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Kevin Stratvert produces videos at his home in Seattle.
Tara Brown

When Microsoft updated its Teams communication app with a more sophisticated way to give PowerPoint presentations in January, the company published a 500-word blog post on the feature. People could read the blog post and try to figure out how to use it, or they could consult YouTube.

On the video service owned by arch-rival Google, a former Microsoft employee named Kevin Stratvert published a video on Presenter Mode to his more than 800,000 subscribers, garnering more than 180,000 views and hundreds of comments. Microsoft itself had not published a video on the topic.

“I’ve built a Microsoft audience,” Stratvert said in an interview with CNBC. “Microsoft content drives a lot more viewership than non-Microsoft content. I’ve done Gmail and a few others, but they haven’t done quite as well.”

That might have to do with the reach of Microsoft’s products. The company held 86% of the email and authoring market in 2020, according to technology research firm Gartner, with 1.2 billion Office users.

Not every one of those 1.2 billion knows how to do everything in Office, though, and people also need to keep up with the latest updates that Microsoft pumps out. Videos from Stratvert and his YouTube contemporaries are helping with that — and sometimes getting more eyeballs than Microsoft’s official videos.

Much better off

Stratvert arrived at Microsoft in 2006, the same year Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion. His first YouTube video showed footage from a drone flying over a town in New Jersey. Then Stratvert filmed videos of his travels in the Puget Sound and beyond. How-to videos and gadget-review videos followed.

In 2017 he posted his first Microsoft-related video, in which he toured treehouses on the company’s campus with his wife, Kerry Stratvert, a manager at the company. In the video description, he included a disclosure saying that he was a Microsoft employee.

Two months after the treehouse video, Stratvert was working on the small development team behind Office.com, a website that gives fast access to online versions of Excel spreadsheets and other Office documents. The site was not well known, especially compared with Office applications for PCs, so Stratvert and colleagues asked their peers in marketing if they could spread the word about Office.com. The marketers didn’t have enough resources to help, Stratvert said.

So Stratvert produced a video showing how people could use Office.com to get most features of Microsoft Office free of charge. It performed well, and his manager told him he had done a good job.

He went on to make videos about Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Teams, Windows and Word. Microsoft employees on other teams noticed and started asking him to make videos about their products. They saw how many people were watching and recognized that getting him to talk about their products could bring in new users, which in turn could mean more favorable employee reviews.

“It’s almost like teams appreciate that there’s this other outlet that’s kind of unofficial,” he said.

Then, in July 2020, months after the pandemic sent the Stratverts home, he gave up his position at Microsoft and began making five times as many videos as he was before. He no longer needed to include disclosures in videos that he was a Microsoft employee, and he could talk more freely about competing products such as Slack and Zoom.

YouTube users have hit the subscribe button. Today he has 85% more subscribers than the official Microsoft 365 YouTube channel focused on Teams and other Office applications, which he said has a team of 20 to 30 people producing content.

“Economically I’m much better off,” he said. His wife still works at Microsoft.

Promoting external creators

Historically, developing and maintaining products has been the core of Microsoft. Today nearly 50% of employees work in engineering. Marketing is a considerably smaller part of the business, and employees work on ads, materials for Microsoft’s website, events and other methods of promotion.

In the past few years, a group inside Microsoft began focusing more on YouTube.

“On YouTube specifically, we’re starting to explore the concept of what it looks like to do something native to YouTube,” Sonia Atchison, a market research lead who worked on the Microsoft Creators Program, said on a podcast last year.

People often turn to YouTube when they want to get a better understanding of Microsoft software, and while Microsoft has plenty of its own videos available on YouTube, they don’t always come up at the top of the site’s search results, Atchison said. Videos from outsiders can receive higher rankings.

Sometimes a video from a Microsoft employee might be there. The company does have employees with large audiences, including Mike Tholfsen, a 26-year company veteran whose videos show how teachers and students can use Teams and other applications.

Microsoft wanted more people like Tholfsen. The company formed a group to help people working on different products learn how to build sizable YouTube channels, said Jon Levesque, who posted YouTube videos as a senior platform evangelist at Microsoft before taking a job at DocuSign in March. There were issues at times. Some employees asked why they were concentrating on a service owned by a top competitor, and teams didn’t always agree with everything that employee-creators said in videos, Levesque said.

