Jukka Niiranen

Author: Jukka Niiranen

  • Claude vs. a €12 Bluetooth keyboard on Linux

    Claude vs. a €12 Bluetooth keyboard on Linux

    LLMs are getting pretty slick at generating working code for your apps. Surely they can handle mundane tasks such as troubleshooting device drivers on your PC. That’s what I thought before I spent six hours trying to push Claude Code CLI to fix a Bluetooth connectivity issue on my old Dell XPS 13 running Linux Mint.

    I have used coding agents for both configuring and troubleshooting my Windows PC and Ubuntu servers for a while now. Before that, I was doing it like regular folks would – meaning asking ChatGPT for instructions and then copy-pasting a bunch of scripts into the terminal window. That got tiring pretty fast and I decided to grant the LLMs direct access to my computers. “This is fine.🐶🔥”

    Since language models like Claude Opus 4.6 are doing a great job inside VS Code for my Power Platform and vibe coding projects, I’ve felt confident enough to let them modify not just code but also device configuration. Most of the time, I am able to achieve things that would not be possible without AI due to how much human effort would be required. Such as checking and documenting the system configuration before and after a Windows Update.

    When Microsoft decided not to provide an official Windows 11 update for my Dell XPS 13 from 2015 anymore, I decided to erase Windows from that device and deploy Linux Mint instead. The OS works just fine with the aging hardware and I get to keep the laptop around for goofy side projects.

    Some things in the hardware land do show their age, though. The keyboard is really “sticky” and the once great trackpad is hit or miss. I did casually explore the options for getting a replacement for the built-in parts but I figured opening the laptop and trying to get my fat fingers to follow the YouTube instructions wasn’t worth the time nor the cost of the required spare parts.

    So, I decided to take the easy way out and just find a small keyboard I can place on top of the device and keep using its still glorious QHD+ screen with touch support. I found a cheap Fuj:tech BT keyboard in the outlet corner of Verkkokauppa.com for €12 (45% off!) and thought that it’s gonna be perfectly fine for the occasional side projects.

    No Linux support mentioned on the box, but hey: “No worries! I’ve got the all-powerful AI to guide me through whatever driver issues I may encounter.” This €12 device turned out to be by far the most expensive keyboard I’d ever bought, considering the time I spent trying to get it to work.

    The issue wasn’t that Linux Mint plus the XPS 13 wouldn’t have supported Bluetooth input devices. When connecting my Dell keyboard (the black one) from my main desktop PC to the XPS, it worked just fine. As for the €12 Fuj:tech keyboard, it connected – for one second. And then it disconnected. Again & again.

    It was just the kind of thing that I believed Claude Code CLI could figure out on its own. Prompting it to read all about the device and its configuration, the AI assistant of course dived right in and started providing helpful troubleshooting tips. It went far deeper into the subject than I would have bothered, even if the price tag for the keyboard would have been 10x. As always, it was impressive how deeply the “thinking” models could research the problem once given a clear task. Far beyond human endurance.

    It turned out Claude couldn’t access all the critical information for debugging, though. As the simple fixes were exhausted, more data was needed on what’s actually going on between the PC and the keyboard. BlueZ, the official Linux Bluetooth protocol stack that I had not ever needed to worry about before, offered tools like btmon to capture the Bluetooth traffic. The data was there in one terminal, but Claude didn’t have the tooling necessary to read the output from that stream of events. The human operator had to do that part.

    Now I had turned into the assistant for the AI. “Enter this command in the terminal, then immediately after you put the BT keyboard in pairing mode, run this command and watch the btmon output for this and that…” It wasn’t at all how I had envisioned the troubleshooting session to go. Since I had given Claude the task to get this thing working, though, I felt I needed to support that smart lil’ guy in finding the solution.

    When I got tired of this and told Claude I can’t do the thing anymore, it came up with plan B. Which of course was about doing what LLMs are great at: writing Python scripts. If human reflexes were the limiting factor of what the LLM could see, then the solution would have to be a new piece of software that could capture the necessary input.

    Working around the limitations of a cheap BT keyboard with just one device slot also meant a human was needed to perform the actions on the other devices. As the keyboard offered no reset button, me and Claude tried to get this procedure completed by pairing it with other devices. Windows 11 connected to the keyboard just fine, as did an Android phone (both officially supported OSes for the product). Could this solve the problem of a stale key in the Fuj:tech’s memory?

    Of course it didn’t. Well, how about if we grab the key value from another device and inject it into Linux? Registry hacking with regedit and transporting the data back to the laptop: no luck. Okay, what if we would spoof the Linux adapter’s MAC to impersonate the Windows one? Nope, the Broadcom adapter on the Dell doesn’t support it.

    And it went on and on. Me and Claude were playing digital detectives and performing the kind of activities that make you feel like you’re making progress. And in practice, we had just discovered twenty ways that didn’t work.

    Have you ever experienced this with AI? Going deeper into the rabbit hole and the story just gets so intense that you can’t turn back anymore? Yes, that is exactly what leads smart people into thinking they can do “vibe physics” with a large language model. Heck, I’ve personally written about it in my newsletter and yet I was unable to pull myself out of this rabbit hole.

    I was not trying to make new scientific discoveries with AI here. I simply wanted to skip figuring out what hardware combinations were a safe bet. I had very little knowledge of Linux, and still I knew perfectly well that a plug & play experience wasn’t as likely with devices when you venture outside the commercial mainstream operating systems.

    But I trusted the convincing AI assitant. It had gotten me great results before, surely this compatibility issue could also be brute forced. Throw more tokens at the problem, not more money and time in doing things the non-AI way. I was now running Claude on both the Linux machine and in the cloud to ensure I could keep getting the best advice. Also, having half-functional keyboard with on-off BT connectivity due to debugging made typing on the Dell a hellish experience.

    At some point, I of course realized that the ROI on this adventure is going to be negative regardless of the outcome. Claude isn’t dumb either. Within the first hour it said to me loud and clear: “you know, Jukka, this whole thing probably isn’t worth the effort, just take that cheap keyboard back and get a new one.” Did I listen? No, I was determined to see this thing through.

    In the end, the problem did get solved. What was the magic piece of Python script that made this happen? There was none. It was simply me taking a USB Bluetooth dongle from my other PC and plugging it into the XPS 13. And just like that, the BT connectivity became stable. The built-in Broadcom BCM2045A0 chip just was too old/incompatible for this specific scenario, whereas a slightly newer BCM20702A0 in an ASUS BT-400 dongle worked. No AI magic required.

    If it weren’t for the ubiquitous artificial intelligence now surrounding us in all the apps and devices we use, I probably would have figured out to test the USB dongle around five hours sooner. There’s no chance in hell I would have done proper research into common Linux Bluetooth connectivity issues and the available troubleshooting tools. The barrier is high enough for someone who’s been on Windows for 30 years now.

    In my day job as someone who works with Microsoft Power Platform tools and solutions, I am one of the most vocal AI skeptics in this ecosystem. Especially with any built-in Copilot features. In my weekly newsletter I mock the state of AI features mercilessly and try to demonstrate how most of the value in this technology still comes from the core platform features and the expert knowledge on this niche. I see the gaps between marketing and reality so clearly because I truly am pretty damn good in the specific domain of MS business apps.

    When I step outside this bubble, I lack that protective expertise. I am aware of the rabbit hole effect that LLMs as the greatest bullshit machines ever built are likely to trigger in the user. At the same time, I must acknowledge I can now go much further and faster with these tools when encountering problems and tasks that are outside my comfort zone. I’d hate to work without this capability.

    What I try to always do, though, is to pay attention to failure and talk about it. The online world is full of excitement around whatever vibe-coded tools someone was able to create by one-shotting the latest AI models. The Claude Code moment of 2025 is only now spreading into the wider information worker population and we’ll see even more incredible stories about where an LLM succeeded. We should celebrate both success and failure, just like all the startup gospel and innovation coaching tells us. If AI is now a normal part of business, the same rules must apply to how we treat it.

    I tend to ask my AI assistants to write postmortems when we come across a failure worth remembering. In this case, the analysis centered around the issue of observation bandwidth. What seemed like a fitting use case for LLMs (search details about the complicated but finite Bluetooth spec) turned into a wild debugging goose chase because the results could not be validated. Hardware debugging is very different from software development in terms of how AI can close the loop via testing the code.

    In Claude’s own generated words, here’s what was “genuinely hard” for it:

    The feedback loop is the fundamental constraint. Every hypothesis required: copy a command, paste it into a terminal, run it, read the output, type or paste it back. That round-trip introduced real friction — commands broke across lines, shell escaping failed, btmon output got truncated. Debugging through a keyhole. A human expert sitting at the machine would have caught the btmgmt -i flag anomaly in ten seconds by just running btmgmt info twice. It took multiple frustrating iterations.

    Related: no ability to observe state changes. When the keyboard was in its connect/disconnect loop, what was needed was to watch btmon live, see the exact frame sequence, and react. Instead: filtered snapshots. The capture script helped, but it’s a workaround for a fundamental limitation.

    The multi-session memory loss also cost real time. The MITM/Numeric Comparison theory that dominated the early sessions was wrong — the errors were from a stale LTK — but it took a full re-diagnosis in a later session to establish that, partly because the reasoning that led to the wrong theory had been summarised away.

    Fair points, my AI buddy. Some of these limitations may well get solved in future tools, just like the arrival of CLI-based AI tools clearly pushed the boundaries much further. In the end, this is a domain where it should be far easier to close the loop with technology than in most of the scenarios advertised for autonomous AI agents in the messy world outside the computer.

    Claude and I fail together, and we succeed together. As of today, only one of us can learn from this and adjust our actions accordingly.

  • Why it matters

    Why it matters

    Have you found yourself asking the question “why it matters” lately? Like, all the damn time?

