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Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?

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51–60 of 814 posts

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

#51
> I am literally forced to use this app at work...

Exactly. You are not the customer. Your IT admin is. And they have to convince your security team while managing spend. Why wouldn’t they pick the “free” option that your company has already approved for deployment?

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

#52

It's the iPhone effect: If you use Teams, and something goes wrong, everybody is patient and sympathetic. If you use something else, then it's your fault for being "weird" or "cheap." In my case, my computer came from IT, pre-loaded with Teams, and it runs nearly flawlessly. But I've noticed something else about computers and software. You can have two people with similar jobs, similar computers, similar software, et…

That's what happens when you start fucking with defaults. You get farther and farther away from a stabile baseline. 2 days to set up a PC tells me they are just fucking with too much stuff. I have the same problem. But my parents, who aren't tech savvy, have 0 problems because they aren't fucking with the workings of their PC changing defaults and making customizations.

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

#53
post #45

My company is transitioning to Teams and I find it frustrating. So much so that I collect my complaints in a confluence page. I could be wrong on some of these, so happy to be corrected! No links You can’t link to conversations. This means if you want to add context to a Jira ticket or in a code comment, you can’t easily do so. Inconsistent UI The UI between a Teams channel and a chat with multiple people is not cons…

Doesn’t matter… teams is free with an office 365 subscription and slack is not, therefore lots of companies will prefer it.

Agreed. Especially with slack raising prices, I understand the business decision.

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

#55
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s Teams. On a intel Mac with no management software, it is a shitty, buggy mess.

Works beautifully on an M1. I never have any of the issues that colleagues do on their heavily IT mutilated PCs.

Must be that they are not true Scotsmen, if they were it wouldn't eb an issue and if it si an issue it for sure never happened to you

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

#56
post #52

It's the iPhone effect: If you use Teams, and something goes wrong, everybody is patient and sympathetic. If you use something else, then it's your fault for being "weird" or "cheap." In my case, my computer came from IT, pre-loaded with Teams, and it runs nearly flawlessly. But I've noticed something else about computers and software. You can have two people with similar jobs, similar computers, similar software, et…

That's what happens when you start fucking with defaults. You get farther and farther away from a stabile baseline. 2 days to set up a PC tells me they are just fucking with too much stuff. I have the same problem. But my parents, who aren't tech savvy, have 0 problems because they aren't fucking with the workings of their PC changing defaults and making customizations.

When I used to run Windows, the very first thing I would do would be to turn off all the GUI animations, and switch the desktop back to "classic Windows" desktop, resulting in a usually more stable machine.

So it depends on which direction you push the customizations.

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

#57
post #45

My company is transitioning to Teams and I find it frustrating. So much so that I collect my complaints in a confluence page. I could be wrong on some of these, so happy to be corrected! No links You can’t link to conversations. This means if you want to add context to a Jira ticket or in a code comment, you can’t easily do so. Inconsistent UI The UI between a Teams channel and a chat with multiple people is not cons…

How hard is it to get codeblocks working instead of them focusing on every use case on the planet. It's so damn terrible.

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

#59

It's the iPhone effect: If you use Teams, and something goes wrong, everybody is patient and sympathetic. If you use something else, then it's your fault for being "weird" or "cheap." In my case, my computer came from IT, pre-loaded with Teams, and it runs nearly flawlessly. But I've noticed something else about computers and software. You can have two people with similar jobs, similar computers, similar software, et…

> You can have two people with similar jobs, similar computers, similar software, etc. One person will have crashes and problems all the time, and the other person, smooth sailing. Nobody knows why.

Imo this is just a result of the chaotic, unreproducible install processes typical for proprietary software and a hesitancy to do root cause analysis on a workstation when you have time pressures to focus on other things.

The deep mystery of 'no one knows why' when it comes to issues is something I've never experienced on a personal Linux machine as an adult. But most of us work on machines where software installers can do whatever they want, we don't control the software update cadence, and our computers are bogged down with all kinds of instrumentation (AV, privilege management, data exfiltration monitoring, etc.) that affects performance and compatibility in complex ways and whose configuration we may have limited capacity to inspect or modify.

The hopeless sense of mystification here is not a fact of computing. It's a function of being alienated from our computing environments. We don't have to work this way, and I wish we didn't. But we largely do.

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

#60
post #40

This happens because of how Microsoft approaches product development and design. On many product teams, PMs end up doing not only the product design decisions but even designs much of the products themselves. This works for them because it focuses product cycles on releasing what "matters" to the customer, but it ends up cutting craft and quality. This makes their products poor to use, but is also what drives revenue…

For this reason the US military said NO to Microsoft [1]

The more the deep state (nothing about conspiracy theory, it's just the people at the oval office, and their surroundings, mostly industry lobby) want to trust and push Microsoft, the worse it's going to get in the coming years were AI, software and hardware will be the deciding factor for the civilization war we are currently living

> Microsoft insiders worry the Pentagon may walk away from its $22 billion contract for mixed-reality goggles as the device continues to disappoint the military

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-military-hololens-...

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