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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?

#371

Post by hardware2win »

Daub wrote: post #119

I teach visual effects and digital art. I am used to the madly compLex interfaces (Maya, Blender, Nuke etc). I have no fear of such software. But I am completely defeated by Teams. - Why two windows when you are in a meeting? The second window is sometimes hard to find intuitively. - Why, when opening an attachment, is the user locked out of chat? Again, with many windows open, the preview can look and function like…

>Why two windows when you are in a meeting? The second window is sometimes hard to find intuitively.

What do you mean? Aint the icon stacked on task bar?

>Upload a file to chat and sending that file are two separate actions. Why? I can’t count the number of times I have to remind students to press the send button after upload.

I think it could be sane in such a way that you dont send something by accident

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

#372

Post by DocTomoe »

Daub wrote: post #119

I teach visual effects and digital art. I am used to the madly compLex interfaces (Maya, Blender, Nuke etc). I have no fear of such software. But I am completely defeated by Teams. - Why two windows when you are in a meeting? The second window is sometimes hard to find intuitively. - Why, when opening an attachment, is the user locked out of chat? Again, with many windows open, the preview can look and function like…

> - Why two windows when you are in a meeting? The second window is sometimes hard to find intuitively.

Seriously, that is a godsend if you are presenting a lot and have a two+ monitor setup - have the presentation up on one, still see your participants on the other one.

> - Upload a file to chat and sending that file are two separate actions. Why? I can’t count the number of times I have to remind students to press the send button after upload.

That's a safeguard. Too easy to send the wrong file. Making it a two-step process gives the user a chance to recognise a mistake and correct it.

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

#373

Post by coffeedoughnuts »

We use Teams for group calls at work, but Slack for all other messaging. This is because Slack's video calling feature has always been a pain, particularly for our Linux team members. It could have improved, but we moved to Teams for calls so I wouldn't know. Because I only open teams when we have a meeting and then immediately close it, my experience is generally positive. I _wish_ I could just use the browser based version to save opening the slow-slow-slow-to-open desktop app but: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/safari-browser-su... says I need to disable cross-site tracking which is, frankly, an insane ask.

I think that sort of poor engineering is a sign that the team behind teams must have very limited resources. It's hard to prioritise a desktop browser with such small market share, especially when a work around of 'just use the app' is there - but this is hardly a lean startup here.

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

#374

Post by fuzzy2 »

skc wrote: post #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…

Teams truly is that bad. But perhaps it takes power users to see that. A regular user might just give up instead of ranting about it on the net. It’s not that it doesn’t work. It’s that it’s not reliable and performance is bad.

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

#375

Post by thefz »

I never had it miss a beat, let alone crash, and I use it everyday for work.

It can be slow when joining very large meetings, though, but I use it mainly on a mobile CPU.

No issue with devices either and I can switch on the fly even when they are in use.

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

#376

Post by nl »

philippejara wrote: post #109
Maarten88 wrote: post #85

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 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…

WTF is it with this weird "things were better in the old days" nostalgia? They really, really weren't!

> Original skype would probably work better than zoom does today with a few tweaks

When it came out, Skype was amazing because it let you get video calls on your computer. The audio was flaky (I paid for a number for a work line and yeah - wasn't good!), the video broke up all the time, and it dropped out a lot. But we were new to video calls that worked at all and it seemed like a miracle!

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

#377

Post by MrPatan »

jerojero wrote: post #184
philippejara wrote: post #109

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…

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…

In Discord you can use the same account to join a new server, Slack makes you create a new identity one for every server you join, it's a pain. I don't know if it changed, but at least it was like that, and I never tried again.

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

#378

Post by uselpa »

coffeedoughnuts wrote: post #373

We use Teams for group calls at work, but Slack for all other messaging. This is because Slack's video calling feature has always been a pain, particularly for our Linux team members. It could have improved, but we moved to Teams for calls so I wouldn't know. Because I only open teams when we have a meeting and then immediately close it, my experience is generally positive. I _wish_ I could just use the browser based…

Teams works fine in Edge on a Mac. It’s the only reason I installed Edge.

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

#379

Post by roydivision »

My 2 cents of venting on this sorry excuse of software

- Backtick formatting in a chat post only works after typing the closing backtick, deleting it, re-typing it

- Text copied from a conversation is polluted with names and time stamps. "I really want this feature" said nobody ever

- The mute/unmute button is hard to find, I don't think I've ever attended a Teams meeting without someone struggling with this. Teams should change its name to "You're on mute"

- Multiple windows, I never know which is the 'main' window, which is the meeting window, where are they, which has focus

- Too hard to know which chat you're replying to, who is in it

- Updates in chats are not consistently acknowledged, you have to change focus, and back again. Even then the "Activity" tab still shows unread items that I have read

- Random crashing

- Random communication freezes, everyone else is chatting, I don't see any updates nor notification of any problems until I restart the app

- "Reply" is sometimes in the chat context menu, sometimes not.

- Media handling is inconsistent, sometimes I can't paste photos, sometimes I can

- The size of the text chat column in a meeting cannot be changed and is very narrow, forcing you to find the same chat in the 'main' window

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

#380

Post by c4ptnjack »

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 work for an outsourced tech company supporting a large system of hospitals in the NE USA.

In my team of 50+ people, the last 2 years since starting this contract have been steady transition to using Teams for all communications. They are now moving to use it for scheduling as well with it being integrated with the rest of the Office suite.

Moreover, the entire hospital system uses it as the defacto means of communication. This makes it incredibly easy to connect with any of the thousands of employees we have immediately in a lot ways.

I don't like Teams or the office suite whatsoever. However, I think the real secret to their sauce is simple: > Ecosystem integration > Cram every feature possible into each product

Those two things alone can makeup for all the deficiencies in Microsoft's products within the marketplace. Their software may be clunky, buggy, and terrible to use but if you have those two factors it will stay dominant imo.

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