The effort didn’t get far, and Microsoft began promoting videos from non-employees instead, with the establishment of the Microsoft Creators Program. The company started including outsiders’ videos in its video playlists, and it offered to use their videos for customer support. That led to some additional video views, said Jason Sele, whose YouTube channel goes by the name Sele Training. In late June, Microsoft announced plans to put the program on pause.

Among the dozens of people who joined the Creators Program, the most popular is Leila Gharani, a software instructor in Vienna, with over 900,000 subscribers. After picking up skills in Excel and other software on the job, Gharani began teaching classes in person and online. She made her YouTube debut in 2016, with the hope of enhancing her filming skills.

The channel took off, and that brought in money, plus it drew more students to her premium courses, which her company, XelPlus, continues to offer. With the company growing, her husband left his position as a chief financial officer to join her. They brought on an editor and a writer, too.

Many of Gharani’s YouTube videos detail parts of Excel. That doesn’t mean she completely ignores the competition. One of her more popular videos in 2020 was called “Google Sheets BEATS Excel with THESE 10 Features!”

Like Stratvert, Gharani has heard from Microsoft employees. After she posted a video on the Whiteboard app, a program manager said the team loved her video and offered to show her updates that were coming soon. The program manager didn’t tell her to make a video but instead wanted to see if she thought the enhancements would be video-worthy, Gharani said.

She said users might ascribe greater authority to YouTube creators who work at Microsoft, unlike her.

“People appreciate that they’re at Microsoft,” she said. “‘They must know what they’re saying. They’re not going to say it if it’s not true. That authority thing does come with it. But not a lot.”

Jason Sele makes YouTube videos from a high-tech RV.
Jason Sele

It hasn’t stopped Gharani from growing into a major entity. She boasts more subscribers than almost all of Microsoft’s YouTube accounts. The Xbox channel remains a top attraction, with over 4 million subscribers.

Sele would love the type of YouTube success that Gharani and Stratvert have had. Videos of his that contain tips and tricks on Excel and other applications have received more than 1 million views, but he’s not an on-camera star. Sele, who makes videos from his RV after 25 years of exposure to Microsoft products as a director of information technology, narrates while giving all the visual attention to the video feed from his computer. He said he spends time carefully writing and editing scripts before hitting record. The YouTube money is enough to live on, he said.

He said he isn’t worried about competing with Microsoft. “They’ll crank out all this training, but it really isn’t training you can just hand to your employees,” he said. “It’s either too high-level or low-level.”

Entertainment

While YouTube has no shortage of software walk-throughs, YouTube is more than just a destination for careful learning. It’s a venue for entertainment. Gharani gets that.

“It’s more passive, they don’t have to really concentrate,” she said of people who watch her videos. “They can let themselves also think about other things and come back and just watch and still get something out of it. You can’t get that out of writing.”

She strives to keep her YouTube videos moving along at a fast pace. She doesn’t want the videos to be too boring. Otherwise she won’t have many people watching.

“It’s not necessary that they actually learn something, but they just see the potential that they could learn something, or they feel like they’ve learned something,” she said. Her online courses have a different purpose. There’s no background music, they’re slower, and there’s less of her talking on camera.

The thumbnail images for her videos on YouTube always show her face, and her channel uses her full name, rather than some jumble of words such as OfficeIsSuperGreat, which helps her work stand out in search results.

The same can be said about Stratvert’s channel.

But his videos can be longer. Some run well past 20 or 30 minutes. He keeps them from becoming tedious by talking about how he uses software inside his made-up corporation, the Kevin Cookie Company. In one video about holding webinars in Teams, Kerry Stratvert made an appearance, posing as a Kevin Cookie Company employee who wanted to air her concerns. As the person running the meeting, he turned off her microphone and camera, demonstrating what webinar hosts can do in that situation in real life.

For years she had called Stratvert’s YouTube channel a hobby and pointed out that he hadn’t recouped the investment in production equipment. She didn’t think he could ever go full time. Then, last year, he did.

“It’s done extremely well,” he said. “My wife looks at that — ‘Oh, man, working at home, cranking out a video a day, maybe I should do this, too. Maybe I should pull together videos.’ Same with her sister, too.”

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Affirm’s stock soars 15% on earnings, revenue beat

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Affirm's stock soars 15% on earnings, revenue beat

Max Levchin, co-founder of PayPal and chief executive officer of financial technology company Affirm, arrives at the Sun Valley Resort for the annual Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference, in Sun Valley, Idaho.