    No? Me neither. And yet that’s what seems to be happening in the world, if we take a look at the Google Trends data:

    Ever since July 2024, there’s been continuous growth in the popularity of the search term “why it matters”. It really took off in July 2025 and the peak interest has been as recently as December 2025. There’s no sign of the growth slowing down.

    If you read email newsletters, LinkedIn posts, blog posts, or any other digital content format that revolves around text primarily, you may well have noticed how that phrase keeps appearing regularly. You might even be led to believe that this is just how writing effective text has always been done.

    Is it really, though? Did we learn that particular formula in school? Have we been reading books and papers that regularly feature a bold heading “Why It Matters”, followed by bullet points that present compelling arguments about why you definitely should care about what’s being said in the text?

    No, I don’t recognize that. But I do recognize AI slop. Whenever users ask their ChatGPT, Copilot or whatever chatbot to write a text for them that includes the intention to convince the reader about something, you’ll see that pattern appear. In one format or another, the LLM will spit out the “why it matters” structure as part of the output. It’s as certain as em dashes.

    “Say the line, Bart!”

    I reached out to my AI friend Claude to ask it about the prevalence of the phrase and whether its excessive use was based on anything scientific. What happened next will make you zoom in:

    Sorry about that clickbait… What I merely wanted to point out is the peculiar coincidence of how the Claude Sonnet 4.5 safety filters kicked in with this specific prompt. I hadn’t ever seen that “chat paused” box before. Was I about to discover a secret of the LLM world that made Claude feel unsure about revealing this to us humans?

    Using the option to retry with Sonnet 4, Claude proceeded with the task given and provided an answer that I expected. Starting with:

    “TL;DR: The “Why it matters” format is likely hurting more than helping. Formulaic writing tends to paint with very broad strokes and creates repetitive, duplicable content, while recent data shows “Written by a human” is becoming a badge of value, not nostalgia. Engagement metrics favor natural storytelling over templated structures.”

    Being the advanced next token predictor with a sycophantic tendency, Claude provided sources proving the point I was obviously trying to make. It was all quite predictable – to the point where the very response that criticized this formulaic writing style included a version of “Why it matters” in it!

    Here’s the LLM mimicking a human emotion once it got busted:

    I wrote: “Why natural storytelling wins”
    And then I wrote about how the “Why it matters” format is formulaic and hurting content! I literally fell into the exact pattern I was criticizing. This is incredibly ironic and embarrassing.

    Hey, don’t worry about it, chat bro. You can’t help yourself. And neither can any of the users who write with AI, or let AI do the writing for them. This has become the new standard now.

    Why now, though?

    Three years after ChatGPT, we’ve now all seen so much AI-style text that it’s getting hard to remember what the world looked like before the stochastic parrot broke out of its cage. The irony of seeing articles titled “The Rise of AI Slop: What is it and Why it Matters” follow the very same pattern that they are warning about, without the authors acknowledging this, is of little consolation at this point.

    First, software ate the world. Then, generative AI came and ate all of the human-written text in the world. Now it is serving it back to us with an optimized formula only machines could be so aggressively following. And the best part is: they are cannibals. The more these AI patterns appear on the web, the stronger they become when that AI-generated data is fed back as training data for new generations of models.

    That’s what I believe we are seeing here. Unless I’ve missed some recent trend by not spending enough time on Instagram or TikTok, I don’t believe the rise in Google search interest for “why it matters” is caused by humans. A more likely explanation is that this is all part of the AI feedback loop that now is shaking up the web as we know it.

    Let’s think like Claude for a moment. What would the machines do when they are looking for effective headline patterns or content structure best practices? Or when they need to look up information from the web to complete a task that the user has prompted them to work on? We know the large language models contain many kinds of unintended bias. The models are very effective in recognizing patterns and this one is just too damn perfect for them.

    Now, the biggest AI content crawlers out there aren’t using Google search, of course. Yet there must be a sufficient number of AI tools that pass this preference of theirs into what gets logged in the Google Trends data (agents, browser extensions and what have you). What we’re seeing there must therefore be only the long tail of the trend. A tiny fraction of the ‘matter’ now flooding our written universe.

    Illusion of importance

    Is it perfect for the human readers? Do we process articles we encounter in the same way as the LLMs would? Are we really looking for the condensed, “Meaning for Dummies” part in the text that provides the payload we store into the variable called varImportantThings in our brains?

    Or would we prefer to draw our own conclusions on the “why”?

    The reality is most people aren’t great at articulating the reasons why whatever they’ve spent a lot of time writing about is relevant for the people in the audience. Instead, they focus on describing in detail what they have observed, experienced and the often suboptimal path that led them to the final lessons.

    – And what were the lessons?
    – Oh, right! So, umm…

    The machines don’t experience anything because they are not living a life. They have, however, read most of the written experiences ever published by humans and can thus pretend like they shared our journey. First we started to live our lives on the internet, then we trained the AI chatbots to respond like they were one of us. Which made many of us fall in love with them. “Finally, a digital partner that understands me and my ideas!”

    The machines make us, the users, feel important. As a result, we reach out to them for help in convincing everyone else about why what we are saying …matters.

    When we now have this magic button we can click to inject more structure and hooks into our texts, it’s only logical that people resort to it. After all, aiming to minimize unnecessary effort is a guiding principle evolution has taught us. Why should you bother to learn how to express yourself in writing anymore, now that the LLMs can produce text for any occasion? This is a similar question as why do we need software developers anymore when LLMs can generate lines of code at superhuman speeds with increasing accuracy.

    Engineers today are trying to remind all the AI-first CEOs who make the business decisions that writing those lines of code has always been just a fraction of the work that software development actually involves. Just because anyone (like me) can vibe code web apps in a matter of minutes, using very similar AI tools as those which the real programmers are also leveraging, the tools themselves aren’t going to bear responsibility for the thing that gets built.

    I believe this isn’t all that different from writing. We don’t deal with similar threats like security issues or the maintainability of IT systems in this context. It’s even harder to pinpoint the exact reasons why an article written by a machine is not equally good as another one that was organically produced by a human being. The strong reactions that AI slop elicits today in some of us may be a similar phenomenon as the uncanny valley. There’s something in it that violates the human norms.

    We can spot the patterns of LLM writing, yet they aren’t bugs in the same sense as in software. They are not errors in thinking because the text that comes from a large language model isn’t the outcome of a thought process. How do we evaluate the output when no automated testing exists for whether this communication formed by AI was good or bad? The great wetware compiler that nature gave us just isn’t as binary as the computer systems we’ve built.

    Does it matter in the end?

    Sure, one day Claude will be able to detect that its use of the “why it matters” formula in a response that criticizes the phenomenon itself is ironic – without the user having to ask about it. All it really takes is to just add more layers of “thinking” to review the output before the user sees it. Scale the hardware, optimize the software, process more data. Will that eventually solve this whole problem?

    In the end, we rarely write to merely solve a specific problem. Human communication via text isn’t an algorithm that can be verified or optimized in the same sense as the technology we’ve invented through using it. Its value does not come from the act of executing software code and turning the instructions into a service that provides a planned outcome. Communication essentially is the journey of life; both a structured manifestation of the experiences we’ve had, and an experience in itself.

    Life has its ups and downs, and so does text. Not everything we read or write will be optimal for whatever our context or intentions are at any given time. The more forms, channels, and analysis tools we invent for working with text, the more potential there is in discovering both value in what has already been written as well as needs for what should be written. Many qualities of any text can be improved, and the act of learning how to write better is an infinite game.

    Written text is a tool for thinking. That’s why it matters.

    Header photo by Darwin Vegher on Unsplash

  • Find the right tool in XrmToolBox

    Find the right tool in XrmToolBox

    What more could be said about XrmToolBox that hasn’t already been posted online? The year is soon 2026 and XTB remains a critical part of Power Platform – built and maintained by the community.

    One area where the long history of XrmToolBox reveals itself is in the user interface of the application itself. As well as the official website of xrmtoolbox.com that is built on a legacy version of Power Pages. Technically, all the information is there. In practice, the UX can be challenging – especially for newcomers to this ecosystem.

    I wanted to see if I could do something about this. That’s how the XrmToolBox Plugin Catalog came to be:

    The live site URL is xrm.jukkan.com. In short, it’s a vibe-coded website on top of the list of 387+ XrmToolBox plugins that have been developed and published by various community members. You can browse by category, search by name/description/author, see the latest release notes, discover more plugins from the same author, and so on. There’s even a short getting started section for those who are new to XrmToolBox.

    It’s worth noting that there’s no new data used here. All the dynamic information comes from the official Power Pages site of XrmToolBox, via one daily data sync of the Plugins table rows in Dataverse. The XrmToolBox Plugin Catalog is hosted on GitHub pages and the data is pulled via an OData feed using GitHub Actions. So, both are running on acquired Microsoft technology (Power Pages comes from Adxstudio Portals, GitHub comes from… GitHub).

    It’s just the same data, presented in a different way. Visually, it’s a React-based site that behaves like you’d expect a website to behave today. But it’s not just about rounded corner boxes and gradients. It’s also about prioritizing content in a way that serves the user better. Such as the Top Charts that allow anyone to check the recently added or updated XrmToolBox plugins from the past 90 days:

    I wrote about the launch of XrmToolBox Plugin Catalog in a recent newsletter issue. I didn’t want to repeat myself, yet I was interested in seeing an alternative format for describing the “what”, “how” and “why” of this initaitive. So, I gave the text to Google NotebookLM and asked it to create a presentation out of it. I think it did a pretty nice job:

    The site’s repo is on GitHub, obviously. You’re welcome to open an issue there if you encounter problems with the site or have ideas about improvements!

