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Microsoft Teams down for thousands of users

reuters.com

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Re: Microsoft Teams down for thousands of users

#82

It's hard to understand why Teams is so bad. They have all these engineers, and it's not like it's difficult to make a chat program. Teleconferencing, sure, that's difficult. But most of the problems I hear about is "Teams crashed" or "Wouldn't connect" or "Makes my machine run unbearably slow". How do you end up with such a crap app? And why is the interface so terrible? Can't they afford UX people? And why are ther…

Counterpoint... I don't get all the hate for Teams. I work fully-remote on a medium sized team. We use Teams for one-one calls, team calls, presentations, screen-sharing, calls to external numbers and I've never had any problems. I run it on a Windows desktop and an Android phone. I've never had performance problems or crashes on either. Some of the file-sharing/explorer stuff is a bit janky in terms of UI but I don'…

Never had an issue with Teams myself. It seems most problems stem from people using a crummy wifi connection to videoconference on their laptop.

Re: Microsoft Teams down for thousands of users

#83

Has anyone had a good experience with Microsoft's online products? I tried using Office 365 recently for a small side project after using Google apps for years. Their email has like 5-10 messages come in every day about hotfixes, updates etc. Even after turning everything off, I still get a few emails from them every few days. Missed important emails in all that noise. Outlook randomly decided to delete all my emails…

Never has any of these problems at my corp.

Re: Microsoft Teams down for thousands of users

#84

It's hard to understand why Teams is so bad. They have all these engineers, and it's not like it's difficult to make a chat program. Teleconferencing, sure, that's difficult. But most of the problems I hear about is "Teams crashed" or "Wouldn't connect" or "Makes my machine run unbearably slow". How do you end up with such a crap app? And why is the interface so terrible? Can't they afford UX people? And why are ther…

"... it's not like it's difficult to make a chat program."

A chat program? Easy. A chat program with 270 million monthly active users? Slightly harder, but sure, still easy. A chat program with 270 million monthly active users that has to integrate the entire Microsoft ecosystem [sharepoint, outlook mail + calendar + contacts, yammer, O365 groups, etc] because that is what their enterprise customers demand? Slightly less easy. A chat program with 270 million monthly active users that really isn't just a chat program but rather an entire chat + teleconferencing + screen sharing + MS O365 app platform which has to deal with B2B AAD authentication cross organization, legacy on-premise Exchange servers setup in a hybrid environment, excessive levels of enterprise-controlled configuration and policies, compliance (Purview, IB, retention policies, etc), legal requirements needed to allow Teams to be used as part of the Microsoft 365 Government offering, and many many more niche requirements/features? I suspect it's hard.

I don't particularly like the software (and had many issues with it myself at my prior job) but MS Teams is not realistically _just_ a "chat program" that is easy to build. If you are a company just looking for a good chat experience, I have no idea why you would not use Slack. However, if you are one of the countless companies who have already bought into the entire Microsoft O365+outlook+AAD+sharepoint ecosystem, Teams is probably a good choice, as it is very seamlessly integrated.

Re: Microsoft Teams down for thousands of users

#85
post #71

Quoted post unavailable.

What is the secret sauce for such a horrible company to stay incredibly profitable so long?

Unparalleled distribution channels? Windows, Word and Excel are core to almost every business on the planet. I was surprised to see the amount of computing that is done in excel in banks.

They can launch half-baked offerings bundled into 365 like Teams that are just good enough to stop people buying the competing product and have 100m users instantly. It's remarkable how bad things like SharePoint and OneDrive are and yet they likely have more users than 99% of B2B applications.

Re: Microsoft Teams down for thousands of users

#86

It's hard to understand why Teams is so bad. They have all these engineers, and it's not like it's difficult to make a chat program. Teleconferencing, sure, that's difficult. But most of the problems I hear about is "Teams crashed" or "Wouldn't connect" or "Makes my machine run unbearably slow". How do you end up with such a crap app? And why is the interface so terrible? Can't they afford UX people? And why are ther…

One of the reasons Teams crashes so much is that Microsoft always uses shared code when they want shared behavior. That's why all Microsoft products use the same file picker - because they're writing that code once and sharing it everywhere. Because Teams is essentially the central hub that's supposed to integrate everything else from Microsoft it's running a hell of a lot of code from all across the company. For example when it renders your PowerPoint presentation it's actually using PowerPoint right there, in place.

