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Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?

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

#691

Post by sumedh »

Thlom wrote: post #394
nikau wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not decent, its usable. Decent would be able to switch chat tabs in under a second, reliable quoting (one minute ``` works, next minute it doesn't), an unread messages view like slack, and overall not being a laggy piece of crap. It gets the job done, but its not decent.

And the splitting of Teams/chat is really confusing. At least in my org the teams feature is rarely used, but we have chat groups for everything. Other than that agree that it’s too slow to load chats, unread notifications doesn’t go away reliably, search sucks etc.

For some reason you cannot create threads in chat groups but you can in Teams feature.

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

#692

Post by vel0city »

ranguna wrote: post #398
archi42 wrote: post #356

I never experienced any crashes, and neither can I recall a team mate complaining about that . Bugs I encountered: 1. Opening the link to a scheduled meeting opens the browser (good), but then clicking the "open in teams" and confirming the external URL handler in the browser does... Nothing. Restarting teams fixes that. (Happens for my team mates as well). 2. I have a dedicated USB mic that's always on, while my spe…

Have you never sent a message with images just to later find out that the message wasn't sent and it wouldn't even show up on the chat so you could retry? Have you never tried to join a meeting where teams made you just sit there for a minute until you decide to restart it? Have you ever called someone at the same time as they call you, ending you with teams saying that they are calling you at the same time as you ar…

I have experienced several things on that list, a long time ago. I haven't lost an image in the past year. It seems these days when I call someone when they're calling me it just connects and works and connects. I don't have issues with missed notifications. I'm using the Windows client though.

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

#693

Post by Liskni_si »

bsharitt wrote: post #558
dustedcodes wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone should make job board where people can filter out companies that use Teams instead of Slack or Discord.

Use of Teams has a been a deciding factor about not taking a job before. It's got to be pretty bad when it makes me nostalgic for HipChat.

I used HipChat for years and never actually saw what the thing looked like. Any XMPP client just worked, no hassle whatsoever. When we later switched to Slack it was actually a downgrade from my point of view. :-/

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

#694

Post by Maursault »

kqr wrote: post #287
Maursault wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook is vanity. It is really all about ego. People love to stroke their ego. It is hilarious to me how many will defend pride and how many somehow confuse pride with virtue, when the opposite of pride, humility, is the virtue. What made Facebook popular is the same thing that makes any vice popular, such as gambling or drinking, because pride is a vice, also known as an indulgence , and pride, ego, and vanity are…

Oh, that's not what got Facebook big. You can stroke your ego in emails or blogs or on forums. What made Facebook great was that it encouraged users to share personal information (including pictures and bio items) and then made it easy for everyone to anonymously take part of this information. You could look at pictures of your crush in cute outfits or co-workers in embarrassing situations. You could read about the l…

> it encouraged users to share personal information (including pictures and bio items)

Yes, precisely. This is my point entirely, that ego, vanity, pride, conceit and narcissism is what motivates these individuals to want and need to share personal details with complete strangers, and this is the entire point of Facebook, to beguile its members with a platform of opportunity to indulge in symptoms of personality disorder and character flaw.

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

#695

Post by oneplane »

BuckRogers wrote: post #176
oneplane wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And those are in the same boat as Teams: it came with the bundle. (well, one could argue that plenty of people enjoy Outlook, but OneDrive is nothing special and SharePoint is just a bad Wiki going the SAP integration hell route)

I use OneDrive as my cloud storage provider. To me cloud storage from the top-tier vendors seem to work well enough at this point. I probably would’ve used Google Drive, but once I learned they take it out of your Gmail storage space I declined. To Microsoft’s credit, your OneDrive storage space does not come out of your app Outlook email storage.

Yeah, they are all pretty similar. The storage usage is probably due to Google's gigantic user base, or perhaps due to their tenancy model (i.e. you get a 'google account' that also contains 'storage' instead of the other way around).

While some features like versioning and sharing and mail integration vary, nearly all of the 'big' ones do the same thing (OneDrive, iCloud, Google Drive, Dropbox, even box.com and MEGA to some extent).

Ironically, this sameness might actually be a good thing, as it makes it a bit more interchangeable (well, if we ignore the variety in native integrations), it would be pretty bad if there were significant missing features between them.

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

#696

Post by vel0city »

nikau wrote: post #242
holografix wrote: post #21

Everyone saying teams is garbage. It’s not. It’s like you’re complaining about the kid who got a C in class. Guess what? They passed the exam. Microsoft brutalised Slack with a C grade app that was “bundled for free”. For 80% of people, teams is just fine.

It probably also depends what you are used to. Younger people have only ever used bloated laggy stuff like teams and don't know any better. I miss the days of just having a dedicated desk phone - it rings, you answer, and talk instantly. Teams in comparison pops up a call dialogue box, have to navigate the mouse to answer (because the answer hotkey doesn't work most of the time), wait for it to connect, fuck around f…

> I miss the days of just having a dedicated desk phone

I don't really. It tied me to my desk. Now my extension is wherever I want to work, not just at my desk. Its on my cell phone, its on my work laptop, its wherever I am.

Loads of desk phones didn't have any Bluetooth support so using a headset meant getting a probably expensive maybe proprietary thing with EHS support (or a mechanical handset lifter!!!).

When I want to call someone about an email they sent me, I just click the Call button and it connects me. I don't have to then think about "what was their extension?", context change to an entirely different physical device, and then dial that extension. And then if that call connected on Teams, I'm ready to share video or have the chat pulled up to easily send them additional context right away. With a desk phone, we'd have to context change to yet another platform to then share a screen.

