
New business apps in Office 365: Connections, Listings and Invoicing - willyyr
https://blogs.office.com/en-us/2017/07/10/new-business-apps-in-office-365-business-premium-help-you-run-and-grow-your-small-business/
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jaclaz
Limited to "Microsoft Invoicing":

>Microsoft Invoicing helps you quickly create professional-looking estimates
and invoices, so you get paid quickly.

I can assure everyone that I normally (slowly) create manually VERY
professional-looking invoices, but that doesn't in any way help me being paid
quickly.

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StavrosK
Freshbooks commit the same sin:

> Wow your clients with professional looking invoices that take only seconds
> to create. The best part? You’ll get paid faster, too.

I don't really understand how they figure that.

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dade_
I think their business benefits are real: Small business owners are often
brutal at sending out invoices. They procrastinate like everyone else. The
sooner you send out an invoice, the sooner you will be paid. Also, tracking
payments provides structure to follow up with your receivables. Often a
reminder is all that is needed for payment. Customers just forget, but do want
to pay. Clear invoices that are easy to understand will also have fewer
questions and are less likely to be contested.

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StavrosK
Does Microsoft's product not do these things?

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polskibus
<joke> It looks like Microsoft is slowly reimplementing half of YC startups.
</joke>

Seriously though, I'd be really worried if I was in SaaS space now. Microsoft
is going after most business-relevant SaaS offerings, while providing
infrastructure to others (what's going to be left?) at the same time.

I wonder at what point will this strategy be seen as monopolistic or as a
threat. For example, what's stopping them from becoming THE accounting
outsourcer for half of the world? First you use their accounting, next you are
out. While MS investors must be in heaven now, others should be wary.

Anti-monopolistic laws probably won't kick in in USA, because MS has
competitors in each space they are walking into. However, seen as a whole, one
can easily see how impoverished (in terms of choice) the ecosystem is going to
become.

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kfk
PowerBI is the best example, Tableau's stock price dropped 50%+ last year and
I am convinced a big part of that is Microsoft stepping up their game in the
analytics dashboard area, I covered this in my blog too. It's difficult to
make predictions and if you are using these software solutions the only way to
protect yourself and your organization from sudden changes in the market is to
adopt an architecture that is as modular as possible. No software package or
SaaS should be mission critical to run your business unless impossible to
avoid to do so (ie Excel in finance).

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jameslk
Looks interesting. I wonder how these apps compare to the individual
competitors in the space such as MailChimp and Freshbooks

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Neil44
Pretty pared down by the looks, they're not going to be as mature for a while.

I wonder if Connections is going to charge per mailout/campaign like the
encumbants do.

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fwr
Listings looks exactly like what I was looking for - does anybody have
experience with a similar tool?

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swiley
Isn't there some GNU tool that can automatically generate invoices and
cheques?

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znpy
m4? :P

