Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

591–600 of 814 posts

Re: Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?

#591

Post by cs02rm0 »

easton wrote: post #563
cs02rm0 wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. I log in and type "Morning" as is the routine in our main channel. Then over the next two hours I get 30 notifications about people liking my comment and nothing for anything actually useful, like calls. It doesn't even pretend to let me turn off notifications for reactions without losing the whole channel's notifications.

You can disable reaction notifications globally in Settings -> Notifications -> Chat. Doesn't help if you only want them for some channels though.

That's set to off. I still get them though...

Re: Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?

#592

Post by trelane »

mr_mitm wrote: post #326
shadowofneptune wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't people use it elsewhere? I know that WhatsApp is dominant, but why?

Unlimited texting plans were rare in some parts of the world. If you need to pay 9 cents per text, WhatsApp is a godsend. I even had to pay for receiving texts or pay a premium on sending texts when being abroad (which happens much more often in Europe). My understanding is that during the same time period, unlimited texting in the USA was pretty much expected. Luckily, we now have free roaming in the EU, so we don't…

Interesting, given that SMS originated in Europe.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?

#593

Post by hooby »

FridgeSeal wrote: post #503
bartread wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll add more: - Fries CPU and GPU on video calls, making it difficult to use other applications or demo when screensharing - Interacts unfavourably with at least some WiFi drivers leading to unidirectional and bidirectional losses of connectivity - Copy and paste randomly break so you can't copy content from Teams or paste anything into it; applies to both text and images - Doesn't honour setting not to automaticall…

Here's some more: - eats your battery like nothing else. Got charge? Not if teams has anything to do about it. Discord does more, at better quality and doesn't eat that much power. - has some bizarre interaction with the volume slider: clicking it mutes just the teams call, but sliding the volume controls alters the volume level of the whole computer. Why? - cuts off the sides of video, because it defaults to "fit vi…

- sends you a notification about a meeting starting, with a join button. when you hover your mouse over the join button, the notification disappears. the meeting is nowhere to be found. you have to got to outlook calendar and join the meeting from there

- sometimes the same meeting ends up existing twice with the same name, with half the participants in here, the other half back there

- when your internet is bad, you can no longer hear the speaker talking, but the video feeds of 5 other participants all run fine

- when I join a call with a built-in microphone and a webcam microphone attached, teams pre-selects the webcam microphone, but sends the sound of no microphone at all. I have to go the hidden away settings, change to the built-in microphone and back to the webcam microphone to make it work.

- a few versions ago, teams would hammer microsoft servers with multiple authentication requests per second, eating a lot of CPU and bandwidth, but there's no indication of anything going on in the UI - you are still logged in and everything works normally.

- powerpoint presentations sometimes work, sometimes all you get to see is a black rectangle

- uploading files is extremely buggy, and it's not always clear if it did work or not.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?

#595

Post by muzani »

b0afc375b5 wrote: post #525
jupp0r wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Throw JIRA into the mix while you're on it.

Wait, what's wrong with JIRA?

Jira doesn't really work well out of the box. It needs a lot of work to configure. I love Jira now, but it's been hell in the other startups. It's probably why stuff like Trello and Asana took off.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?

#596

Post by matwood »

dagaci wrote: post #483

This thread is incredibly negative, this is a suprise because our entire company relies on teams for remote working and it works pretty damned well. Interestingly teams usage seems to be still rising post-pandemic, something competitors are not seeing (and competitors include its own Skype product), teams even managed to surpass Slack in third part plugin support. So i'm not really buying this thread as repsentative,…

> Interestingly teams usage seems to be still rising post-pandemic

We don't use Teams, but IME, every meeting I setup in Outlook defaults to including a Teams link. I have to actively turn it off. This type of thing will eventually get people stumbling into using Teams.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?

#597

Post by jiggawatts »

snarfy wrote: post #541
FridgeSeal wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's some more: - eats your battery like nothing else. Got charge? Not if teams has anything to do about it. Discord does more, at better quality and doesn't eat that much power. - has some bizarre interaction with the volume slider: clicking it mutes just the teams call, but sliding the volume controls alters the volume level of the whole computer. Why? - cuts off the sides of video, because it defaults to "fit vi…

The audio part drives me crazy. Why does it have to re-implement its own volume controls, device settings, and mixer and completely ignore the OS counterparts? On windows if the OS doesn't do what they need they could just walk over (ok drive over) to the windows guy's office and ask for it. I guess they could also send them a message on Teams but then they would never see it.

It's written like a computer game from the 1990s. For unfathomable reasons, it takes "full control" of your audio stack. I want to say.. ha-ha... for performance reasons, but we all know that can't possibly be true.

The trick here for everyone being driven mad by Teams randomly overriding system settings is that for each audio device there's a setting miles deep in the legacy control panel called:

    "Allow applications to take exclusive control of this device"
Untick that, and then Teams won't have the permission to change system-wide settings. In practice, nothing else needs this permission anyway, unless you're doing some sort of low-latency audio capture with professional tools or whatever.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?

#598

Post by f1refly »

mfer wrote: post #508
zmmmmm wrote: post #402

Teams doesn't have to be good to succeed. It just has to exist. It's not even very important how good it is. Given it exists, IT will make everyone use it on Microsoft's behalf regardless of how bad it is. Or another way to look at it is that the real customers for Teams are IT departments. It makes their lives easier because they don't have to do anything and it meets all the compliance requirements they are suppose…

If the software works well but isn’t compliant with laws a lot of companies will have issues with it. There are a bunch of regulations these days. GDPR is just one of them. A lot of tools are just not compliant. IT departments have to take those into account. Especially at public companies. Microsoft does a good job at that and tends to make it easy for the IT departments, too

It's illegal to transfer PII to microsoft under GDPR though, so wouldn't it be like setting up a minefield for your employees to consciously choose ms teams for daily communications?

Re: Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?

#599

Post by neillyons »

They talked about this on All-In Podcast this week [0]. Essentially Microsoft teams doesn't need to be "good" to compete with Slack or others. It just needs to exist and part of the Microsoft bundle to be a viable option to the decision makers in a company.

[0]: https://youtu.be/_UpczzfeAFA?t=1099

Re: Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?

#600

Post by hn92726819 »

airtonix wrote: post #237
hn92726819 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's the full story. On Mac, which is way harder to break than linux, teams is atrocious. I don't know the teams experience on Linux or Windows but just using it on Mac is terrible enough.

lol... harder to break. k

I use Linux on every single personal computer and server, and I have been for over 10 years. I love Linux and can't use anything else, but I'm not doing it any favors by pretending it isn't easy to break. Full /boot partition, broadcom WiFi drivers, and anything Nvidia are some of the examples that can cause your computer to just stop working at any time. That doesn't include any of the thousand ways you can mess up configuration too. /etc/sudoers, grub.cfg, Xorg.conf
Post reply on HN