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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?

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or we need to stop banning words because people we don't like start using them (correctly, I might add.) It's annoying that once some people started saying that the country was run by a deep state populated by communist lizard child molesters, the reaction was to start insisting that there wasn't a deep state at all.

Maybe we can say military-industrial complex? Nice, venerable, well-established phrase, notably popularized by a president during his final words as a president.

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

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think "military–industrial complex" is the typical term.

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

#103
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 agree for the most part except the lack of stability and resiliency. I joined a company using Teams 3 months ago and there has been at least one global outage once a month… that’s 3 more outages than I experienced with Slack for the last 2 years or more maybe?

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

#105

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…

Right, every Fortune 500 company already has a msft office contract. Getting everyone on teams is as easy as an IT guy clicking a box and everyone has it on their computer. Doesn’t have to be a great product when it’s that easy to start using. Really Microsoft’s entire company revolves around this “lock them in and utilize our relationship to grow new products” strategy.

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

#106
Try this: select all the text in a text box input in teams with your mouse, click and drag the cursor to select the text. Start typing. It will type the correct characters, right to left. So instead on "hello world" it will display "dlrow olleh". No joke. Selecting by triple clicking doesn't trigger the right-to-left typing. Using shift and arrows doesn't. Just by dragging the cursor. I can't imagine what could possibly cause this, even as a bug. Truly impressively bad software.

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

#107

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/…

> Just try to get it to not start at login...

God, why do PMs push this crap. Like users are picking their communication software of the day based on what pops up into their face.

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

#108
Because they can't figure out how to do something in this space that catches fire and everyone loves. So instead, they bundle Teams in with their other stuff in order to cut the legs out from the competition i.e. lower the prices other companies can charge (because there's a mediocre free alternative), and hopefully slow down their growth until Microsoft can come up with (or acquire) something cool.

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

#109

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/…

It's kind of crazy to look back and see just how much worse we are today than some years ago with regards to this stuff. I remember an old social media named Orkut, had pretty much everything facebook had and more, also had a huge userbase in brazil and india(?) iirc, but just goot overtaken by facebook. Original skype would probably work better than zoom does today with a few tweaks(I assume, could be wrong there when it comes to joining calls without being "friends" and such). Never used communicator but I assume it would fill the role just as well by your description. Not even going to mention forums getting gutted and being replaced with discord servers that nobody uses voice(the reason i'd assume one would prefer to use a discord server). Cmmunities that didn't want to go for a forum had several "closed community" website creators(that I cannot for the life of me remember the names) and that all got replaced by subreddits...

Quite sad to see the internet continuously being shrunk down to the lowest common denominator, some federated efforts like the fediverse make me quite hopeful, a shame most of them mimick twitter.

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