Re: Microsoft Teams down for thousands of users

#87

It's hard to understand why Teams is so bad. They have all these engineers, and it's not like it's difficult to make a chat program. Teleconferencing, sure, that's difficult. But most of the problems I hear about is "Teams crashed" or "Wouldn't connect" or "Makes my machine run unbearably slow". How do you end up with such a crap app? And why is the interface so terrible? Can't they afford UX people? And why are ther…

Counterpoint... I don't get all the hate for Teams. I work fully-remote on a medium sized team. We use Teams for one-one calls, team calls, presentations, screen-sharing, calls to external numbers and I've never had any problems. I run it on a Windows desktop and an Android phone. I've never had performance problems or crashes on either. Some of the file-sharing/explorer stuff is a bit janky in terms of UI but I don'…

Have you tried copy/pasting from teams to another application, or especially code snippets? If you're lucky you can copy what you highlight, otherwise you copy the entire text of the current message with timestamp and all.

Code snippets are a pain to get right. The tilde key is the shortcut to get monospace fonts or code blocks, and it feels like I roll the die everytime I try to convert text to a code block.

Teleconferencing is also a major pain, where devices are not remembered for some reason. It's mostly ok, but every now and then it forgets my mic. This might have been fixed recently since it doesn't happen as often but it still happens.

Not to mention the hangs that comes up when switching between conversations.

Re: Microsoft Teams down for thousands of users

#88

It's hard to understand why Teams is so bad. They have all these engineers, and it's not like it's difficult to make a chat program. Teleconferencing, sure, that's difficult. But most of the problems I hear about is "Teams crashed" or "Wouldn't connect" or "Makes my machine run unbearably slow". How do you end up with such a crap app? And why is the interface so terrible? Can't they afford UX people? And why are ther…

Probably the majority of the team is composed of interns and managers driving an offshore team.

Usually it is the magic formula to get this kind of quality, and Microsoft isn't imune to it.

Re: Microsoft Teams down for thousands of users

#89
post #26

It's hard to understand why Teams is so bad. They have all these engineers, and it's not like it's difficult to make a chat program. Teleconferencing, sure, that's difficult. But most of the problems I hear about is "Teams crashed" or "Wouldn't connect" or "Makes my machine run unbearably slow". How do you end up with such a crap app? And why is the interface so terrible? Can't they afford UX people? And why are ther…

> They have all these engineers, and it's not like it's difficult to make a chat program. Teleconferencing, sure, that's difficult. But most of the problems I hear about is "Teams crashed" or "Wouldn't connect" or "Makes my machine run unbearably slow". The answer is hidden in your question already. "not difficult" + "all these engineers" = overengineering.

I've had to use Teams daily for the past two jobs I've had. Over-engineered is not what comes to mind when describing the app. It's not a complicated app, the UI isn't overwhelming, and if anything it seems like it lacks functionality.

Visual Studio - that's seems over-engineered (excellent app in many respects, but still...) The whole Lync thing felt over-engineered. MS has more than a few good examples of over-engineering, but Teams doesn't strike me as one of them.

I'm sure Teams has crashed on me at least once in using it for the past 3-4 years, but if so then it has been extremely rare - I wouldn't call it a crashy app. I've experienced performance issues with it, particularly when I've got my laptop hooked up to a larger monitor and I'm sharing my screen. There too though, I've learned to live with it and Teams works fine for me day to day.

However, I do see it as a lowest-common-denominator slack clone, and I agree with others here in that the overall Teams experience is lacking compared to slack.

It feels like MS is trying to do something different with it, but it hasn't worked. They keep pushing it so hard though that more and more people find themselves having to interact with it. Similarly, more and more shops pick it up because "nobody ever got fired for choosing Microsoft" and they're probably already neck-deep in Azure and O365 anyway.

Teams is not particularly buggy, it's not crash prone, it seems like it's missing some functionality, and other functionality seems like an afterthought (e.g., the wiki feature). It's just not a great app.

Re: Microsoft Teams down for thousands of users

#90

It's hard to understand why Teams is so bad. They have all these engineers, and it's not like it's difficult to make a chat program. Teleconferencing, sure, that's difficult. But most of the problems I hear about is "Teams crashed" or "Wouldn't connect" or "Makes my machine run unbearably slow". How do you end up with such a crap app? And why is the interface so terrible? Can't they afford UX people? And why are ther…

"... it's not like it's difficult to make a chat program." A chat program? Easy. A chat program with 270 million monthly active users? Slightly harder, but sure, still easy. A chat program with 270 million monthly active users that has to integrate the entire Microsoft ecosystem [sharepoint, outlook mail + calendar + contacts, yammer, O365 groups, etc] because that is what their enterprise customers demand? Slightly…

Daily Teams user and I agree with you. Maybe the scope is too broad. But the UI is the worst part. I have around 50 chats open and switching from one to another usually takes more than 10 seconds. Joining a large-ish meeting takes 30 seconds of hearing audio and no response from the UI.

Usually the day to day experience is really, really bad.

I wish they got rid of this js-on-the-desktop crap and rewrite it in a decent desktop language like C or C#.

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