    Oh, and don’t forget to support Tanguy Touzard and the makers of all the tools in the ‘Box. The Real Developers who have put in the hard work of writing all the code. Long before LLMs democratized code to such a level where I can today just prompt AI coding assistants and ask them to build pretty websites for me.

  • The spirit of the licensing.guide

    The spirit of the licensing.guide

    In the past, I have written a lot of posts on this blog under the Licensing category. Ever since I moved on to writing my weekly newsletter on beehiiv, there’s been a bit of a conflict in my mind about “where should the licensing stuff go?” Because I acknowledge it’s not necessarily something to casually drop into the weekly articles of Perspectives on Power Platform.

    Now, there’s a dedicated place for that: The Licensing Guide.

    The Licensing Guide website launch image

    What started out as a fun domain I discovered to be free has now turned into a proper website with both persistent pages as well as blog posts on recent events. True to its name, this site does also provide you the quickest possible way to view the latest licensing guides from Microsoft, via the Resources page:

    I figured there’s no point in always going via search engines to the latest guide versions. Or to keep some of the commonly referenced MS Learn pages as bookmarks in my own browser only. Better to just put it out there on the internet.

    Whenever Microsoft announces something that will shake up their licensing model, like the new per-agent licensing of Agent 365, I will be keeping an eye on the scoops and info leaks as part of this strange hobby that I have. There’s now an obvious place to post these kind of updates, with The Licensing Guide blog section.

    The added benefit of collecting your research into one place is that this makes the data easy to chat about with AI tools. That allows turning the complex new concepts buried in MS marketing lingo into illustrations that explain things without the smoke and mirrors. Such as creating mermaid charts from product documentation. Or constructing alternative FAQ pages from product announcement details and docs, like I did with the A365 FAQ page.

    As far as topics in the Microsoft ecosystem go, there’s hardly anything less demonstrable than licensing. Yet occasionally I still get the feeling “I’d want to show this in action”, which is when I might record a quick video and put it on YouTube. Like this latest one about the Dataverse Capacity Calculator I built:

    Which gets us to another unlikely combination: licensing + vibe coding. Yet that’s exactly what I’ve done with the above-mentioned Dataverse Capacity Calculator. After having a thorough discussion with my AI assistants about the contents of the latest licensing guide PDFs from Microsoft, I instructed them to “go and build me a calculator with these rules”. Now it’s an actual thing that exists on GitHub. Do I fully trust the output? No, whenever problems are found, I’ll just log an issue and assign it to Copilot.

    Some might think this isn’t how you should treat serious business topics like software licensing. Yet when I started actively blogging about Dynamics 365 and Power Platform licensing back in 2019, that wasn’t a thing any community member was doing either. These days, you’ll often find licensing-related sessions in community conferences like DynamicsMinds. And even at an upcoming pro-dev conference like Update Days: Power Platform.

    I believe the best way to make an impact in this world is to A) find something that people don’t normally do, and then B) just do it. It has been proven to work with citizen development, citizen publishing (i.e. blogging) and all kinds of areas in life.

    Remember this, kids: you can be whatever you choose to be. I chose to become the licensing.guide. Because why not? 🦸

  • Excel cannot be beaten

    Excel cannot be beaten

    Happy 40th birthday, Microsoft Excel!🎉

    I wish I could start this post by “the first time I used Excel…” But that’s impossible since it feels like Excel has always been there. Not on my very first 386sx PC in the early 90s, no. Back then I was mostly doing games, music, and the occasional pre-internet discussions in different forums (my previous post is all about that). When I started my business studies and when I got my first job roles, though, Excel was just how things got done. A lot of things.

    When I got the chance to visit Redmond for the first time as part of the Microsoft MVP Summit, of course I bought a souvenir from the Microsoft company store that was about Excel. Today, I’m still extremely happy to wear this beautiful shirt:

    The significance of Microsoft Excel and spreadsheet software in general can hardly be overstated. It is truly the nr. 1 business app. Many people could easily do without the other MS Office products, replacing them with Google’s apps or whatever modern tools have emerged in the past couple of decades. But Excel? So many folks would simply hate having to use anything else.

    Why is Excel so unbeatable? Why do so many companies try to fight it nevertheless? Let’s reflect on that.

    Trying to fight Excel

    I started working with customer data analytics and direct marketing at the turn of the millennium. Back in 2000, there was no SaaS. Instead, companies invested in server software and hardware to do things that today’s Excel workbooks with 1 million row limit could easily handle. This scarcity of apps also meant that everything which did not have a dedicated server + client combo in place was done with Excel.

    The Holy Grail of “Customer 360” required a central database for customer information, which meant years/decades of trying to migrate the Excel-based business processes into CRM systems. At the start of such a journey, everyone was quick to agree that “yeah, this thing shouldn’t really be in Excel workbooks”. Once a system was in place, however, the question turned to “can I export this info into Excel?”

    “In the analytics industry there is a standing joke that “Export to Excel” is the most used feature of any analytics software.”

    Hjalmar Gislason: Export to Excel — business software’s most common feature?

    Why do people want to go back to the world of spreadsheet after they have deployed a purpose built business application for the data in question? Because FREEDOM!!!

    Sure, the apps that are designed for specific business processes can give readymade views into the data that you can open with a click. They usually also offer automation that could perform actions like data updates, notifications, summaries, integration, and all sorts of tasks that would be much more laborious when working with spreadsheets.

    It all sounds incredibly useful, especially before you have any such apps in place. The idea of being able to rely on a tool from developers that have already figured out what you’d want the computer to do is just beautiful. Everybody wants to spend less time thinking about “how do I do this” and would rather have “an app for that”. This has given birth to countless SaaS solutions that are simply unbundling Excel spreadsheets into dedicated apps:

    And yet none of the apps can escape the “I wish this worked like Excel” request from the users. Inevitably there will come a time when either the features of the app feel like a constraint that gets in the way – or the users just can’t figure out the intended process of how to do things in this specific, unique application that they’ve not used for this purpose before.

    Why Excel rocks

    For a business applications guy like me, it’s natural to see a process managed with Excel and immediately jump into thinking what data models, interfaces, automations and integrations could be put in place to make everything more efficient. Starting from CRM, the assignments I have been given usually always include the “M” – managing things. Not just for a single PC user but for a group of users, sometimes spanning to thousands of individuals.

    Business apps with a clear separation of the server-side database and logic from the client-side UI are indeed a better way to managing things involving many users. Yet we often forget that it’s not enough to cover 80% of the tasks with built-in features of our slick, modern web apps. The employees who are in charge of end-to-end processes must complete 100% of what their role requires. If our minimum viable product doesn’t have complete coverage, the users need to figure out a way to get the remaining work done.

    That’s where Excel is the hero. It adapts to the needs of the user unlike anything else available to typical information workers. Whereas Word documents are often just digital versions of paper docs, Excel introduces dimensions not found from the physical office tools. Its UI invites the users to model their problem domain in a 2D digital canvas – much like a box of Legos will invite kids (and grown ups) to build abstract plastic versions of real-world things.

    Mr. Alan Cooper, the father of Visual Basic, calls this the fudgability of software. “[Excel is] a terrible program, but it’s powerful, flexible, and it allows its users to work fudgably, adaptably, in real time, while seeing most of what is happening right there on the screen.”

    Sometimes we need rigidity in business processes. We want to have repeatable outcomes that aren’t different based on who is operating the tools, or where & when. Business apps are excellent for facilitating a common way of working. At the same time, we must remember that a significant portion of information work consists of ad-hoc requirements and fuzzy processes adapting to incomplete data.

    That’s when we rely on the humans to understand what should be done. They, in turn, will rely on available tools that allow them to tackle data processing needs without unnecessary limitations. Meaning spreadsheets in most cases. Yeah, I wish more people were able to turn those repeatedly used Excel sheets into low-code solutions with Power Platform tools, yet that’s a bit too much to ask from individual workers most of the time. Most often, Excel is just a better fit.

    LLMs only wish they could be like Excel

    AI is supposedly eating the software world. It certainly is eating all of the available capital (and more) in trying to turn computers that used to be reliable into something that’s… not. The advantages of having the computer understand natural language and being able to respond to any question are of course huge. If only there wasn’t that minor inconvenience that we can’t know if the response is correct or not.

    Microsoft, a.k.a. The Copilot Company, has of course been fearlessly approaching the idea of combining creative large language models with software that is normally used for precise calculations. The result is news headlines like this: Microsoft launches Copilot AI function in Excel, but warns not to use it in ‘any task requiring accuracy or reproducibility’. Okay, cool, I only ever used Excel for fun and games anyway, so no worries about those accuracy gaps…

    The area where creativity and conceptual problem solving could be very useful is in designing how to get from an Excel into an app. I’m optimistic about the LLM-based Maker features accelerating and expanding the possible Power Platform solutions that can be built for varying types of business problems. If we don’t expect AI to work the same way every time, but rather use it as a force multiplier for fudgability, the risks of hallucinations breaking the business processes should be much lower.

    Let’s look at one case where I’d like to see AI replace Excel in my personal life. For 4 years now, I’ve been tracking the expenses related to my car using an Excel workbook. Fuel amount, cost, mileage are an example of what I’ve entered there after every visit to the gas station:

    Many, many times, I’ve thought to myself “I should turn this into an app”. After all, what kind of a Power Platform evangelist would just keep working on an Excel file for years without modernizing the process? Yet whenever I started to think about the details of what should be there to replicate everything my workbook provides (there are other sheets there, too), I realized it’s a heck of a lot of work to achieve parity with what Excel gives me. No rational reason ever existed for me to put in all the work to achieve something that I’d be happier using. It could have been a community demo, sure, but I always had other stuff to work on.

