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Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?

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251–260 of 814 posts

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

#251

Pop is good: https://pop.com The IntelliJ Code With Me feature is worth trying: https://www.jetbrains.com/code-with-me/

I love the realistic perfectly lit nice bokeh stock art portrait photos in their sales page 9 quadrant chat demo.

Can imagine the disappointment in real world use with grainy, poorly lit, blurry webcam images of normal people.

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

#252
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 the record, have you actually eaten at Olive Garden recently? Their food is actually pretty fantastic. Some of the best Chicken Parm. Definitely better than Teams. Please don’t insult Olive Garden like this.

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

#253
I hate how Teams really can’t handle full-duplex conversations, at least with transpacific calls. You pretty much need to speak, pause, and then hope that only one person speaks next, or there’s a series of “sorry, you go ahead…” until someone manages to get started again. Background noise removal and feedback removal is poor compared to the competition. I much prefer Zoom for video/voice conferencing and Slack for text chats.

However, what Teams has done well is dethrone WebEx and other legacy stuff from really big companies during the pandemic/WFH era. As has been mentioned, many big companies already had huge Microsoft accounts (likely O365) so turning on Teams was easy. When WebEx fell over under load, users moved to Teams.

One feature that’s pretty cool is the real time closed captions and the ability to do text based searches for recorded meetings. But that’s not enough to make up for some of the most basic audio quality issues.

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

#254
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oracle database is rock solid.

Lol, sure- for certain use-cases, it works fine. But the only way it stays consistently good is because Big-O severely limits the scope. The Oracle DB internal team culture is just plain depressing. Stuck 30 years in the past in terms of development practices, little or no innovation is allowed. Function names are limited to four or five characters, and the source control is literally from the nineties. Maybe that's…

I'm not sure what you are trying to convey here around "certain use cases".

I hate Oracle culture and their licensing as much as the next person and will avoid their product and services as much as possible, but Oracle database is one of the most scalable and stable database products around.

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

#256
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…

Unfortunatley like many of the other comments have pointed out. This is incorrect. Most of the military currently uses Teams and O365. The military deal for hololens is going through and the shipments are greater thant he initial order. That information is dated.

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

#257
post #10

We use zoom but are switching to teams. As an engineer my absoutley must have feature is screen sharing with collaborative annotation. I waited with bated breath for the 'active annotation' feature that was on the teams roadmap for months to be released. And then it was. To my horror it was the epitome of bloat. It essentially takes a screenshot of the presenters desktop and then starts a whiteboard session. It takes…

I am not a zoom user, but I do use the "write on someone else's screen" feature quite often in slack when screen-sharing, and what you're describing in teams sounds like utter crap.

Everything in Teams ranges from "utter crap" to "half assed effort but mostly still just crap". It's the most "me-too" app I've ever had the displeasure of being forced to use... sigh.

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

#258

> God forbid you try to change the audio device from speakers to headphones in the middle of a call. And then if you try to just call back on your phone, and they want to share their screen, and you go back to your PC and try to join the call from your PC so you can see the screenshare (it's not going to work). What voice/video client handles this much fiddling? When my friend and I get steam voice chat running, it’s…

I ended up making a script to set custom audio devices back to what I want.

Its peak elegance, have to kill teams, modify a json file with some cryptic uuid reference to the speaker and mic device, then restart teams.

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

#259
Teams on my laptop crashes in the middle of calls. The only way to fix this is to reinstall. And then hope it will stay stable for a while.

Teams on my smartphone crashes in the middle of calls. The only way to fix this is to reinstall from the App Store. And then hope it will stay stable for a while.

Also I’m paying a monthly subscription for this experience.

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

#260
post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forums weren't replaced by discord. Forums were replaced by Reddit. Although you post still stands, I think you're very wrong in thinking about the reasoning why people use one or another platform. Let's think about discord for a minute, why is everyone using it? And what are they using it for? I think the answers here are rather simple, people have a need for communication with peers; this communication usually take…

> Forums weren't replaced by discord. Forums were replaced by Reddit. Technically, reddit and Discourse is more like forums, but a lot of things that would have been a forum 15 years ago are now Discord "servers".

True, they were just Reddit or FB groups in the meantime.
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