Should you standardise tools in your company? Case of Miro vs. MS Whiteboard

I've also been using MS Loop a lot and it's pretty great actually. It's clearly still under development and missing a lot of features but leaving that aside, I don't think it's fair to dismiss it as a Notion clone. It's far simpler than Notion and for writing things like company handbooks that's a good thing, actually. Sometimes simpler is better. If you need all the tables as database stuff, then use Notion. If you need a simple and clean documentation source, well I've tried a lot of these kinds of apps over the years and Loop is shaping up to be one of the better ones IMO.

I say this grudgingly, BTW. I strongly resisted choosing MS for our business. But as a small company in Vietnam we get an amazing value proposition from MS 365 that isn't even close to matched by anything else. We pay about $3.50 per user and we get Teams, video conferencing, office apps, Loop, Visio, Whiteboard, SharePoint (ok that one is genuinely quite bad), and also a load of business automation stuff in the form of Workflows that I'm still exploring. Oh and Shift scheduling. OneNote. About a hundred other things that I forget right now.

Even still I resisted but the final straw was that automatic translation is included in Teams for free. As a bilingual team that's vital for us.

By contrast, just Notion would be $8 per user. I think Slack is $6 per user. Not a lot for a western tech company, but we genuinely can't afford that. MS 365 wins by being "just good enough" at _loads_ of things, and way cheaper than the competition.

I have about 20 years of experience dealing with this ranging from mostly harmonious all the way to civil war.

100 employees and 130 different SaaS tools. Got buy in from senior management to reduce footprint to lower cost and increase security and compliance only to get pushback from every middle manager that would bring up these same reasons why THEIR team is special.

Ok Mr/Mrs Team lead… be careful what you wish for because TCO and full RP status is now on your head. And I know you don’t have the experience to assess the costs, risks and admin workload but you’ve managed to convince the CEO. Not my problem anymore. I’ll let the auditors know where to find you when it comes time.

At least I was smart enough to know to keep Miro, though. They’re reasonably good at managing data over the course of staff churn and the flexible licensing is nice.

Try convincing everyone that grammarly is a keystroke logger.

Sure, there is other stuff that might be junk like files, tasks and apps but I just don't use that.

That is the old adage about keeping the main thing the main thing. It depresses me how many major apps doesn't even do the basics well, either performance is terrible or the UX is over-complicated.

For the second problem, I guess I don't have much to say because I haven't tried running a large company. I just have never heard any good reason to be stingy with licences. On the other hand, the time I have wasted and the extra work I have done to get around problems caused by upper managment being stingy with licences has cost a lot more than the licence would.

I guess this will immediately make people discard my opinion, but I don't actually feel very strongly about each team having its own formatting rules or coding standard. It's not hard to adapt to the local conventions and the consequences of formatting rules are incredibly local.