Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?

news.ycombinator.com

341–350 of 814 posts

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

#341
- MSN Messenger

- Windows Live Messenger

- Microsoft Office Communications

- Microsoft V-Chat

- Microsoft Lync

- Skype

- Skype for Business (completely different piece of software than skype)

- Microsoft Classroom

- Microsoft Teams

(no guarantee of completeness)

Some of these did better than others, but in the end they all went down the drain. That makes me suspect that it's not the software itself, but some corporate requirements that Microsoft imposes on their chat programs, that's the root cause of the problems.

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

#342
post #261

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. Although you post still stands, I think you're very wrong in thinking about the reasoning why people use one or another platform. There may be some contexts where that's true, but overwhelmingly I've seen Discord replacing forums, particularly for small, closed groups. Wheereas I've never so much as heard of any group adopting a private subreddit!…

This was over a decade ago at this point but at one company we ran our own Reddit server (when Reddit was nearly fully open source) and it was set up to work with our Active Directory so if we could use our work logins.

It was really really awesome.

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

#343

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 really crazy how everyone had MSN back when I was younger. It was great, it had webcam stuff, personalization of font size and colors and such, plenty of emoticons, and even GAMES!

I can't believe they managed to kill this amazing product.

I do feel like FB is being killed in the same way, as it was an amazing product for many years and has slowly become ads and unrelated content in a noisy newsfeed :( I really think FB should go back to its roots and simplify the interface and go back to the chronological timeline.

I don't understand why product feel that they need to change to stay relevant. They should just launch other products instead of changing what works well.

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

#344
post #45

My 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…

>- don’t support ``` for code blocks. Channel chats do. Why? I have no clue.

In general, Teams doesn't have real markdown support. It can detect some markdown-ish syntax and replace it with its WYSIWYG stuff, but that's not the same thing (it doesn't always replace it, it doesn't handle messages sent with markdown syntax properly, it doesn't follow standard markdown syntax, and it doesn't let you edit the markdown markup).

Other issues I've had:

- Teams for desktop likes to randomly decide your microphone isn't working, and turn your audio off. The microphone works fine in literally any other program.

- Trying to close the window doesn't close it, it just minimizes it and hides it from the taskbar. It plays the minimize animation, it still shows up in alt-tab, and it stays on the same virtual desktop when reopening the window, rather than reopening on the current desktop.

- It always throws its window up when starting. There seems to be no way to make it start in the background.

-There is no way to choose spellchecker language, it's hardcoded to use the same language as the UI.

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

#345

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 don’t know which universe you live in, but things like Microsoft Communicator/Lync and “worked very well” do not belong to the same sentence in mine.

I too remember Lync being incredibly buggy. It's probably the least reliable chat software I've ever used.

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

#346

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/…

Not to forget that 26 years ago, starting in 1996, we had Microsoft NetMeeting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_NetMeeting A very good VOIP / videoconferencing / white-boarding / application sharing client present on almost all Windows computers, open standards interoperable, with an official ActiveX Control and public API. You could easily embed it into your HTML site (IE compatible only), or drag and drop i…

It's been a long time since I heard mention of NetMeeting.

I remember using NetMeeting in late 97 or early 98 on a 33.6 kbps modem. One of the most memorable parts was the area were you could find other random people to chat with on audio. I had many enjoyable conversations with various people on there, something that I don't think would work well today with the increased number of horrible netizens.

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

#347
post #341

- MSN Messenger - Windows Live Messenger - Microsoft Office Communications - Microsoft V-Chat - Microsoft Lync - Skype - Skype for Business (completely different piece of software than skype) - Microsoft Classroom - Microsoft Teams (no guarantee of completeness) Some of these did better than others, but in the end they all went down the drain. That makes me suspect that it's not the software itself, but some corporat…

Oh gosh, had to use Lync for work (on a Mac). The absolute horror.

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

#348
I work for a very large insurance company.

Pretty much the whole company is on Teams.

If Teams was as bad as this thread suggests we would have heard about it (I know this because company-wide we complain bitterly about the anti-malware cruft that gums up our machines daily)

So it seems to me that we either got very lucky with our rollout or this thread represents a very vocal minority of people that are experiencing issues

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

#350
This is a regular comment on hn. It doesn't chime with my experience.

I have used Teams every day for 3 years. It is a memory hog, it sometimes takes a moment from connection to hearing people...but I never once had it 'crash'. I swap from phone to screen fairly regularly with no problem.

I wonder, do people who pay for Teams as an organisation get better service? We pay and I have no problems with it.

Post reply on HN