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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?

#81

Post by ineedasername »

Kukumber wrote: post #60
yawnxyz wrote: 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…

We need another less polarized word than deep state to describe the various industrial complexes entrenched in military & government, and the revolving door of employment between government -> lobbyists -> industry etc.

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

#82

Post by insane_dreamer »

jagged-chisel wrote: post #41
yawnxyz wrote: 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.”

It's not only the cost, but it's having to deal with another vendor and maintain another system, interoperability, security, access, etc.

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

#83

Post by TurkishPoptart »

n8cpdx wrote: post #69

At least it doesn’t totally change the UI and hide all important elements when you start a screen share (Zoom). My experience has been pretty positive overall, at least for calling. Channels don’t work as well as slack, but it’s decent. The big trick is to run it in a browser so you avoid any electron overhead. It is fully featured in browser.

Can you tell me what you mean by electron overhead?

Does that mean, like, the CPU resources it exhausts in the browser as opposed to the app is capped or reduced? Thanks

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

#84

Post by ParetoOptimal »

alar44 wrote: post #52
analog31 wrote: post #30

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.

> . 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.

People have different annoyances and preferences. Perhaps you are lucky enough to be close to the default where you don't need to change so many things.

While the defaults for other is death by a thousand papercuts...

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

#85

Post by Maarten88 »

Long ago Microsoft had MSN Messenger, which was one of the leading messaging apps. It worked well, and many 'normal' users were using it. Then Microsoft dissolved the team behind it and screwed up the product so bad with bloatware and ads that everyone moved to WhatsApp (except in the US where people went back to texting).

Then Microsoft came out with Communicator, renamed it to Lync, which was a corporate messenger/meeting software. It used its own server, that could federate outside. It worked very well. They added LiveMeeting as a separate app for meetings, built on the same protocols. Our company used it with the "roundtable" camera from 2008, and it all worked amazingly well. We had meetings with people joining in from home and other offices over the internet using inexpensive webcams, 15 years ago.

Then they bought Skype and it went downhill from there. I don't know what happened, but they took a lot of time integrating technologies from Skype (peer-to-peer) with their own tech (which was more telecom/server based) and tried competing with ever-changing perceived competitors by copying parts of their features and UI, without ever making any feature really good. They integrated everything into a single program, Skype for Business, now renamed Teams, and made it bloated and obnoxious. Just try to get it to not start at login... It's like MSN all over again.

I think the Communicator/LiveMeeting software combo they had 15 years ago would still (conceptually) do pretty well as messenger/meeting software now, when modernized. It was much less intrusive and behaved like nice software that you actually wanted to use.

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

#87

Post by giantg2 »

Kukumber wrote: post #60
yawnxyz wrote: 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…

I swear I saw a recent article saying they were moving forward.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-us-army-combat-hololens...

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

#88

Post by TurkishPoptart »

guidedlight wrote: post #14

I suggest you try the web app version, it’s faster and more stable. In fact, I believe Microsoft will replace the desktop client with a web app shell. You can try it out today; 1. Install the Microsoft Edge Web browser on Mac or Windows 2. Log into https://teams.microsoft.com 3. Click … > Apps > Install this site as an app 4. Enjoy!

Thanks so much, I will try this! Much appreciated!

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

#89

Post by userbinator »

culanuchachamim wrote: post #34
outside1234 wrote: post #31

I see that nobody here had to use Skype for Business or WebEx... This is the better future people!

Those are nightmare! And not to speak about Skype for business predecesor, Microsoft Lync.

At least they were native.

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

#90

Post by jlarocco »

jrib wrote: 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…

Those are just missing features, though!

My favorite Teams bug is when the arrow keys stop working for text navigation. They had to go out of the way to break something like that.

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