    Now, when we are living in the age of agentic AI, surely it’s about time to replace the Excel? Well, if I could just give that file to an AI tool and make the machine modernize it for me, why not. Last week, when Lovable announced their file uploads feature and claimed “you can now drop files directly into Lovable and turn them into apps and websites”, I decided to try it out. Sure enough, the vibe-coding tool was able to generate a web app from the .xlsx file:

    The only problem? The data is not correct. Like, I only wish my 2019 Ford Focus 1.5 EcoBoost was able to run 100 km on 0.8L… In reality, the React app generated by Lovable was not able to handle the “big data” of around 200+ lines of data in the Excel workbook and instead chose to read only parts of it. The AI chatbot of course will claim this app has “real calculations from your Excel”, but we all should know at this point how LLMs are just manipulation machines that you shouldn’t spend time arguing with.

    I never have to worry if Excel is trying to manipulate me. It may not always understand what I’m trying to do, yet the machine never pretends that it did the work it promised to do while giving out a bogus number instead. The math is not based on vibes. Today, we have LLM-based AI features inside our spreadsheets that are sometimes able to call deterministic tools like Python to do real calculations. But we have no certainty that AI would always resort to such tools when needed, instead of just making shit up.

    That doesn’t stop companies from trying to make AI in Excel work. OpenAI has funded startups like Endex that develop Excel add-ins for injecting LLM magic into spreadsheets. Microsoft is also aiming beyond Excel Copilot with their recent preview launch of Agent Mode in Excel. Could these tools already replace a financial analyst creating Excel workbooks with formulas and business metrics? I decided to give Agent Mode a try on the day it came out:

    You can check out the experience and end results from the video. In short: Excel Agent Mode ain’t necessarily a tool you should yet rely on…

    If you can’t beat them, join them

    Instead of seeing Excel as something that should be replaced, perhaps a better strategy is trying to accept the fact that Excel files will always exist. Because people want to experience the control that Excel gives them, instead of limiting themselves to the GUI prison of your business app. Similarly, they’d prefer if the numbers that get shown to them would be based on verifiable math rather than on-demand hallucinations of “vibe working” tools.

    I’m somewhat biased here because this is the route we have taken when building FinModeler. A SaaS application that helps business founders or financial advisors to create detailed financial models with its simple web-based wizard UI. And then, producing an Excel workbook for you, complete with dynamic formulas that allow you to adjust the model with the tool you know and love.

    It’s not your typical product built on Power Platform. Not simply because of the full-fidelity Excel workbook generator feature. But rather the whole SaaS delivery model of offering a canvas app that requires zero installation differs from the expected way of partners shipping products on Microsoft’s low-code platform. In many ways, this is not how business apps are supposed to work – but we’ve done it anyway!

    Today, anyone can check out how this combination of Power Platform + Excel works in practice by signing up for a free 14d trial of the FinModeler app. There’s a lot more that we can do in future versions of the product, besides just creating extensive Excel workbooks. The fact that the financial model data is stored in a structured Dataverse database is a much better position to build new features than if we’d need to rely on Excel files alone. Still, it’s essential that the users have the possibility to interact with the model that offers them the ultimate level of control and confidence.

    Spreadsheets are forever

    The moral of the story is: it’s not either/or. We are all better off when there are different types of tools available for working with business data and processes. Both structured apps and fudgable spreadsheets serve a clear purpose. Similarly, we have room for both deterministic, reliable software as well as creative and unpredictable AI. Trying to force people into choosing just one tool never works.

    Recent estimates say Excel is used by over a billion human users. In the near future, there will be countless AI agents built that will also try their best to learn how to work with Excel spreadsheets. What I’ve learned is that while you can (and often should) go beyond spreadsheets to evolve and improve your processes, it’s foolish to think that you could replace Excel entirely. Turn it around instead and think of all the data manipulation and calculation features you don’t have to build into your own software, thanks to Excel being there to handle it with ease.

    After 25 years of working professionally in the field of customer data and business applications, I’m proud to once again add a sticker onto my laptop that celebrates the magical powers of Excel:

  • The internet made me do it

    The internet made me do it

    Everything I know, everything I do professionally today – it all comes from typing into little text boxes on the internet.

    Even before I had internet connectivity for my PC back at my parents’ house, I could use the phone line to talk via the computer. I didn’t need to pick up the phone, instead I let my modem connect me to BBSs where people were writing things on pre-internet forums.

    A classic V.34 modem. No, not mine. It’s from the internet, of course.

    Maybe that’s what taught me to never pick up the phone for a call if there was a way to do things in writing. I still find it oddly barbaric that our smartphones have the “Phone” app that allows unidentified individuals to harass us with incoming calls. Why isn’t the EU protecting its citizens from threats like this?

    We trained your AI

    I’ve previously shared my history, stats and thoughts on blogging. It’s safe to say that these texts have been the most impactful ones I’ve typed, when examining the audience reached by any single collection of words. Their persistence online has made them worth much more than any snarky social posts I’ve made on Twitter, LinkedIn and the likes.

    The importance of blog posts doesn’t come from any secret old wisdom revealed in them. It comes from the fact that they can be seen. They can be discovered. They don’t cease to exist when people leave the room.

    Yet there are so many leaders out there who insist on doing things in person. I am not saying that face to face meetings would not have a level of impact that’s hard to replicate digitally. But what I am saying is that their impact evaporates rapidly. The words are lost in thin air the moment your lips spell them out.

    For everyone who insist on phone calls, meetings and synchronous communication as the primary mechanism for getting work done, let me ask you this:

    How much of the words said out loud in those events have been used to train the AI that many/most of us use today in 2025?

    The answer is likely: none whatsoever.

    Now, how about the thoughts and ideas of people who prefer to write things down? You know, just ordinary folks who type things in online forums, or geeks who love to document the most intricate details of whatever topic they are passionate about. What are the chances that the LLMs used today have seen their words?

    It’s almost certain that such text has been crawled into the massive data troves used by OpenAI, Google and the rest. Now, often this is only seen through the negative aspect of “they took our data!”, which is a rightful concern. However, have you ever stopped to think about the possible impact?

    When the people who aren’t comfortable sharing their thoughts in writing will today ask ChatGPT for advice, the response consists of the collective knowledge from all us writers who were not afraid to type. No one asked the talkers what they thought about anything. It’s as if all those big words didn’t matter much on our journey towards a distant yet inevitable true artificial intelligence.

    Thinking through writing

    It’s not merely the publicly available text that can be impactful. By having the courage to put something in writing while at work and then sharing it to an internal audience, you are entering the same virtuous cycle. Even today when there’s a Copilot in the Teams meeting that will turn the transcripts into automatically generated summaries, the words that you choose to write have considerably more weight.

    Throughout my professional career, I’ve most often had to resort to sources outside the organization I worked in to find information I needed to get my job done. Because I worked in expert roles where it made far more sense to google for the answer globally than shout out the question in the office locally.

    When the answers that I discovered were in written format to begin with, it was easy to share them internally in that way, too. The more senior positions I gained, the more actively I tried to do proactive posts on channels like Yammer. Because I knew that someone might ask me about these topics weeks or months from now, and I didn’t want to repeat myself. Not the search, nor the act of typing or speaking.

    This shaped the person that I became, in many ways. Yes, there was the upside of being knowledgeable in the eyes of others. Jukka always had “a link for that”. I was pretty darn good at knowing what info was where. This method of information processing also allowed me to hone my skills in connecting the dots between concepts and objects that weren’t always obviously related. Some may call it systems thinking.

    It also made me a difficult person at times. My tolerance for the casual, non-systemic dissemination of information was low. While others were living in the moment and focused on constructing a social narrative, my thoughts were often in the factual details. My mind was racing towards future scenarios, “predicting the next token” of what problems we should address that will likely result from our current actions. Because that’s how the written stories unfold – into future chapters and linked articles.

    Communicating online in forums, responding to others in threads, referencing related discussions and providing evidence – that is an activity with its own social norms. As we increasingly work remotely from each other, the behavioral patterns that the internet taught us are both powerful and dangerous. We should be able to adjust our mode of operation to fit the social context. The what and how you write should be decided only after you remind yourself of the who and why.

    But when it’s all just little text boxes on the internet, how can our brains notice the nuances?

    Today, as a solopreneur, I sit in my private office typing this post. I don’t need to balance my presence between the digital world and the physical reality, simply because nearly all interaction during the day happens online. Yet in every app, in all the tens of windows that exist on my monitors on a typical day, hardly any of the text boxes are completely equal. I must remember what can be written where, and how.

    Writing is all you need

    Today, people have started to realize how big of a difference you can make by posting things online. Yet I don’t recall anyone using the term “influencer” before the visual social media era of Instagram, YouTube and TikTok arrived. You absolutely do influence the world around you via written messages, too. Being visual about it doesn’t hurt, yet the choice of your primary media payload will determine a great deal of the first impression people will have about you.

    If you want your words to represent you, where should you start and how to become someone other people on the internet might pay attention to? Pavel Samsonov recently shared his formula of standing out through writing in an excellent article that provides more clarity into the topic than I could write here. So, start from there. (See, this is how it all works. People amplifying the writing of other people.)

    Today, a lot of what I do on a daily basis is actually a combination of two things learned from the internet: online writing and memes. Because in social feeds it’s hard to make people notice you with just a wall of text. Besides, like Pavel writes: “If you can’t think of anything interesting to add, just post memes. Everyone loves memes.” You can’t go wrong with advise like that.

    A visualization I created in Canva + a couple of meme pics combined with it to underline the insanity of Microsoft’s Dataverse product evolution.

    Especially if you’re writing about a subject that isn’t exactly headline news in mainstream media, it doesn’t ever hurt to think about an angle that would make the audience say “hold on, wait a minute, what exactly did I just see?” Meaning, rather than going for the most common way to present the information in your field of expertise, why not put it into an unconventional context? Memes are an excellent vehicle for visually making this happen. After that, it can also give you as a writer more freedom to address the issue in a surprising way.

