YouTubers Are Making a Living on Videos About Microsoft Software (cnbc.com) 32
An anonymous reader shares a report: When Microsoft updated its Teams communication app with a more sophisticated way to give PowerPoint presentations in January, the company published a 500-word blog post on the feature. People could read the blog post and try to figure out how to use it, or they could consult YouTube. On the video service owned by arch-rival Google, a former Microsoft employee named Kevin Stratvert published a video on Presenter Mode to his more than 800,000 subscribers, garnering more than 180,000 views and hundreds of comments. Microsoft itself had not published a video on the topic. "I've built a Microsoft audience," Stratvert said in an interview with CNBC. "Microsoft content drives a lot more viewership than non-Microsoft content. I've done Gmail and a few others, but they haven't done quite as well."
[...] Historically, developing and maintaining products has been the core of Microsoft. Today nearly 50% of employees work in engineering. Marketing is a considerably smaller part of the business, and employees work on ads, materials for Microsoft's website, events and other methods of promotion. In the past few years, a group inside Microsoft began focusing more on YouTube. "On YouTube specifically, we're starting to explore the concept of what it looks like to do something native to YouTube," Sonia Atchison, a market research lead who worked on the Microsoft Creators Program, said on a podcast last year. People often turn to YouTube when they want to get a better understanding of Microsoft software, and while Microsoft has plenty of its own videos available on YouTube, they don't always come up at the top of the site's search results, Atchison said. Videos from outsiders can receive higher rankings. Sometimes a video from a Microsoft employee might be there. The company does have employees with large audiences, including Mike Tholfsen, a 26-year company veteran whose videos show how teachers and students can use Teams and other applications.
[...] Historically, developing and maintaining products has been the core of Microsoft. Today nearly 50% of employees work in engineering. Marketing is a considerably smaller part of the business, and employees work on ads, materials for Microsoft's website, events and other methods of promotion. In the past few years, a group inside Microsoft began focusing more on YouTube. "On YouTube specifically, we're starting to explore the concept of what it looks like to do something native to YouTube," Sonia Atchison, a market research lead who worked on the Microsoft Creators Program, said on a podcast last year. People often turn to YouTube when they want to get a better understanding of Microsoft software, and while Microsoft has plenty of its own videos available on YouTube, they don't always come up at the top of the site's search results, Atchison said. Videos from outsiders can receive higher rankings. Sometimes a video from a Microsoft employee might be there. The company does have employees with large audiences, including Mike Tholfsen, a 26-year company veteran whose videos show how teachers and students can use Teams and other applications.
It's all in the hands. (Score:1)
Ah but just think if they took notes [slashdot.org] they'd retain everything better.
I think that meme is plain nonsense. (Score:2, Interesting)
Fun fact: I literally can not take notes and form memories at the same time. ... OR blindly pipe it through.
When I note some input down, it's a pipeline from e.g. my ears through my brain to my hands, not ever coming anywhere close to my memory or pondering any of it in a eqy that would resemple actual understanding required for more than blind bulemic memorization.
I can only choose to pipe it to my pondering neurons, take my time to think it through, and resume taking in input,
I suspect that that is normal
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I can't learn while I transcribe notes exactly from another source. That's a waste of time; please send me the power point or the textbook reference.
The only notes that are worth a crap are things I learned while listening and then wrote down after processing it.
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People have been making videos about other software products for years, e.g. Android/iOS and apps. The only real surprise here is that Microsoft's stuff is now popular enough to make money on YouTube.
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Microsoft has long sense lost it Buzzworthy MoJo. That doesn't mean their products are not in high usage.
It is like comparing a Toyota Camry with a Tesla Model S Plaid. While the Tesla gets a lot of Buzz, the Toyota is still much more broadly used.
It terms of YouTube Income if you are covering Buzz, you have to be on it all the time, get videos out fast, with little focus on quality. While if you make videos on something that is actual popular but just not so Buzzworthy. You are less restricted by the spe
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They're popular, because Microsoft products follow convoluted UX design logic. That logic is not well understood outside of Microsoft and that leads to people needing a lot of confusion and need for hand-holding. There seems to be some recent effort put into the OS trying to point the user to where they need to get to in the UI, but apparently that's not enough for the average Windows user.
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It seems they make more money when Microsoft forget to provide a manual.
Teams is particularly cryptic.
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It seems they make more money when Microsoft forget to provide a manual. Teams is particularly cryptic.
Nobody learns software by reading the manual anymore. Few people learn software by any vendor-provided material. Community-created material is almost always far more helpful.
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Their online support forums are also garbage.
You have a problem, you get the proposed solution of the most basic fix (reboot your PC, Reinstall Driver type of crap), or they redirect you to a that level of solution on an unrelated question that happens to use some of the same words.
I am like what Version of Excel supports the Lambda function. I get pointed to a site that gives me my current version of Excel, and what features are in my current version.
I am like my Wireless Microsoft Mouse isn't being respon
Youtube is Windows rabbit hole (Score:2)
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MS's tools used to be fairly intuitive and coherent such that I didn't have to turn to manuals and online guides very often. That has gradually gone out the Window (pun half intended). It seems MS is too focused on being enterprisey where expensive specialists and consultants are expected to save the day when spaghetti and confusion hits the fan. A multi-hat CRUD cubiclist like myself cannot keep up with all the oddities and opaque layers.