Drew Angerer | Getty Images

Affirm shares rose 15% in extended trading on Thursday after the provider of buy now, pay later loans reported better-than-expected earnings and revenue for the fiscal fourth quarter.

Here’s how the company did versus LSEG consensus estimates:

  • EPS: 20 cents vs. 11 cents estimated
  • Revenue: $876 million vs. $837 million estimated

Revenue climbed 33% in the period from $659 million in the same quarter a year earlier. Gross merchandise volume rose 43% to $10.4 billion from $7.2 billion a year ago.

Affirm reported net income of $69.2 million, or 20 cents a share, after recording a loss a year earlier of $45.1 million, or 14 cents a share.

 “This consistent execution led Affirm to achieve operating income profitability in FQ4’25 – right on the schedule we committed to a year ago,” the company said in its shareholder letter.

For the first quarter, Affirm said revenue will be between $855 million and $885 million, while gross merchandise volume will be $10.1 billion to 10.4 billion.

Shares of Affirm were up 31% this year before the after-hours pop, topping the Nasdaq’s 12% gain.

Affirm, which went public in 2021, faces growing competition in e-commerce. It has partnerships with Amazon and Shopify, but Walmart recently shifted to competitor Klarna, which is expected to go public in the near future. Last year, Affirm announced a deal with Apple.

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Tesla FSD turns off more U.S. consumers than its attracts, survey finds

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Tesla FSD turns off more U.S. consumers than its attracts, survey finds

Elon Musk reacts during a press event with U.S. President Donald Trump (not pictured), at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., May 30, 2025.

Nathan Howard | Reuters

Elon Musk’s fervent promotion of Tesla‘s self-driving technology isn’t doing much to win over prospective buyers.

According to a new survey, more U.S. consumers say that Tesla’s FSD, or Full Self-Driving (Supervised) systems, would push them away from the brand rather than drawing them to it.

The Electric Vehicle Intelligence Report for August, published by political consulting firm Slingshot Strategies, polled 8,000 Americans. Only 14% of those surveyed said FSD would make them more likely to buy a Tesla, while 35% said the technology would make them less likely to purchase one.

The remaining 51% said the availability of FSD would make no difference to them in terms of their car buying decisions. Nearly half of consumers surveyed by Slingshot said they think FSD technology should be illegal.

For Tesla, the troubling results land in the middle of a sales slump resulting from an aging lineup of electric vehicles and increased competition from rivals. There’s also reputational damage in response to Musk, his incendiary political rhetoric, work with the Trump administration and support of Germany’s far-right AfD party.

Sales of Tesla cars in Europe plunged 40% in July from a year earlier, the seventh consecutive month of declines.

In the robotaxi market, Tesla is lagging Alphabet-owned Waymo, and Baidu’s Apollo Go. It’s now in the early stages of testing a ride-hailing service in Austin, Texas, and in the San Francisco Bay Area, with hopes to reach more cities this year. Cars in Austin have human supervisors on board, while those in San Francisco have drivers at the wheel.

Musk, the world’s richest person, has said the future of Tesla hangs on its ability to deliver autonomous vehicles and related services. He recently said a new variant of the Model Y, which launched in China, won’t “start production in the U.S. until the end of next year,” and “might not ever, given the advent of self-driving in America.”

Tesla sales fall 40% in Europe as Chinese EV rival BYD's triple

For now, Tesla still relies on EV sales for the vast majority of its revenue, though Musk has touted FSD as one of the company’s big advantages over competitors.

Last month, executives suggested that Tesla has a market education problem when it comes to driving adoption of FSD.

“The vast majority of people don’t know it exists,” Musk said on the company’s second-quarter earnings call. “And it’s still like half of Tesla owners who could use it, haven’t tried it even once.”

Musk said he would start telling customers about FSD when they bring their cars in for service, and would begin reaching out to drivers, sending them videos of how it works.

Tesla CFO Vaibhav Taneja said on the July earnings call that people who subscribe to the premium FSD option get something like a “personal chauffeur” for about $3.33 a day.

The version of FSD Supervised that Tesla sells today is available to owners for $99 per month or an up-front purchase. The system gives users a limited set of self-driving capabilities on residential and city streets.