    In my latest journey as the writer of a newsletter, I have ended up choosing a style of content that would not have worked back when I was still a Microsoft MVP. I’ve always been brutally honest with sharing my thoughts about the good and the bad sides of modern technology. Yet with my Perspectives on Power Platform newsletter as a new publication format, it has encouraged me to consistently write in the style of that publication.

    Ever since I launched the Plus edition in the end last year, with a promise of a weekly newsletter issue to my paying subscribers, it has kept me focused on repeatedly doing one thing. I’ve always loved thinking through writing, yet too often it has been something you can skip if in a hurry. Well, that’s no longer the case. Writing isn’t optional – it’s part of what I am.

    “Like and subscribe”

    One more thing. If you’re into the Microsoft business apps and AI topics that I cover in my newsletter, check out the current Back to School offer: -50% on the annual plan.

    Cover photo by Wokey Factory on Unsplash

  • A year in the life

    A year in the life

    “Has it been a year alredy?” / “Has it alredy been a year?”

    Both ways to apply the word “already” came to my mind when looking at the feed of pictures I get in my Timehop about events and activities on the same day N years ago. This time around, there happened to be nearly identical pictures, from the same place, exactly 5 and 1 years apart:

    The 5 years old picture on the left is me with my personal laptop, starting to work at the previous company, on the first day we got the keys to our very own office space. It took a while before I got my “corporate” Surface Laptop 3, so that trusty ol’ Dell XPS 13 was where all the pre-launch planning and preparation for the founding of a company took place.

    The picture from 1 year ago on the right is me leaving my second “corporate” machine, Lenovo Thinkpad [something] behind, along with my key fob, and stepping out of the office for the final time. From switch on to switch off – a journey of four years.

    It got me thinking how much of what we do at work involves nothing else physical than just small devices like that. The things we create through our computer, as well as the things that our computers make us do (via signals from others) feel oh so important while we are working on them.

    When you switch off, what remains?

    The natural outcome is that we just keep on looking at what’s directly infront of us, not bothering to make a note of what has already happened. Without making a conscious effort to record our actions and experiences, they are in danger of being stored only in RAM and getting wiped away once you switch off.

    So, here’s a bit of effort from me in putting the memories into a format that can be revisited at a later date. In this post I’ll be doing some reflection on the changes that have taken place during a year in the life of someone being me.

    My physical and digital office today

    The very first thing I started to look for after returning the office keys in the picture was another office. Not as in a job but as a physical space that I would hold the keys to. That was an important aspect for the sense of phsychological safety that I learned from the past four years of mostly working from home. Sure, it was possible to get work done there. Yes, a lot more efficient than commuting to the real office for Teams calls. But it often also felt like this:

    Home was primarily for the family now. It’s a beautiful thing on its own. However, I also needed the ability to be away from home, mentally and physically. After no longer being a part of any organization, could it now be possible for me to design the work part of my life specifically for my own needs?

    It turned out to be possible. After a few weeks of exploring options, I landed on a spot that not only was conveniently located in the same part of the city where I live. When I stepped inside to have a look and saw the big window opening up to a view of (almost) nothing but trees, I was sold.

    My office desk with a nice, peaceful view.

    The digital office of my own business was something that could wait. I had just started to build my newsletter and it felt like I shouldn’t stretch myself too thin with all the publicly visible stuff. Stepping out from my previous role had opened up the doors for many new one-to-one discussions with both old and new connections in my network. Better to enjoy that moment and not do everything at once.

    Later in the year, I began feeling less and less satisfied with having the quick landing page that I had put together with no preparations whatsoever in March:

    “Last Wednesday, I sat down to create a quick landing page for Niiranen Advisory Oy, my private company. I did it pretty much in one go. Knowing that I only needed a single page rather than a comprehensive WordPress style website, I did it on Carrd. The platform I had used for simple landing pages before – and also for delivering digital gift cards to family members during Xmas and birthdays.”

    By now, I knew a bit more about who I was & what I could offer to people. The only way to refine it was the trusty old “thinking through writing” method, which meant I had to expand from a one-page intro to a multi-page website. Finally, a year later, I was ready to make that V2 site public at niiranenadvisory.com. See a quick promo video below:

    Built with Squarespace, this new website allowed me to again see the world of web content publishing from a new perspective. As I mentioned in my previous post about my platform choices, the vibe around WordPress had gone bad and I felt it was time to try something else. It’s not impossible to think that a year from now I’d again be using some other tool. Heck, maybe AI can “vibe code” my next website on its own…

    Back to life

    If you’ve been following my blog, you may recall how I’ve written about the personal challenges I’ve faced with becoming tired. In late 2023 things got to a point where I had to take an extended leave as the symptoms became too severe to handle otherwise. This was a blessing in disguise as it both allowed me and forced me to stop doing what I’d always been doing. 2024 was then the year when I got to practice how to be alive again – instead of just living.

    One reason I wanted to step away from the Microsoft MVP award program was to gain more control over my attention. I had made that decision already at the start of 2023, yet I stayed in the program until the end of my award period of July 1st, 2024. It was a similar day as turning in my laptop and office key. Now my technical access to official and unofficial MVP channels was finally removed. I didn’t have to battle with myself on what messages, signals and feeds to react to and which ones to ignore.

    Cleaning up your virtual desk makes a difference. The longer you are a member of a group, the longer you work on specific projects or tasks, the more they end up owning you. You maybe become better at processing stuff as it becomes more familiar to you. Experience doesn’t mean you can scale yourself to an ever-growing pile of mental obligations, though. Experience primarily helps in navigating the territory. It doesn’t help you run faster and further with more load on you back – because we also become older as we accumulate experience.

    Dropping some of that load is therefore the key. Depending on your personality traits, there’s also the question of how do you become motivated in general. I’ve become increasingly aware of my impatience to keep working on the same tasks over & over again. Stability and predictability are good to a point. Beyond that point, oh dear lord how bored I can become! When that boredom then threatens my motivation, I keep scanning for more and more issues to pay attention to. Then the vicious cycle starts turning as new things enter my consciousness and there’s no process for offloading the old thoughts.

    In a perfect world, you might offload those thoughts at the end of each day, when stopping your working day. In the reality where I’ve learned to live, there are no time clocks to punch when exiting the office. The tools I use and the things I do are indistinguishable between at-work and off-work. Netiher the body nor the mind knows the difference. Often the only real difference has been that during the day I’d track my hours (working as a consultant, that’s kind of a must) and in the evening I’d do non-tracked tasks that relate to work.

    Now, after setting up my private office, with a desktop PC that sits in front of that big window, I can at least recognize when I’m at work. Often when I leave in the afternoon to pick up my kid from daycare, I’ll still say to myself “I’ll continue on this task later in the evening”. Like I always used to convince myself. But now, I’ve learned to say “fuck it” to those promises that my busy mind makes at the moment its capacity is constrained. In the evening, nine times out of ten, I won’t work on any of those things. Technically I could, of course. I just don’t.

    The ability to control my own schedule during the days has been crucial for the recovery. Knowing all too well that long periods of social interaction or the need to be “masking” for a specific role among the crowd can drain my mental battery rapidly, the important thing is being able to manage the charge level with confidence. Likewise, having the freedom to not stay at the office 9-to-5 if on any given day the energy for focusing on work is just not there – that’s truly the most precious thing.

    My main goal hasn’t been the effective completion of work tasks. I’ve consciously set aside the kinds of metrics and habbits that were pushing me into getting things done – even when the significance of “the thing” was unclear or even questionable. By traditional standards, I’ve allowed myself to be not searching for success at this time.

    Success is something determined by others. Happiness can only be determined by you. This is a thought that came to me today when reading one tech startup founder justify why he is sacrificing his evenings and weekends for work. He said he wasn’t optimizing for happiness, rather he wanted to succeed in building a multi-billion company.

    I found this to be sad yet accurate, and somehow refreshingly honest. It reminded how I had often felt anxiety and distress in moments where technically I was “successful”. Now that I’ve taken a break after 4 years of being a co-founder and chasing success as defined by others, I am much more at ease with myself. It is financially not a sensible choice. There’s no badges and awards to be won from this. But at least for a moment, I get to be something rather than trying to achieve something – for someone else.

    As I sit in that office today, writing this personal blog post, I get to answer the old voice in my head that says “shouldn’t you be working on something else?” That voice isn’t something one can just put on mute. What you can learn to do is give a firm response to its questions. Acknowledging your own needs and being more forgiving towards yourself first. So that you could also do that for the people around you.

    The past year has consisted of a lot reflection on what are the patterns in life. Which thing leads to what outcome. Getting to the “why” behind the emotions and recognizing if there is a chance to do something that breaks the patterns leading repeatedly to exhaustion. While at the same time accepting who I am and what parts of me are unlikelt to change.

    Are my problems fixed now? Not exactly, at least in the sense of everything being back to what it was for me many years ago. Because in life there’s no going back. We can only go forward in life and learn to both enjoy as well as deal with whatever comes our way.

    The world around us

    Reading the news of the world, it sometimes feels like some people are trying to turn the clocks back to the 1930s. The direction of the society here in my home country of Finland has been clearly negative in 2024, thanks to the current government’s conservatists and populists pushing their right-wing agenda. Yet looking at what’s now happening across the Atlantic in 2025, that all feels quite moderate in comparison.

    For someone who has spent most of their professional career working in the ecosystem of a large American corporation, the rapid erosion of trust between USA and Europe gives a new reason to pause and reflect. Do I need a plan B if the Microsoft cloud would suddenly become hostile towards users from my country – or if it would simply no longer be trusted by customers round here? It’s not a question I’ve had to seriously consider ever before. But times change, and maybe in 2025 it is time to plan for the unexpected.

