201–210 of 359 posts
Tools like Slack and Teams are focus-killers and should be banned from all companies that want to work efficiently. The synchronous nature of these tools and the chatty blather they encourage should be avoided by all serious knowledge workers.
Not really relevant but I need to vent. Client dropped Slack for Teams. I hate it, and information exchange has dropped precipitously since everyone switched. So slow, half the time text markup doesn't work, and the UI is inconsistent depending on if you're typing in a chat, meeting, or channel. Oh and none of the Slack logs were kept, losing years of information. (But that's not the fault of the Teams software) I lo…
While Slack displays all your organizations in a single tabbed UI, presenting you with the number of unread messages on the tab icons in Teams you need to hard switch and you never know what happens in the others. This makes Teams worse than nothing in communications because one half of the communication expects you to communicate and you are not even aware of this. You literally must jump organizations constantly ,…
This is the root of all Teams fuckups.
It's an asinine primitive mapping, that could only come from a project manager who spent their entire career optimizing SharePoint access controls to meet HR product requests.
The entire point of modern chat solutions is persistence and searchability. So the only real differentiation should be public or private channels.
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Same. Our company (we'll call it Monsarno) was bought by a certain German aspirin company, and our Bavarian overlords are slowly forcing us from Slack over to Teams. It's a nightmare, and very few groups have made the transition willingly.
Bayer isn't Bavarian, it's Northrine Westphalian.
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Native apps means essentially building at least 5 distinct apps: windows, mac, iOS, linux, android. What a mess to work with and maintain. We already have cross-platfrom UI engines called browsers and they're very advanced and reasonably pleasant to work with these days. If you bundle the browser (electron) then you don't have to worry about differences between browsers. So electron makes plenty of sense to developer…
I don’t think that connecting the 4 buttons of functionality in 5 frameworks is all that much work, when the bulk of the work is backend. Also, it is a trivially scalable problem, where you can just throw 5x as many people at it. I get the popularity of electron and other cross-platform tools for small startups, but for Microsoft..
Having done exactly this work it's really not as simple as throwing 5x as many people at it.
Though to be clear, I am an advocate of native apps on each platform and am not a fan of "wrap a webview around it" type fake-apps. That said, we need to be honest about level of complexity here.
The problem with maintaining 5x native apps is not just the cost of hiring 5x as many people - as you scale towards more platforms the inter-team coordination overhead increases exponentially.
The complexity of coordinating 4 teams to ship in lockstep on 4 separate platforms isn't double the complexity of 2 teams on 2 platforms.
There are a bunch of intersecting factors here:
- product management has extreme load - new features need to be designed for every supported platform at the same time, increasing complexity in feature definition. Some features aren't possible on some platforms, so that increases scope and complexity of the features as we include fallbacks or exceptions.
- engineering has to happen (roughly) in lockstep with one another. It's not acceptable to ship a new feature only on Windows and not Android - they don't have to launch on the same day, but neither can they launch a year apart. This means you have multiple engineering teams that basically have to move at roughly the same speed, even though they are developing on completely differently platforms.
- underlying platform changes affect your ability to move in lockstep - iOS and Android both have significant yearly updates that create additional testing needs. Both platforms also introduce more significant OS-level features that you want to add support for than the older/more mature platforms like macOS or Windows. This throws another wrench in having your teams progress in unison.
There are real advantages to cross-platform frameworks, even though I dislike them from a UX perspective. In particular I have beef with the use of web views, which while offering incredible consistency between platforms is probably the least CPU/RAM efficient way to do literally anything. A huge part of why computers feel slower than ever is the pervasive use of web views for everything.
I really, really wish we had a better cross-platform solution than a thing with an ill-defined render cycle, bases literally all rendering on an XML-like structure, and has all processing stuck to a single thread on an interpreted language. Yikes.
Not really relevant but I need to vent. Client dropped Slack for Teams. I hate it, and information exchange has dropped precipitously since everyone switched. So slow, half the time text markup doesn't work, and the UI is inconsistent depending on if you're typing in a chat, meeting, or channel. Oh and none of the Slack logs were kept, losing years of information. (But that's not the fault of the Teams software) I lo…
We were using Skype for Business before and Teams was a big improvement over that. It does video conferencing and file sharing well, with even collaborative editing of Office files working well. The chat features seem like an afterthought so if you're comparing it based on that I'm not surprised it's that bad.
So you mean the Lync codebase.
That's a pretty low bar to start with.
As one "for example", that's the product team that couldn't figure out how to stop repeating AD logins with invalid saved passwords for 5+ years. Which invariably led to a system you were signed into somewhere locking your account every password rotation.
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What's the alternative? Be only on one platform? Not viable today. Implement 5 different apps, usually not viable. The platforms are fragmented and the user pays the costs of that in the end, one way or another. If you hide it by increasing development costs, the price of the app ( or amount of ads or premium only features) must go up to compensate and the user pays the cost as well. Edit: downvote all you like, ther…
Microsoft easily has the resources to write 5 chat app UIs.
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I agree with this. Also how can they forget an option to “paste without formatting”? Copying stuff from other sources is extremely painful. At this point, I leave it as is. I don’t have time to micromanage each copy and paste. Also teams has this arbitrary message character limit that makes it terrible for sharing large chunks of text (partial logs for example). While the integrations with outlook (mail/scheduling) +…
Can somebody explain why "paste with formatting" is so widely the default option? I have literally never wanted to paste with formatting and neither have multiple family members who have needed help with preventing it from happening.
Going by comments here, I think most people find the Teams awful, then why are companies moving from Slack to MS Teams. Is the cost the main factor?