On Thursday, Tesla sent out a promotion offering 0% APR financing for customers ordering a new Model 3 by Sept. 1, as long as they add FSD Supervised to their order, or transfer it from their previously owned Tesla.

‘Holding AV manufacturers responsible’

Musk has said in posts on X that FSD can “can operate in all conditions,” will “save lives” and will be a “life-changing product” for many people. He’s also shared user-generated videos showing Tesla owners using FSD without their hands on the wheel.

However, in owners manuals, Tesla lists many conditions in which FSD Supervised may not be reliable, and warns users to keep their hands on the steering wheel at all times, and be ready to take over steering or braking.

Among the subset of survey respondents actively looking to buy a fully electric vehicle, only 20% said they were more likely to buy a Tesla because of FSD, while 33% said they were less likely. Evan Roth Smith, Slingshot’s head of research, said a lack of clarity and honesty in the company’s marketing could be a factor.

Most consumers polled by the firm want clear and strong regulations in the U.S. governing autonomous vehicles, whether they’re fully or partially automated.

“There is strong support for holding AV manufacturers responsible for accidents and requiring stricter regulatory and advertising guardrails around features such as FSD,” the Slingshot report said.

Smith said the data shows that beyond its FSD woes, Tesla has “the worst reputation of any EV maker in the U.S.”

“The drop in the company’s brand reputation this year is remarkable,” he said, adding that recent product liability lawsuits and verdicts may be playing a role.

In early August, a jury found Tesla partially liable for a fatal crash where the driver was relying on its autopilot systems. Tesla, which plans to appeal the decision, must pay around $243 million in damages to victims and a survivor.

In the past two months, the number of consumers who view Tesla cars as unsafe has increased to 36% from 34%, the Slingshot report found, while those viewing Tesla as very safe fell to 13% from 17%.

Honda, Toyota and Chevrolet were seen as safest among the greatest number of respondents.

Tesla didn’t respond to a request for comment. Slingshot said it sent the survey results to the company but also didn’t hear back from the automaker.

Tesla may find that owners in other markets embrace its brand, and FSD, with greater enthusiasm. The company just started offering FSD Supervised in Australia this week.

Read Slingshot’s full Electric Vehicle Intelligence Report for August 2025 here.

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Dell shares fall on soft third-quarter earnings outlook

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Dell shares fall on soft third-quarter earnings outlook

A Dell Technologies sign is seen in Round Rock, Texas, on June 2, 2023.

Brandon Bell | Getty Images

Despite beating on its top and bottom lines, shares of Dell Technologies fell more than 5% Thursday in extended trading after giving third-quarter earnings per share guidance that below Wall Street’s expectations.

Here’s how the systems integrator did versus LSEG consensus estimates:

  • EPS: $2.32, adjusted vs. $2.30 estimated
  • Revenue: $29.78 billion vs. $29.17 billion estimated

Dell raised its full year outlook for revenue to be $107 billion at its midpoint and diluted earnings per share to $9.55 at the midpoint, topping Wall Street estimates of $104.6 billion and $9.38 per share.

However, Dell’s guidance for third-quarter earnings per share of $2.45 came in short versus LSEG’s mark of $2.55, despite Dell’s guide for $27 billion in third-quarter revenue topping estimates of $26.1 billion.

Dell said that part of the reason its profit forecast is concentrated in the fourth quarter is due to seasonality, particularly in its storage business.

For the second quarter, overall revenue rose 19% on an annual basis. That was driven by the company’s Servers and Networking revenue, including AI servers, which came in at $12.9 billion, which was up 69% on an annual basis.

Dell is one of Nvidia’s key customers. Dell buys chips from the AI leader and builds computers around them, which it sells to end-users such as CoreWeave, a cloud service. Dell said it shipped $10 billion in AI servers in its past two quarters.

Dell said that it now plans to ship $20 billion of artificial intelligence servers in its fiscal 2026, double what it sold last year.

However, the company’s storage revenue declined 3% to $3.86 billion and missed a StreetAccount estimate of $4.1 billion in sales.

Revenue in the company’s client solutions group, which includes PC sales to enterprises, rose 1% on an annual basis to $12.5 billion. While it used to be Dell’s largest business group, in recent quarters it has grown much slowly than the company’s data center business.

Dell said it spent $1.3 billion on share repurchases and dividends during the quarter.

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