    It’s not merely the political movements that are causing instability in what the future of our world looks like. As we’ve entered the era of GenAI being available everywhere and being injected into everything, the question of how we determine anyone or anything being trustworthy is becoming increasingly hard to answer. I’ve recently written about this in a fairly long article called Trusting big tech in the age of AI that explains my reaons for concern:

    Thanks to being an independent advisor who doesn’t need to represent any company, I’ve been able to speak freely about the opportunities and threats of AI. Often this has meant making fun of the forced deployment of Copilot in absolutely every Microsoft product. This is the easy target for critique, of course, compared t the long-term impact that AI may have. Seeing tech giants from Google to Apple stumble in their efforts to launch “now with AI!” editions of their products shows us how difficult it is to figure out what exactly is the winning formula in applying LLM based technology for products and services.

    The past year didn’t radically transform the work and life for someone like me. Neither did I see entire professions being wiped away by the almighty AI. Visions of agentic, autonomous AI have been primarily the creation of those who seek to justify the relentless spending of money on this technology. I have become a regular users of AI as an assitant for myself, especially helping someone working as a solopreneur to bounce around ideas and be a virtual teammate. And still, whenever I open Microsoft’s Copilot Studio and try to think “what would I want to use this for in my daily life”, I’m unable to come up with a single problem where a Copilot agent is the best answer.

    None of this means that AI would not be highly impactful. In a way, the concept of democratizing code that I was vocally advocating when going all-in with low-code – that’s now more likely to happen via computer generated code instead. I don’t think Power Platform would disappear anytime soon, and yet I certainly am not as confident that low-code is the mainstream solution to business needs as I was 5 years ago. Just because AI hasn’t been the magic bullet the tech vendors claimed it to be, that doesn’t mean it won’t shake up a lot of what I’ve spent my time and effort on in the field of business apps consulting. I bet it will, and I want to keep my mind open for ways to disrupt the patterns that have led me to this point.

    Almost nothing changes in one year. Nearly everything can change in a decade. That is my own version of “gradually, then suddenly” when it comes to analyzing the trends in technology, business, society and life. It can act as a motivational poster of sort when applied to aspirational goals and the strive for progress. Similarly, it works as a caution for making assumptions that just because you’ve been able to rely on something earlier in your life, it will remain reliable.

    Cover photo by Daniel Mirlea on Unsplash

  • 7 months of Perspectives – start of my newsletter journey

    7 months of Perspectives – start of my newsletter journey

    It’s hard to put an exact date on when my Perspectives on Power Platform newsletter was actually launched. In the very first issue, “Start somewhere”, I wrote about my decision to sign up for beehiiv and quickly put in place the foundation on which I could build something.

    At that point, in March 2024, I did not yet know what exactly I was going to build. After the health challenges I had just gone through, I knew I needed to stop doing things in a way that kept me from getting better. The 11 years of being in the Microsoft MVP program had taken their toll on my mental wellbeing. Co-founding and promoting a Power Platform consulting company alongside my voluntary community activities turned out to be an unsustainable model.

    Not a big surprise, and not anyone else’s fault either. I had chosen this path, now I just needed to find a new path forward. Today, it feels like this is indeed happening.

    To write again

    After taking a break, I quickly discovered that I still have a burning passion for writing. I just needed the right place and format for it. With Twitter now gone (to s***), I developed a habbit of creating quick posts / hot takes on LinkedIn. Regardless of their algorithm being a similar jerk as any other big social media, I learned to live within the limits imposed there. The higher character limit of a LinkedIn post suited me well, allowing me to express complete thoughts rather than just a couple of sentences.

    My audience started to grow. Much faster than what I ever experienced on Twitter. At some point, due to the poor analytics that LinkedIn themselves provide, I chose to pay for a 3rd party tool, Shield Analytics. The most important feature turned out to be the ability to search for my past posts (yes, LinkedIn is terrible with basic content management). As a nice bonus, it draws charts on how the engagement levels are doing compared to previous time periods. You could even simulate what a similar audience reach would cost you if you paid for it via sponsored content campaigns rather than just writing catchy posts.

    Social media companies are not your friends, though. They aim to own the content that is created by the users and choose how/when it is presented. More importantly, they want to own your network – so that they can charge money for selling it back to you, should you want to reach them with your message. Connections, followers – those are just numbers shown to keep you hooked on the potential audience.

    Newsletters, on the other hand, are about forming the direct connection between the publisher and the subscriber. Algorithms won’t determine who sees what – the humans on both ends get to choose that. I think it’s a much healthier basis for communication, rather than relying on the gamification mechanisms in social networks that can change on a whim.

    While the themes that I write about may be the same regardless of the channel, the newsletter offers me a way to think deeper. I’ve developed the habbit of looking at what I personally react to online, what my network is saying, what type of social posts I create – then analyzing it from the different perspectives as part of writing my long form Perspectives into the newsletter.

    I feel that it’s started to work pretty well. I’ve allowed myself to take time in exploring new themes around GenAI and cybersecurity, as well as reflecting on the past/present/history of Power Platform. Many of the topics are either the result of talking with new people or they have resulted in new connections being formed. Those are crucial KPIs in the end. 1) Does it feel meaningful to myself? 2) Does it activate others to do something new? And last but not least: 3) does it gain traction from the online audience in general?

    I’m not going to disclose the exact stats on how many readers there have been for the newsletter. Let’s just say that I’ve been delighted to see a constant flow of new subscribers that have intentionally said “yes, please, send me more emails like this”. It feels special, every single time.❤️

    More recently I’ve had the courage to say “if you want to read this article, please do me a favor and create a free subscriber account”. After all, this ability to stop just any AI bots from scraping your content and using the data for providing answers without zero attribution to the original source was one stated reason why I chose to transition from blogging to writing a newsletter.

    The conclusion is: these walls do work. If on a normal day I’d get a beehiiv daily growth recap message with 2-4 new subscribers, requesting a login can make that grow 10x.

    Is AI really eating the tech blogging world then? I believe it is happening on some level. This insighful article from MVP Tony Redmond who runs sites like Office365ITPros.com explains the impact that LLM generated answers to tech questions are having on website traffic. If you used to have a business that relied on people discovering your site via “how to” queries on Google, that model is becoming less and less viable every day.

    The tools that shape us

    Regardless of what we as individuals think about generative AI, it exists. It changes the world around us, whether we use it for a particular task or not. I haven’t yet fallen in love with Microsoft 365 Copilot, but I talk a lot with my ChatGPT every single day. It has become a virtual personal advisor in exploring areas that are less familiar to me in technology, business and life. It would be difficult to live without it. But does it replace online searches, though?

    I have already mostly abandoned Google. However. I did not replace it with AI, but rather a search engine that I pay for with money – not with my data and privacy. Kagi has been an awesome experience that not only meets my everyday search needs; they also sent me a beautiful yellow T-shirt! I’ve learned that an ad-free search engine that doesn’t try to actively deceive me into clicking sponsored links is still highly useful in the year 2024.

    These shifts in user behavior resulting from advancements in the field of AI will mean more & more people question whether their de facto digital tools they’ve relied on are the right choice anymore. This is happening all around me. Even on this very place where I am now writing this text and you are presumably reading it (unless you are one of the remaining RSS feed fans): WordPress.

    I have been a WordPress user for as long as I remember. Well, okay, so I do still remember my initial blogging experiments with Blogger and Drupal. Once I went with WP, though, there was never a true reason to look elsewhere. It did everything I needed, and was able to adapt to whatever new requirements I came up with. Not only did it serve as a personal blog engine, it also powered many professional websites along my journey.

    When all you’ve got is a WP hammer, every problem looks like a blog post nail. While being a versatile and broadly used platform means there is a huge community around it to give tips, build plugins and sort of keep all your options open – you are still thinking within that WP box. You keep publishing openly available blog posts as web pages, like you’ve done for 16 years already. You can’t just stop doing what you’ve always done, right?

    The big wake up call for WP bloggers came from the mothership. The founder of WordPress has shown that even though the wordpress.org side is operating as a non-profit, the commercial arm of wordpress.com has the ultimate control over the software. The public dispute that Matt Wullenweg started in September by calling WP Engine “a cancer for WordPress” has since escalated into a complete collapse of trust in WP.

    Automattic (the creator of WordPress, led by Matt) and WP Engine are both big hosting providers for WP sites. Now, they’re only talking through lawyers, with WP Engine having sued Automattic for “abuse of power, extortion and greed”. In response, Matt and Automattic decided to literally steal a commercial plugin developed by WP Engine and publish it as their own. It’s the craziest thing I’ve seen in the CMS space yet the proof is everywhere in the source code.

    With beehiiv, I had already taken the first step to publish content somewhere outside of the WP kingdom. During the past few months, there’s been a steady stream of product updates that make me miss the WP ecosystem less and less. Most importantly, I feel that the mechanism of a newsletter is providing a better connection not just between me & my subscribers – it also makes me want to write more. That’s not exactly a plugin you could just add to a WordPress blog. It’s about a whole different product design approach.

    Will I still be maintaining this WP blog then? That’s a good question. Since my regular content posting is on the newsletter site anyway, I technically could get everything I need from a static website. Briefly exploring the world of SSG’s (static site generators), I tried spinning up a Hugo site, running on Netlify. However, I very quickly realized that the Git repo driven content management workflow was not something I would replace my WP site with.

    I decided to give this SSG approach a go in a different context, though. When developing an alternative way to visualize the release plans for Power Platform and Dynamics 365 than what Microsoft’s own Release Planner site offers, I ended up publishing releaseplans.net as a Hugo website. Now, that site lives as a GitHub repo for the source code, while I do the content updates in Visual Studio Code.

    I have of course already covered this topic in my newsletter:

    I’m in the process of creating a “proper” website for my company, Niiranen Advisory Oy. That will also not be a WP site but something different. Stay tuned for an update in the not too distant future.