I do get some nostalgia for desk phones. I did our office's deployment of SIP phones and continued to be the manager of the PBX until our migration to Teams. Working on that phone hardware was honestly fun and interesting. But looking at my experience today, having it on my work machine and on my cell phone is just better.

FWIW, my Thinkpad has a call answer and decline/hangup keys on the function row which works with Teams. Makes it pretty easy. But I still don't necessarily have a hard time answering a call with the keyboard/mouse when I'm not in front of my laptop keyboard.

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

#697

Post by gigel82 »

wizofaus wrote: post #655
bluGill wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would assume Microsoft is using teams in house. They should get plenty of feedback - the people writing the software should see most of the issues and have motivation to fix them. The admins are just down the hall and can talk to the developers if there are problems. The executives can talk to the project manager about the priorities they need... They may not know how it works at my company, but it can't be that di…

> I would assume Microsoft is using teams in house I wouldn't. But surely there's someone here that actually knows? It does seem hard to believe their own engineers would put up with all the issues it has. Edit: the only evidence I could find you're right was at https://www.microsoft.com/insidetrack/blog/new-microsoft-tea... . But whether it's the primary tool their devs use for communication I don't know.

Yup, almost everyone at MS is using Teams internally. When they collaborate externally they use whatever the partner prefers. For example, there is a Discord server for ReactNative contributors and collaborators with a bunch of MS folks on it. I guess it's also possible there's a Team for Meta folks to talk to MS directly but I somehow doubt it - or at least, I doubt it gets used very much if it exists :)

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

#698

Post by jupp0r »

rjsw wrote: post #538
viridian wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally find that the more I have to use JIRA, and the more magical ephemeral rules that are set up in it to take actions in response to my actions with it, the more terrible it is to use. I've worked on teams where I just threw info into a card, and it was acceptable to use, and I've worked on teams where commits had to have a JIRA tag associated or the commit got rejected, including in instances where bitbucke…

I'm trying to cleanup a Git tree right now where people haven't put JIRA tags in their commit comments, it is impossible to find out why a change was made, it isn't a totally stupid requirement.

So people put the ticket number in the message and then don't write a useful commit message. Congratulations, you just added one roundtrip per commit to the slowest website in existence to every single time you want to look at git history.

Did I mention that you can't look at JIRA from a mobile phone?

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

#699

Post by apecat »

bko wrote: post #619
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…

This is a bad answer. It's actually a non-answer. You can apply this to a lot of questions. Why does X ... Y (because X can get away with it). There are real resources behind Microsoft Teams and a lot of people want it to be good. They may not get much of a signal about how well their product is doing compared to competitors because lock-in effects, but I can guarantee you the product managers and executives at Micro…

I understand why this sounds like a bad answer, but it's not half-bad in context.

Microsoft 365 absolutely is something of a buffet for companies/orgs with IT budget constraints and compliance-heavy objectives.

Just more stuff that sort of works and ticks boxes, starting with hosting almost everything in the EU for European customers. Compare that to Google, who flat-out refuses to guarantee EU-only hosting for Workspace customer.

All the bundled extra tools outside e-mail and the absolute core M365 Office apps just sit there, ready to use, easy to package and deploy to clients. All generated user data is stored in the MS environment every stakeholder has signed on to. From OneNote, MS Todo to Teams, everything's integrated without as much as configuring SSO externally.

A lot of what's included, Teams specifically, is shockingly bad. But these elements tick very important boxes. And very few people seem to care about the rest. UX isn't a compliance-mandated requirement.

I sort of know this, as I work at a company that has to punch above its weight in compliance, due to industry specific requirements.

If you need good single-sign-on for Slack, you end up paying the now Salesforce-owned company over USD 10/month, just for Slack. If you want decent data retention controls for Slack, you need their Enterprise Grid plan, the price of which is unlisted, but I've heard it's like USD 25/month/user(!). Just for Slack.

Same with Atlassian. The decent handful of dollars you pay per user only applies if you're ok with shockingly limited controls.

With Microsoft, you get a lot for just buying M365. You can get started building a soundly logged and controlled environment if you put everyone on M365 Business Premium (including desktop apps) and/or F3 licenses (web/mobile apps only) for about 20 and 10 dollars respectively.

Sure, you do pay through the nose for the really good logging capabilities with M365 E5 licensing, something close to USD50 per user/month, which is a lot, but it also includes everything from Defender antivirus, InTune device management, Teams telephony call-in support to a Windows Enterprise client license.

There's so much included with M365 in terms of compliance and bundle value that Microsoft absolutely can leave it absolutely terrible UX condition, so they do.

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

#700

Post by apecat »

kylen wrote: post #472
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…

Yup. It might even be that while the engineering team is aware of the faults, the MS exec team considers Teams to be brilliant. At the senior level the role becomes a sales role - you are continuously selling your output, team, product, vision, etc internally to the other execs, board, etc. It's important therefore to present whatever you are producing as exceptional. So you look for indicators that support your pitc…

Was looking for a good place to post this in the thread but I'll just drop it here. Microsoft Teams still lacks multi-account support on desktop.

As in, you can't sign on to several business organizations like you can in Slack. It's so dumb and disqualifying. Utter nightmare if you work with several organizations.

https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/idea/c9995dc8-...

I've bookmarked that page and I check in on it regularly, as Microsoft claims multi-account support is due for late 2022.

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