Comment by nikcub

3 days ago

> ie. Anthropic did not invest in image generation, Google did and Gemini has a shot at the market now.

They're after the enterprise market - where office / workspace + app + directory integration, security, safety, compliance etc. are more important. 80% of their revenue is from enterprise - less churn, much higher revenue per W/token, better margins, better $/user.

Microsoft adopting the Anthropic models into copilot and Azure - despite being a large and early OpenAI investor - is a much bigger win than yet another image model used to make memes for users who balk at spending $20 per month.

Same with the office connector - which is only available to enterprises[0] (further speaking to where their focus is). There hasn't yet been a "claude code" moment for office productivity, but Anthropic are the closest to it.

[0] This may be a mistake as Claude Code has been adopted from the ground up

10 comments

nikcub

ozim 3 days ago

People underestimate enterprise market.

Usually you can see it when someone nags about “call us” pricing that is targeted at enterprise. People that nag about it are most likely not the customers someone wants to cater to.

projektfu 3 days ago

When I was a software developer, I mostly griped about this when I wanted to experiment to see if I would even ask my larger enterprise if they would be interested in looking into it. I always felt like companies were killing a useful marketing stream from the enterprise's own employees. I think Tailscale has really nailed it, though. They give away the store to casual users, but make it so that a business will want to talk to sales to get all the features they need with better pricing per user. Small businesses can survive quite well on the free plan.

Dylan16807 3 days ago

I'm sure everyone "wants to" land a many million dollar deal with a big company that has mild demands, but that doesn't mean those naggers are bad customers. Bad customers have much more annoying and unreasonable demands than a pricing sheet.

ozim 2 days ago

I don’t think anyone lands contracts with “mild demands”.
Most of the time you want to cut off ‘non customers’ as soon as possible and don’t leave ‘big fish’ without having direct contact person who can explain stuff. People just clicking around on their own will make assumptions that need to be addressed in a way no one wastes time.

1 reply →

ignoramous 2 days ago

Definitely there exist customers one must fire, but the flip side is, some of them might have genuine complaints.

  ... an extremely popular marketing tool ... sending an equally excessive amount of data above what they were paying for. They were far less adamant about the product, and on some days I didn't even want them as a customer. If there was a minor blip in the service, they were the first to complain. Reminder, [Sentry] was still a side project at the time so I had a day-job. That meant it was often stressful for Chris and I to deal w/ customer support, and way more stressful dealing with outages.

  We had one customer who loved the product, and one who didn't. Both of these customers had such extreme volumes of data that it had a tangible infrastructure cost associated with hosting them. We knew the best thing to do was to find a way to be able to charge them more money for the amount of data they sent. So we set off to build that and then followed up with each customer.

  To our surprise, the customer that loved the product didn't want to pay more. The customer who was constantly complaining immediately jumped on the opportunity. What's the lesson to take away from this? 

  ... when I was a teenager I worked at Burger King, and there was an anecdote I will never forget: for every customer that complains, there are nine more with a similar experience. I've cemented this in my philosophy around development, to the point where I now believe over rotating on negative feedback is actually just biasing towards the customers who truly see the value in what you're offering. The customer that was complaining really valued our product, whereas the customer that was happy was simply content.

A $7 Subscription, https://cra.mr/a-seven-dollar-subscription / https://archive.vn/IWS0A (2023).

leokennis 2 days ago

> They're after the enterprise market

I am curious how big of a chance they have. I could imagine many enterprises that are already (almost by default) Microsoft customers (Windows, Office, Entra etc.) will just default to Copilot (and maybe Azure) to keep everything neatly integrated.

So an enterprise would need to be very dedicated to use everything Microsoft, but then go through the trouble use Claude as their AI just because it is slightly better for coding.

I have a feeling I am missing something here though, I would be happy for anyone to educate me!

Rastonbury 2 days ago

I think at the current price point the capability of office copilot (which I don't use, only read reviews) is that it's basically email writer/summarizer/meeting notes.
Can't light a candle to Opus 4.5 who can now create and modify financial models from PDFs and augmented with websearch and the Excel skill (gpt-5.2 can do this too). That said the market IS smaller

amluto 2 days ago

> They're after the enterprise market

Anthropic is rather obnoxious about training on user data, and I wonder if enterprises (and small businesses!) will grow up soon and start using competing products instead.

(Not that Google is amazing in this regard — their purchasable product options are all over the place to the point where it might be nearly a full time (human!) job to keep track of how to correctly purchase Gemini. Gemini itself seems incapable of figuring this out, or at least I haven’t found the right prompt yet. Gemini is absolutely amazing at hallucinating Google product offerings. OpenAI, on the other hand, seems to have nailed this.)

tom_m 1 day ago

I think their only profitable horse is Claude Code. That's the reason for the control.

But that means they lose on inference. Which isn't good.