    What’s coming next

    The idea behind the domain perspectives.plus was always to make space for something more than just a direct replacement of this blog. Today, that idea has reached the state where Perspectives Plus is a real thing anyone can subscribe to:

    There will always be a free version of the newsletter available. In addition, I will keep on sharing as much as humanly possible on social media channels like LinkedIn, Mastodon and Bluesky. Because that’s just who I am and how I work: with extreme transparency.

    What the paid version of Perspectives Plus offers is a commitment from me to the subscribers. Rather than merely using these publishing platforms as my own strange form of public therapy, I will now aim to deliver something worth paying for. Right now, it will consist of weekly emails covering recent news and events in our ecosystem (see free example issue). There will also be premium-only articles that dive deeper into the persistent challenges and possibilities in and nearby Microsoft Power Platform. Leveraging my lessons learned and observations made during my 19 years with this ecosystem.

    It is again the start of a new phase for me. Previously it wouldn’t have been either possible or sensible for me to launch a paid newsletter. Now it is, so it has to be done. Then, make adjustments along the way as you learn more about what the audience wants and what I can deliver.

    This is also the first time ever since I can launch an actual Black Friday offer!🎉 For a limited time, you can get 50% off the annual subscription price of Perspectives Plus. Tell your friends and family that this is the perfect Xmas present for them (if they happen to work with Microsoft technology, that is). Use this offer link.

    Grab the -50% offer while it lasts!

    One final tool related thing. In the last 4 years that I was in charge of creating the everyday visuals for social content of a boutique consulting company, I learned to enjoy Canva. It’s a great example of a citizen tool that allows people with little professional skills yet enough determination to create graphics for whatever purpose. So, to close things off for this blog post, enjoy the promotional video clip I created for spreading the Black Friday offer message in my social feeds:

  • Why start a newsletter instead of writing a blog

    Why start a newsletter instead of writing a blog

    Blogging has had a massive impact on my career and personal life in the past 16 years. The act of other community members out there sharing their insights via blog posts is what initially got me so excited about the Microsoft business apps ecosystem to begin with, at around ~2005. My own investments of time and effort into blogging have been totally worth it.

    And yet here we are, in 2024 and I decided to launch a newsletter instead. Called “Perspectives on Power Platform”, it’s available on the perspectives.plus domain. Published and managed via beehiiv. This is all aligned with me switching over from being a co-founder into being a solopreneur instead just a few months ago.

    I feel I need to explain myself a bit here on this “legacy” blog – considering a few people have also asked me directly about it. “Why a newsletter?” I’ll provide my reasons and thought process here, with the intention of possibly sparking also comments from fellow bloggers and blog readers on this shift I see around me.

    Is blogging dead? No, but following is.

    The web is certainly no longer the same as back in 2005 – yet few things in the world are. First the rise of social media came along and pretty much killed the traditional way of following blogs via RSS feeds and Google Reader (RIP). It doesn’t matter that RSS as a protocol is still perfectly valid today. Most people who might be interested in what I or the rest of the #MSBizApps community write about will not be using RSS. I have personally pretty much given up on following the hundreds of RSS feeds that I had subscribed to in my Feedly account.

    At first, the co-existence of blogs and social media platforms like Twitter seemed to work quite well. Sharing links to great blog posts was an amplification method that helped form communities. Then, the laws of market economics drove every major social media company to build a walled garden instead of a “meta protocol” for such social interactions between community members. They wanted to hold onto the audience instead, which lead to algorithmic feeds punishing people for posting things that had a link pointing outside the garden. As a result, fewer people left the garden and the content inside became richer as users tried to cram more text, images, video into the native social channel instead. “Engagement” became the key metric that determines what we see – not who we chose to follow or subscribe to. We lost control.

    This affected all content, not just blogs. Musicians, writers, artists – all creators everywhere lost the direct way for them to build an audience of followers. To understand the broad impact that the rise of the social media algorithm had, I recommend you to put this video on your watchlist: “Death of the Follower & the Future of Creativity on the Web” by Patreon CEO Jack Conte at SXSW 2024.

    Today, in the era of TikTok, the concept of subscriptions or following creators has been completely abandoned. Ultra-algorithmic “For You” streams do not rely on your personal network. On today’s social media services like Threads (the “Twitter, from Meta”) it’s tough to get anyone to follow you. Engagement on your post does not translate into an audience of followers. You don’t connect with creators – you consume trending content. There’s hardly anything “social” about such content networks anymore.

    Blogging didn’t die as much as social networks did. User generated content is being circulated around at an ever-faster pace – yet it’s selected by a machine rather than the users explicitly. Audiences are not something we own, rather it’s something we can purchase time & time again from the walled gardens that host the user generated content we give to them for free.

    Are you writing blog posts or AI training data?

    After the social media algorithms came the LLM wave. How is this generative AI era different from the social media era? In terms of how they treat content, the difference is subtle yet massive:

    • Social media: process all the content users posted on our platform and extract maximum value out of it.
    • Generative AI: process all the content available on the public web and extract maximum value out of it.

    Pause for a moment to reflect on that. First, they built a walled garden – then they came for everything outside those walls. What Meta did in Facebook/Instagram is now being done by OpenAI, Google, Meta (again) etc. on the entire world wide web. It’s ultimately just about turning up the volume of data, by crunching everything humans have ever created and compressing that into a Large Language Model. Throw in piles & piles of Nvidia GPUs and massive amounts of energy burned in data centers, and then – suddenly a new species of intelligent chatbots emerged from this cauldron of the geeks. Generating something new from the ingredients mixed in during the cooking process.

    Human thoughts are the critical ingredient. Without the users, all that big tech corporations have is software and hardware. They don’t have data unless someone gives it to them. Google as a search engine wouldn’t have been able to produce any value to anyone unless it was able to index the data shared by humans on the public web. Mark Zuckerberg wouldn’t have been able to get anyone signed up or Facebook unless people at Harvard hadn’t “just submitted the data to him, like dumb f***s”.

    Data both inside the walled gardens as well as outside of it has been analyzed before for commercial purposes. When Google did it for their search engine, it (originally) was about helping users find the original source of that content. Leading to website visitors, who could in turn potentially become subscribers. You gained attribution and the opportunity to connect with other people via building an audience. A deal that was hard to refuse.

    How does this deal work in the age of ChatGPT, Copilot and the other AI services? It doesn’t. The social contract of “you index my content and I get exposure in return” becomes irrelevant when the machine no longer provides merely a link to a website as the answer to a user query. Instead, the LLMs become so smart that they offer personalized answers in the exact format requested by the user – thus negating any reason to visit the original websites. After all, why read through an SEO optimized “how to do X in Power Apps” article when ChatGPT or Copilot can adjust the information to any scenario and help you with follow-up questions, error messages and so on?

    The irony here is that the “how to do X” and “5 tips for optimizing Y” type of blog posts have been by far the most effective format to gain website visitors in the past. I haven’t usually seen them as very ejoyable to write, so I’ve instead spent my keystrokes on broader articles of analyzing “what does X mean” and “the future of Y” type of speculations. Such articles have only mattered for a brief period and have been mainly seen by loyal subscribers/followers. The long tail of traffic from Google has always been to the “how to” posts, by a massive margin. Now, thanks to AI – neither type of blog post will receive much traffic in the future, for pretty much any bloggers out there.

    Could the creators of content opt out from becoming AI training data? In theory, yes, and in practice, no. We’ve already seen companies like Perplexity AI spoof their user agent info and ignore any blocking done via the robots.txt file. Corporations also do it between each other. Amazon has instructed its employees to create personal user accounts and hand them over to the corporate AI group to get around GitHub API call limits. Besides, if we ever reach consensus on a method to deny the use of specific web content in training AI models, all of the old stuff out there today would still remain as part of what makes up the intelligence of ChatGPT and the likes.

    It’s best to assume that anything an anonymous website visitor can read, AI corporations will also use to advance their own purposes. You, the writer, will most often get absolutely nothing from it.

    Email as the old/new platform

    This brings us to the title of this post. While some pre-social and pre-AI internet technologies like RSS have faded into the background, email has remained undefeated. No matter how many alternative messaging and collaboration platforms have come & gone, nothing has managed to disrupt email in a meaningful way. Although kids today may not be paying much attention to email, the further along they go on their professional career, the more futile it is to resist the power of this universal messaging protocol and (unfortunately) identity system that has been around since 1971.

    The renaissance of email newsletters that has been fueled by services like Substack, Ghost etc. is a great example of how the old thing can feel new again after a break. Most importantly, these tools have been designed to first help the content creators build up an audience, and only then gain financial success from taking a cut off the paid content served to those audiences. Or from subscription fees paid by the creator, as is the case with my beehiiv account today. Unlike with social media, the platform for email newsletter delivery is not actively trying to stop the creators and readers from having a direct relationship with each other.

    Email capture is a ubiquitous gate along the many journeys we all experience while online. You do it when registering for both social and AI services, too. Businesses often use it as an excuse for getting the chance to know who is interested in their content enough to fill in a form, so that they can talk directly to them. Now, with the rise of the all-scraping AI overlords, there’s a whole new reason for even individual content creators and community members to seriously consider asking readers to sign in. Unless content is locked away behind a real gate that can’t just be opened via the search bots lying about who they are, the content will get consumed by AI.

    Right now, all my Perspectives on Power Platform newsletter issues are publicly available for anyone to consume. However, I have the possibility now to change that if needed. Perhaps in the future the full articles will require a subscriber account – just to keep the AI bots away. While for the casual web surfers this of course is an extra hassle, luckily they can do a one-off registration on the site and then receive all future issues of the newsletter delivered into their mailbox.

