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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?

#291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Skype for Business" was just a rebranded Lync. Consumer-land skype remained a different thing until Microsoft killed that for Teams. Skype for Business' exe was lync.exe right up until the end. "Teams" was a brand new thing and didn't use the Communicator/Lync/Skype for Business architecture.

>Skype for Business' exe was lync.exe right up until the end What do you mean "end"? We still use it!

It's now end of life for Teams, there's no chance they'll rename the exe at this point. You'll be lucky to get anything except the most critical bugs fixed.

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

#292

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/…

I had to support live meeting in a 80k seat org at the time and it was an awful piece of software. Quite often it would fail to launch, the Outlook plugin would fail to load. You could spend hours playing with registry settings, app config trying to get the plug-in to launch. Live meeting was terrible and deserves to be fired into the sun.

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

#293

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…

Laptop qc issues? Had to send back a lenovo recently as the touchscreen didn’t work. Tech packs up occasionally!

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

#294

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…

Teams certainly has a random factor to it. Perhaps it's MS' A/B testing or incrementally rolling out features? Because they definitely do that.

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

#295
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wh…

Even crazier when you realize Orkut was owned by Google!

But Orkut was in the wrong department. Hence had to be shutdown. The sheer stupidity of shutting down a 20% project that actually took off in a big way!

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

#296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TIL people in the US use SMS

Why don't people use it elsewhere? I know that WhatsApp is dominant, but why?

Hard to say, they were all the rage and suddenly just kinda stopped being used (their only purpose now I believe is 2FA, and spam). One reason I can think of is chat history syncing between devices

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

#297

It isn't because Microsoft lacks good programmers. My guess would be that someone believes they need to have every feature from slack, zoom, WebEx, meet etc, and also integrate tightly with every Skype/SharePoint/OneNote feature, and also run on at least four platforms. But they aren't willing to give people time to do this.

> It isn't because Microsoft lacks good programmers. Their products targeted to other programmers seem to be nicer to work with. E.g. VS Code, C#, SQL Server. The products aimed at the ‘knowledge workers’, like Teams, and SharePoint are garbage.

I wonder how there's so much difference. Don't programmers working at VS Code and Teams interact with each other?

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

#298
post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Do you also start/stop the modem on your phone whenever you need it? For the majority of people it makes sense to have a comms app always running as they come to expect that from the smartphones. Granted, there should be an easy way to configure this behavior for advanced users.

I think we should strongly encourage everyone to be both more aware and more in control of the devices and applications they elect to use.

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

#300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TIL people in the US use SMS

Why don't people use it elsewhere? I know that WhatsApp is dominant, but why?

A combination of less iPhone dominance, different data/sms rates and other factors.
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