apply at this scale.
The accountability here is to shareholders. And they don’t care about why, just quarterly profits and growth.
This is a good one: https://lemmy.world/post/41564641
Amazon also got in trouble for auto enrolling people in prime.
Did you link the wrong post?
In trouble with investors for tricking them?