Corporate America is the problem.
Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?
311–320 of 814 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?
#312A peeve: Last week I got invited to an online meeting. I am using Firefox on Arch Linux on a Framework laptop. One hour before I opened the invitation link and was just told to wait till the meeting starts. OK. But when the time was up, Teams suddenly told me to install something in a hurry.
I fished out my wife's Chromebook instead but we missed two minutes of the meeting.
That's clearly a failure: I didn't get a chance to check my setup before the meeting started.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?
#313Long 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/…
What's hilarious and sad is that MSN Messenger had a lot of features back in the early '00s that major players like WhatsApp and Telegram now only implement through gritted teeth, one every year if you're lucky. Things like custom emojis, audio messages, sending a drawing, avatars you could see, choosing your display name, exportable conversation history, you even had games! Nowadays people cheer for the bare minimum in UX that we already had 20 years ago.
And that's ignoring that niche it filled where people were identified by emails, and the particular social rules of knowing that if you went online, it meant you wanted to spend a while talking to people and were available to do so. Discord is kind of similar in that last aspect, but it's enormously complex for the average user and intended for servers, not for 1 on 1 conversations with your contacts. I've always wanted to build a clone of Messenger just because of how much I miss it.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?
#314My 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…
One more: No keyboard shortcut for Back, on the Mac at least. And most of the other shortcuts only work in a meeting.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
Facebook is vanity. It is really all about ego. People love to stroke their ego. It is hilarious to me how many will defend pride and how many somehow confuse pride with virtue, when the opposite of pride, humility, is the virtue. What made Facebook popular is the same thing that makes any vice popular, such as gambling or drinking, because pride is a vice, also known as an indulgence , and pride, ego, and vanity are…
Oh, that's not what got Facebook big. You can stroke your ego in emails or blogs or on forums. What made Facebook great was that it encouraged users to share personal information (including pictures and bio items) and then made it easy for everyone to anonymously take part of this information. You could look at pictures of your crush in cute outfits or co-workers in embarrassing situations. You could read about the l…
Voyeurism, mixed with a little FOMO - they had a limited release early on, just like GMail.
I think a large part of it was also the digital photo and smartphone revolution. Instagram did that a little better, but posting straight to Facebook was a little better than what... Photobucket? Personal hosting? Emails with mass CC? It just solved that problem so well for not only the big event pictures we'd traditionally throw in an album, but also adhoc slice-of-life moments.
It also gave that power to businesses, humanising them in a way that hadn't been possible before, and that's where the money came in.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even crazier when you realize Orkut was owned by Google!
That was the problem. Orkut was successful, but that doesn't stop Google from shutting down services. Trusting a Google service to be around long-term is folly unless it's Maps or Gmail.
I am not so sure of those two either (at least free)... the search may stay.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everybody I know has used Zoom at this point, and has thus seen what dead-simple and "just works" telecom software can be (not to mention FaceTime, which seems to revel in "your never-owned-a-computer grandparent is happy to use this").
If you think zoom "just works" I'm guessing you haven't seen the quagmire of poor decisions masquerading as code that is zoom on the Linux desktop. Still better than teams though. (With the caveat that it's only useable on Chrome).
I use Teams in enterprise, and Zoom for college. At this point I pretty firmly believe Zoom is hot garbage. Teams syncs with Outlook, and basically every org I interacts with uses Outlook and has Office365 at this point.
Teams hasn't been crashy, is responsive, doesn't eat memory, etc. At this point I personally cannot point to why there is so much hate for Teams. Either that or my organisation is doing something well to make it work well.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is, but despite it being coined by a former US President and WW2 Allied General, it is now taken to mean something akin to "defund the military".
Could you clarify? I'm having trouble understanding the equivalency because "Military industry complex" is a noun and "defund the military" is a verb (more-or-less)
I believe rchaud meant that the set of people using the term "military industrial complex" has a large overlap with the set of people demanding to "defund the military".
Re: Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?
#319Opposite experience: I use it daily and never had it crash on me. Everything works as expected and I see some slowing down only on very large meetings, but I am on a mobile CPU.
I would even say it's getting better and better.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?
#320The desktop version is buggy. The browser version works better. Don't even bother installing it. Just use the browser version.