Quoted post unavailable.
It's made of 160K people. Surely they can't all be that bad as you describe.
Besides, full of MS products that work well, see VS and VS Code, .NET, PowerShell, and so on.
Microsoft Teams down for thousands of users
91–100 of 125 posts
Re: Microsoft Teams down for thousands of users
#92It'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…
I think you're right. Microsoft is doing /just enough/ to provide a "slack-like" experience that also happens to be very deeply integrated into the rest of their offerings. They can't go to wild or it'll probably alienate the suits and non-techies. The UI is a lowest-common-denominator knock-off of an already popular app the many users are already familiar with, so in that context Teams seems like a solid product. And, as you've said, given a company that's already invested in O365, Azure, and is basically an MS shop, Teams is a pretty solid choice. That doesn't excuse some of its shortcomings, but it does provide a little color to the conversation.
Re: Microsoft Teams down for thousands of users
#93It'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 so bad that if an organisation uses Teams I take that as a red flag and would decline to be interviewed for a permanent job AND will price that in for my contract rate.
For me, use of teams signals the impotence/incompetence of the CTO and that other poor technical and managerial choices will persist at the organisation.
Re: Microsoft Teams down for thousands of users
#94Has 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…
I can't tell if you're astroturfing, but just in case you're not, your problems are pretty easy to fix.
To blur your background on Teams, go to background options while on a call. Click 'Blur'. Here are the steps if you get confused on the way:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/change-your-backg...
To start a meeting, either generate a meeting in the Calendar and it'll add a Teams call link in, or under the Calendar click 'Meet now' in the top right corner.
Re: Microsoft Teams down for thousands of users
#95It'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.
No. It’s over managed. If I was handed teams I could vastly improve it on my own over a 6 month period. However the most significant change would be replacing Azure AD/B2C for auth with literally any other auth solution.
I’d need a year to overhaul AD/B2C and would probably want to hire a team of two more devs so we could get it right for all use cases. Even then it could be so broken that it’s almost impossible to fix in place.
Re: Microsoft Teams down for thousands of users
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, who cares about the rest of the world...
I meant, in North America. I don't know how widespread Teams is outside the Western hemisphere, sorry.
I would be stunned if most users are from North America.
Source: From Europe. Europe already might be in the same ballpark + I don’t forget about other continents.
Re: Microsoft Teams down for thousands of users
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
"... 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 dece…
Be careful what you wish for. I recall when Visual Studio switched to from native to managed (VS 2005?) and it was brutal. It was sluggish, crashy, with weird WPF UI bits thrown in here and there to support some oddball feature.
As for C, maybe you meant C++? Kicking out a modern, complex, desktop, web/network-centric application in C is just begging for trouble. Particularly given all the headline grabbing research MS has done into how error prone manual memory management has been in their organization [0][1]
Actually, it doesn't really seem like a language issue, does it? You can have a terrible app in C/C++/Rust/Go/JS, any language, you name it. Even electron seems a little like a scapegoat - e.g., VSCode and (previously) Atom are examples of "js-on-the-desktop crap" that are surprisingly solid.
It's not the language that's the problem, and it's not (arguably) the underlying framework. The app just sucks. If Teams were written from the ground up in C# or C and had the same functionality (or lack of functionality), it would still suck. Teams, as a product, is just sub par compared to other offerings. Even so, it's good enough for the majority of Microsoft's enterprisey and/or locked-in customer base since it's so well integrated into everything else they offer.
[0] https://msrc-blog.microsoft.com/2019/07/18/we-need-a-safer-s...
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-70-percent-of-all-se...
Re: Microsoft Teams down for thousands of users
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 dece…
Be careful what you wish for. I recall when Visual Studio switched to from native to managed (VS 2005?) and it was brutal. It was sluggish, crashy, with weird WPF UI bits thrown in here and there to support some oddball feature. As for C, maybe you meant C++? Kicking out a modern, complex, desktop, web/network-centric application in C is just begging for trouble. Particularly given all the headline grabbing research…
I don't think it "just sucks". Functionality is there and it is very well integrated in its ecosystem. For what I use it every day, it works and has never crashed on me or let me down. I just wish the UI was more responsive, which is a specific concern that can and will be addressed by its developers.
That said, JS still has no place on the desktop in my opinion, and the world is full of Electron applications that have horrible performance. You can hack up an UI in bash too. But should you?
For products that _vertically_ suck, well, try Cisco WebEx.
Thank you for the lesson, though.
Re: Microsoft Teams down for thousands of users
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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-engi…
> 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.
My current bugbear with Teams is it cannot open Office files in the native Office applications, which I have installed, by default. Sure, you can manually select "Open in..." each time and pick "Desktop application". But when you do "Change default", there are only two options: "Always open Word, PowerPoint and Excel files in (A) Teams, (B) Browser (default)". There's no option "(C) Desktop application"!
Come on guys, how hard can this be? What PM decided that option (C) should be left out? I mean, it's not as if the native Word, Excel and PowerPoint applications haven't been industry standards - and the basis for MS's success - for 30 years...
Re: Microsoft Teams down for thousands of users
#100It'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. FWIW, the UI of your average teleconferencing app is way simpler than a chat app and the state is only relevant in the moment which makes both the front end and backend easier to design due to a lack of search or history. The actual "conferencing" parts of a teleconferencing stack, both…
Every IRC program i used had a better UI than Teams. And i used them 20 years ago.