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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?

#71
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…

I suggest that Teams only gets used because it’s included in the enormous license that companies buy for Exchange and/or Office and the most popular alternative has its own fees. Large companies don’t want to fork over another licensing fee in the tens of thousands of dollars for Slack when they’re getting Teams “free.”

I think it also has to do with how much money Microsoft is kicking back to the right people in those companies to evangelize Microsoft despite knowing that it sucks.

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

#72
Because it doesn't need to improve. It just needs to check some checkboxes. It's "free" as part of Microsoft Office 365. It allows the IT department to check a checkbox and de-incentivize them from looking at Slack. With Slack you have to pay for and is yet another app to administer. Many IT departments who are already Microsoft customers will have an easier time rolling that out than a new app. No new purchase order nor legal review. Microsoft just needs to suck the air out of Slack to "win". Any additional investment by Microsoft is wasted.

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

#73
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…

Lol.. we all know Microsoft gets these contracts by rubbing shoulders with the right people and they have very little to do with whether the products are actually good.

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

#75
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…

The “just good enough” doesn’t always work out for MS.

We Teams as part of whatever bundle MS pushes for OS, Office etc, but no one uses Teams, we use zoom. A few people use slack, but it’s not pervasive.

If it wasn’t so buggy and non-performant, does it offer any other advantages or “killer features” by virtue of tighter integration to the MS ecosystem?

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

#76
post #70

I use teams, slack and zoom for video conferencing. Of all of them zoom is the best imho. (Not that I'm a fan of any of them). It seems to just work the most. Slack has weird issues with screen sharing only working sometimes apart from that it's not bad. Teams randomly doesn't launch and for the past month the calendar integration has vanished with no sign of return. Why are they so bad? It's Microsoft. Everything th…

I use Slack all day every day, and frequently use Slack huddles as a more instant alternative to spinning up a zoom meeting (huddles are more discoverable because you can instantly see channels with a active huddle, and its good for more of a general hang out / paired session that doesn't demand a more static meeting).

I've not once had trouble with the screen sharing, though in the initial rollout of the feature to our org audio was a bit glitchy - that hasn't been an issue for us in the past ~6 months.

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

#78
It seems to be mainly the work of barely-passing programmers on a platform (the web-app-everything) that strongly popularises form over function, quantity over quality, and from a company that increasingly prioritises (controversial opinion) DEI over competence.

That said, MS has not always been like this; those who remember MSN Messenger, and perhaps even Skype for Business, may realise that despite all the various problems they had, they still seem much better than what Teams is today. Hence it's definitely a degradation.

If I had the time and strong need, I'd try to write a native client for it, but apaprently it's very close to Skype (the MS version, not the original one) for which several 3rd-party clients exist, so the effort there might not be so much. They've even documented at least some of the APIs, e.g.: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/chatmessage-post

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

#79

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…

Plus if you use teams on Linux, guess what's getting blamed first.

Nevermind the fact I have cross- platform issues (win/OSX/linux/android) with audio and bluetooth devices with teams...

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