Time for a nimbler company to start chewing at their lower end tool b
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>And why the hell are the URL's to a Teams resource so damned long?
And in my experience, they don't work. Same with sharepoint, although it might be the same thing under the hood.
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MVVM is the preferred pattern for developing desktop and (many) Web apps now. Easier and simpler than MVC in that you get the power of two-way data binding without needing much business logic in your controller.
I prefer today's MS dev tools, by far, compared to earlier incarnations of the same. Largely because they are now open-source, cross-platform, and have improved to the point where you can use them to build real systems, not just toys.
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I will agree they are better suited for big "enterprisey" apps, but it overcomplicates things for smaller in-house projects, which you seem to call "toys". I prefer working on smaller apps because there's less bureaucracy and large-scale office politics, and I'm closer to the end users, who I like synergizing with (yes, I used that word).
One tool size does NOT fit all. MS has a gap between tools meant for really simpl
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I did not mean to imply that smaller apps are necessarily "toys." I build an awful lot of these myself.
But do you remember back when each of these required building an MSI or InstallShield installer, or something along those lines?
And when they spewed dozens of DLLs all over some folder in Program Files (x86)?
And when they required very specific versions of specific .NET framework runtimes, and often also C++ runtimes, that didn't become apparent until you tried installing on a different machine besides yo
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Are you talking about desktop apps? I don't necessarily dispute that, but MS has no viable small/medium-sized web-based app tool.
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I was referring to desktop apps, as I was assuming you were. The proliferation of ginormous frameworks on the Web side (notably Angular and React) means there aren't many truly small Web apps anymore; even the Hello World using these kinds of frameworks weighs multiple megabytes.
While I hate PHP for anything big, it is actually one of the better tools IMO for semi-small Web apps. The closest Microsoft equivalent would be ASP.NET/Razor.
Leila Gharani for example (Score:1)
953K subscribers . says enough
More word salad (Score:3)
Guaranteed there was not a single sentence on how to use this "feature". Instead, it was "how great" it is, how it "streamlines" meetings, how "easy" it is to use.
Companies today are worthless and useless when it comes to telling people how to use their products. It's all about selling an image but providing nothing useful to the end user.
People like to reminisce about the good 'ol days when you bought a game and it had a physcial manual with it, something you could review again and again to learn how to play the game. That is what is needed today. Companies should be forced to include useful documentation with every piece of software they sell, either in physical form (books/manuals), semi-digital form (CDs/DVDs) or fully digital (online). If you're paying for this crap it would be nice to know how to use it.
I was going to post an article from Entrepreneur about Steve Jobs' ability to make things simple, but apparently the incompetent "web master" at the site can't even keep the article up because the link provides a 404. In short, Steve was shown a demonstration of video editing software. The programmers and engineers spent large amounts of time developing the software with a multitude of features, all with a menu driven system, pretty colors and so on. After they demoed the product, Steve went to the blackboard and drew a rectangle. He then drew an arrow pointing into the rectangle and said, "People drag the file into the software which opens it." (or words to that effect). While the programmers and engineers spent all that time and effort to make a complex piece of software with all the bells and whistles, Steve distilled the process into a simple six second statement.
If you have to have a 500 word posting to describe how great something is and what you can do with it, but fail to provide any documentation on how to use the product, why should I be bothered to use your product? I don't want to spend my time poking around the nooks and crannies of your craptacular software, I want to use it to get something done.
Wow, just incredible (Score:2)
Someone is making money off of their tutorial videos, which feature some Windows products. That's so insane - almost unheard of.
What's next? People making money off of videos that are reviewing non-google related hardware? Wow that would be insane right???
I wonder if the submitter is genuinely surprised, and if this is genuinely news to them.
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666. Profit! (Score:2)
Maybe it's somehow Microsoft itself making the money. There's a great idea for a legal scam:
1. Make crappy software that people are compelled to use because they are locked into your tool-set.
2. Make videos on how to work around the myriad idiosyncrasies of your crappy products.
3. Attribute to videos to random people made up by AI face bots.
4. Collect YouTube royalties.
5. Profit!
Not Just Microsoft (Score:3)
Most software companies are terrible at providing support for learning their software. Just think of a widely-used software and type that into YouTube search and you'll find plenty of videos with hundreds of thousands (or millions) of views. There's a video titled "How to Install Google Chrome on Windows 10" that has 1.3 million views and it's only a year old. Adobe software is another great example of this. A video titled "Learn Premiere Pro in 20 Minutes!" has 7.5 million views.
Lynda Weinman was an earlier version of this story. She made how-to videos for design-oriented software (Flash, Photoshop, etc.) on Lynda.com in the mid to late 90s. The company continued to grow over the years and was eventually purchased by LinkedIn for $1.5 Billion in 2015 and helped launch what became LinkedIn Learning. And, a year later in 2016, Microsoft purchased LinkedIn for $26.2 Billion.
Make a living reviewing games and things! /s (Score:2)
Wait till the authors find out that YouTubers make a living reviewing things such as cars, headphones, playing games, etc.!
And then wait till they find out women make a living selling showing off their body on Twitch to dumb simps!