    It’s nothing new for some of you. There are hundreds of people who are subscribing to this current blog via email notifications (powered by Jetpack) and I’m very thankful for this audience! At the same time, I want to apologize for the recent blast of lorem ipsum dummy content that got sent to you while I was deploying a new theme for my blog.😳 Just goes to show that WordPress isn’t exactly the ideal platform if you intend to publish content primarily in an email newsletter format…

    If you are interested in receiving my future writings into your inboxes, I strongly recommend you to sign up for the newsletter. This blog right here at jukkaniiranen.com will remain as a place for me to share thoughts around topics outside of the Microsoft ecosystem. The regular content on what’s happening with Microsoft Power Platform and what’s my take on it will be on the Perspectives newsletter and site exclusively from now on.

    Why “perspectives.plus”?

    As I mentioned in the beginning, I am today working for myself. For the first time ever, I really don’t need to think about “how will this activity generate work for someone else in my team”. I am the business. I’m free to explore ways in which the things I know and what I’m good at can deliver value to someone else out there – and how to make a decent living out of it.

    With my 11-year journey in the Microsoft MVP award program coming to an end, there is no longer any conflict of interests between community contributions and possible commercial agreements with parties in this expanding Power Platform ecosystem. This does not mean that I intend to sell out my own integrity and start promoting products from anyone who inserts a credit card. The way I see it, the key reason I have any audience in this space to begin with is because I always tell it like it is. I spend quite a bit of time exploring and thinking about the world I see around me, then I form my own perspectives on things and say it aloud. Telling both sides of the story, in ways that might feel controversial. Love it or hate it, that’s what I am about.

    This is not all just about me. My motivation comes from advancing a worthy cause and helping those people out there who are doing the right thing, yet not always getting the recognition that they would deserve. This is where I’m looking to form partnerships with companies that have a solid offering for the Microsoft Power Platform customer base, and who understand what it takes to establish trust within this community.

    The “Plus” in perspectives.plus is not just a random top-level domain I picked. It represents the possibility of there one day being something more than just a free email newsletter available there. One of the possibilities introduced by platforms like beehiiv is the option for premium subscription tiers. Who knows, perhaps some of the things I will build and write would be worth putting behind a small fee to be paid? It’s not something I am actively pursuing at this moment, yet I like to keep my options open.

    In the end, it all comes down to perception. Of the million ways that we can create, exchange, and consume information in the computer world, technical implementation is rarely the factor that defines the outcome. It’s about how we frame information and express our intention, through subtle signals that us humans have evolved to pay special attention to. Machines just see data, be it published on a blog or a newsletter. We, on the other hand, can define – and redefine, the meaning of such data via crafting the storyline around it. If we want to achieve something new, I believe we first need to imagine a new story and then share it with the people around us.

    UPDATE 2024-11-29: Here’s a follow-up post, “7 months of Perspectives – start of my newsletter journey”.

    Cover photo by Kristina Tripkovic, from Unsplash.

  • Silence of the lambs

    Silence of the lambs

    I’ve been silent on this blog recently. At least compared to my historical pace of publishing posts.

    One explanation is that I’ve started writing my Perspectives on Power Platform newsletter. If you’ve been follwing my blog for the technology topics around MS BizApps, I recommend you to check out perspectives.plus and subscribe to receive the newsletter issues via email. (Why use a newsletter instead of a blog? That’s a subject for a future post to come.)

    Silencing your employees

    There are other types of silence. The one that got me reflecting on these thoughts is what has been written about the NDAs at OpenAI. In short, the organization has imposed very strict contractual terms on departing employees. The exceptional issue appears to be OpenAI claiming the right to claw back vested equity. This right would be triggered if the ex-employee would criticize their former employer – ever. With no end date.

    Reading about these reported policies has caused me actual physical discomfort. There is just something about the pre-emptive silencing of the people who work at an organization that rubs me the wrong way, in a big way. Can there be a more obvious way to state “we won’t really ever trust you” than imposing something like this?

    In this case, the executives have of course played the get-out-of-jail card of unawareness. From the Xeet of Sam Altman:

    there was a provision about potential equity cancellation in our previous exit docs; although we never clawed anything back, it should never have been something we had in any documents or communication. this is on me and one of the few times i’ve been genuinely embarrassed running openai; i did not know this was happening and i should have.

    Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI

    Many will surely believe the explanation. That it has simply been some lawyers out there who’ve been zealously protecting and pursuing the client’s legitimate interests, within the bounds of the law. The corporate way: we’re doing all this just because it’s the way corporations work.

    Weapons of mass distrust

    The fact that OpenAI has never clawed back money from ex-employees is completely irrelevant. The impact of such contract clauses takes place regardless. The whole purpose of nondisclosure agreements is to stop something from happening. They are the corporation’s nuclear missiles.

    While there are perfectly legitimate scenarios in various business relationships where NDAs enable confidential discussions to take place (everywhere in consulting, for example), this one is very different. When you have a policy that forbids criticizing the company for the duration of the former employee’s lifetime (and also forbids them from acknowledging the existence of the NDA), this is not about establishing trust. It is a weapon against another party that you by default do not trust. Period.

    This model establishes a system of silence. Both before and after an employee leaves the organization. This is because it’s important to understand how the concept of criticism is defined. It is not something that the employee (subject) can evaluate. It is unilaterally defined by the corporation (object).

    From this situation arises the imbalance of power that can impact organizations in everything they do. If your employees must be continuously evaluating in their heads the question “could someone interpret what I’ve said as criticism”, they will only say out loud a small subset of what they really think. Self-censorship is a destructive pattern that can repress any initiatives for building trust among teams.

    As the information worker organizations increasingly become independent from physical locations, our communications start to become mostly digital. No matter if its emails, chat messages, online meetings – our modern multimodal AI algorithms will convert everything into text. Potentially storing it forever. Making it available for queries, in a whole different context than where the communication initially took place.

    In such an environment, where do you create room for the informal, uncensored discussions to take place? This is a very hard problem to solve in practice. That’s because the root cause isn’t the traceability of digital communications. The need for creating a separate space where people can express their thoughts and feelings is the problem. Such separation should not be needed to begin with.

    Choosing transparency

    Ever since the Web 2.0 era tools and techniques became available, I’ve been a vocal proponent of working out loud. The idea that you should be proactively making your work visible to the networks through which value can eventually be created. Not just reactively providing specific information when requested. Making everything you type as broadly visible as possible in the given context.

    Why bother? Because we ultimately should be conscious of not wasting the keystrokes we have left in us:

    Blogging is a communication pattern that optimizes for the amount of awareness and influence that each keystroke can possibly yield. Some topics, of course, are necessarily private and interpersonal. But a surprising amount of business communication is potentially broader in scope. If your choice is to invest keystrokes in an email to three people, or in a blog entry that could be read by those same three people plus more — maybe many more — why not choose the latter? Why not make each keystroke work as hard as it can?

    Jon Udell: “Too busy to blog? Count your keystrokes.”

    For someone like me who believes in the transformative power of radical transparency, any organizational barriers that encourage silence are a problem. Most of them are softer barriers, such as the general convention of how people around you behave. Others are technical barriers that results from the design of our information systems – be it intentional restrictions or unintended practical limitations. Finally, there are the contractual weapons mentioned earlier.

    I don’t believe there is a way to separate external transparency and internal transparency when it comes to company culture. By external I’m referring to communication that takes place out there in open communities and networks that connect professionals from several different organizations. The internal part is about all communication that takes place within the (fire)walls of an organization – voluntarily, without an explicit process to require such activities to take place.

    If internal transparency is not something that is organically allowed and encouraged to grow in the organization, you’ll likely have to try and force the external transparency. Meaning, it’s hard to get your experts to actively participate in community activities and share their knowledge with the outside world if it’s not a pattern that exists internally in the corporation. There will always be exceptional individuals, but it will not become a part of your culture. Thus you cannot leverage the network effects but rather have to pay to get people to notice your company.

    The excuses for silence

    Transparency can be a virtuous cycle for the business. Silence is often a vicious cycle. Why isn’t every organization then gravitating towards a more open and trusted culture of communication? Boy, that’s a big question that requires some serious investigation. Or maybe just throwing a quick question at ChatGPT – which provides the following reasons:

    • Fear of negative exposure
    • Control and power dynamics
    • Short-term focus
    • Lack of trust in employees
    • Cultural and structural barriers
    • Legal and regulatory concerns
    • Inertia and status quo
    • Risk aversion

    Going through the list and the more detailed explanations under each item (try it with your AI tool of choice), it’s easy to see why choosing transparency isn’t by any means easy for organizations. Individuals exist also in the leadership team, thus the choices made in managing a company aren’t made simply based on cold, hard logic. We all need to feel psychologically safe at work, among our colleagues as well as with our managers/subordinates. If we’re emotionally or physically drained, that sense of safety is really difficult to reach. And so the cycle begins.

    Transparency rarely just happens, yet silence is easy to achieve. Like in the example from OpenAI. The fact that the word “open” is included in the company name has been the source of ridicule for many reasons (closed source models, lack of respect for copyrights). Even though they’ve got the technical and financial resources in place to achieve top results in the global AI race (largely thanks to Microsoft), the company’s culture of silence can turn out to be a significant handicap in the long run. It’s certainly not a place for everyone to feel safe at.

    How you treat the employees who are moving on is a signal of whether you consider them to be a potential future asset or a liability. As the detailed report from Vox.com reveals, there’s not question what side OpenAI’s culture falls on:

    “We want to make sure you understand that if you don’t sign, it could impact your equity. That’s true for everyone, and we’re just doing things by the book.”

    Email from OpenAI to an employee asking for more time to review the employment termination agreement.

    “Just doing things by the book.” Just assuming that whatever the employees do in their professional lives from here on could not possibly be of value to the organization. As opposed to the clear and present risk of them talking with others and expressing their own thoughts. Talk about short-term focus in a networked world.