Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad? • Hacker News Board

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

#191

Post by hn92726819 » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 2:32 AM UTC

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…

I don't think that's the full story. On Mac, which is way harder to break than linux, teams is atrocious. I don't know the teams experience on Linux or Windows but just using it on Mac is terrible enough.

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

#192

Post by n_ary » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 2:36 AM UTC

To be honest, it comes with the general Office365 package and if you are leaned on Azure(popular where I am from), then why not use it as is? Teams is convenient too, as adding a calendar invite means you get am auto generated meeting link. And in most cases business & accounting teams make the choice and implement it company wide as policy.

We also use it, but out of frustration, many of our colleagues use Slack as well as some hardcore engineering teams are too reluctant to use Teams and outright use Discord.

Many of the teams brought in the issue to upper management about Teams but they redirect us to our IT management company, who tells us it comes with subscription and our business strategists or something has to ask to change this but they want an “ubiquitous” company wide system and so on.

Now we are often stuck with messaging people in three different places because someone will never respond in Teams, someone may not be in Slack and someone may not be using discord :)

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

#193

Post by Semaphor » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 2:39 AM UTC

It’s funny that it apparently crashes for people. Never had a single crash or lagging, sharing works fine, but it also doesn’t work and is a mess.

Sometimes there are no notifications. I’ve had messages by my boss that I’d only see by chance hours later because Teams never notified me. I tried ingesting Seq alerts. But those are only possible in the groups tab, which has literally no notifications at all if one is in the chats tab.

The search feature has to be an elaborate joke. No one can think you can build a search feature that shows no context at all.

Their pseudo-markdown. What's going on there? If I press the wrong symbols or forget to paste with Ctrl+Shift+V I’ll be in some weird layout state that I can’t get out of, usually I just give up and send the broken looking messages.

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

#194

Post by encryptluks2 » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 2:58 AM UTC

Qem wrote: post #181

encryptluks2 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In Africa they even fired a employee that discovered a kickback scheme, when he tried to scale the matter up to Satya Nadella: https://www.engadget.com/whistleblower-says-microsoft-spent-...

I've known about it and seen it happen but rarely do you get enough evidence to do anything about it. It appears when you do then Microsoft will just fire you and put out a public statement pretending that something will change.

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

#195

Post by Sohcahtoa82 » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 3:00 AM UTC

random42_ wrote: post #186

colordrops wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has had more than one product that I've been excited to use but was invite only, and then only got the invite after interest had died both for the public and myself. Ones I can remember are Orkut, Wave, and Ingress.

GMail was also invite only IIRC.

The difference is that GMail is useful even if none of your friends are on it.

Making a social network like Google+ be invite-only when everybody was already on Facebook was an absolutely bone-headed move and I think was THE driving factor for its failure.

There were so many memes about people finally getting an invite to Google+ and then discovering nobody was there. Without your friends on it, you're not going to make it part of your daily routine, and eventually just forget about it entirely. By the time it wasn't invite-only anymore, the hype was gone and Google+ had already been considered to be a joke.

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

#196

Post by maxerickson » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 3:06 AM UTC

oneplane wrote: post #128

twobitshifter wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

right and it’s integrated with Sharepoint, Outlook and OneDrive.

And those are in the same boat as Teams: it came with the bundle. (well, one could argue that plenty of people enjoy Outlook, but OneDrive is nothing special and SharePoint is just a bad Wiki going the SAP integration hell route)

SharePoint gives you versioned file storage that searches inside of files. It's a big step up from a network drive or whatever.

(and that's just the really basic out of the box usage)

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

#197

Post by PhaedrusV » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 3:09 AM UTC

My biggest gripe isn't teams-specific, it's that MS office products still won't support multiple logins. With Google I can be logged into my 4 different work, personal and business accounts simultaneously and switching between the active one is a single button click.

MS won't even support two accounts, so 3 out of 4 times I get invited to a teams meeting I'm in the wrong account, and it's a huge pain to sign out and sign back in; there's no single sign-in (even in Windows!) that works for Outlook, Onedrive, Teams, etc. all at once. Ridiculous.

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

#198

Post by Godel_unicode » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 3:09 AM UTC

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…

Not so much:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-01/microsoft...

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

#199

Post by jknoepfler » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 3:10 AM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #182

peteradio wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Communication software needs to run in case someone wants to contact you. It should start in the background though.

Communications software needs to run when and only when I want it to run. Who in the heck are you to tell me when to run an application on a device I own?

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

#200

Post by cyberge99 » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 3:14 AM UTC

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.”

I think Teams also offers more capabilities to Enterprise users. I’ve been on a few teams calls with people on the call that are not visible in the attendee list.