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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?

#381

Post by rkagerer »

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…

> Forums weren't replaced by...

Well, for me they were never replaced. I still frequent them regularly for some of the best communities and community-based support around (eg. fortunately vendors of my 3D printing and PCB manufacturing equipment host good ones).

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

#383

Post by thefz »

AndrewVos wrote: post #357

Most things made by Microsoft are horrific. Just look at Azure. It's because they have a bad culture and developers who could never care about their capitalist hell products. Once your company is stuck into a contract with them it's almost impossible to change, so why do they care about fixing anything.

What's bad about Azure?

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

#384

Post by shafyy »

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.”

Bingo. That's the simple and real answer. They invest heavily in sales and lock in big corporates into their ecosystem. Now, they don't have any incentive than to go the extra mile for somehting like Teams. I think it will hurt them in the long run, but in the short term, it's quite profitable probably.

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

#385

Post by KronisLV »

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/…

> Then they bought Skype and it went downhill from there.

I still remember older versions of Skype, which felt usable and rock solid. I actually used some from I think http://www.oldversion.com/windows/skype/ back in the day for my personal stuff, because the reworked UI was just worse.

But nowadays, I don't really care that much, whether I have to use Skype, Teams, Zoom, Slack, Discord, Jitsi, Mattermost, Rocket.Chat or something else - all of the communication tools out there feel viable, just none are excellent.

That said, WhatsApp feels like it's an order of magnitude faster (on mobile) than Signal and Telegram somehow (privacy implications aside, it's still one of the more popular ways to chat with people in the EU), which I found interesting. Of course, it's generally for chatting, not necessarily team collaboration (where you'd want channels and workspaces). On the desktop, however, generally you're just dealing with packaged browser apps most of the time.

I do feel like mentioning how nice having self-hostable non-cloud options is when you need them, be it Nextcloud Talk or the aforementioned Jitsi, Mattermost, Rocket.Chat or something else.

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

#386

Post by coffeedoughnuts »

uselpa wrote: post #378
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.

If I’m going to need to install and open specific software just to use Teams, then it’s probably going to be the Teams app itself.

The purpose of having it browser based is that I can have it quickly open in a tab in the window I’m already in and then close it again.

Other MS products work in my browser (Outlook for example) so why not Teams? I suspect because the Teams team is pretty understaffed.

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

#387

Post by djhworld »

MrPatan wrote: post #377
jerojero wrote: post #184

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…

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.

Slack is designed for business use, i.e. you join with your company email address which is linked to a Slack organization for the company you work for (or you get invited to join as an external party)

I don't think it's ever been sold as like, a general purpose chat platform like IRC or Discord...it's a shame a bunch of OSS projects decided to settle on Slack for their community chat.

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

#388

Post by navane »

shadowofneptune wrote: post #285
thekingofrome wrote: post #263

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?

where i live (western europe), the telco's overcharged for sms, making a decent conversation costs euros each. Whatsapp + wifi is free.

I heard that originally sms wasn't meant to be a consumer product, it was just so technicians could test or communicate. Then the telco's realized people like texting more than calling (people prefer async sometimes, weird because comms mainly developed from async to sync), and decided to charge a limb for it.

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

#389

Post by happymellon »

One thing that has been referenced but not really talked about is that Teams doesn't want to be a tool, but the complete solution.

With the built in SharePoint, and Office editors you can see that it is designed for a very particular use case. The problem is that most people on Hacker News are not just document sharing and editing. Most people are not doing this, and especially not in the half baked Office online tooling.

As a chat tool isn't not great. It isn't supposed to be a chat tool though, which is why it will never be good.

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

#390

Post by dmje »

I'm working with a client right now, trying to onboard them to O365 - I tried to push them the GSuite way (I prefer it, they prefer it, but their IT company is fixed on O365 and...other reasons) - so have been spending lots of time working with O365 from a top-down perspective.

Individually, things like MS Word / Excel work really brilliantly in the browser and as a cloud suite. But put them together and it's an absolutely clusterf*k.

The list of "apps" is absolutely enormous - and there is no coherent route between them, or consistency in operation. It looks like exactly what it is - a huge, overarching and insanely rich company just simply bought All The Things, slapped a bit of branding and a font on everything and then popped all the icons onto the same page. There's zero consistency, zero sense of how these things should be used together, zero explanation as to why you'd choose (say) Yammer over Teams, "Bookings" over Outlook calendars, or "Viva" over Sharepoint. The documentation is awful - again, not individually - sometimes this is ok - but the overall "this is the suite you're buying into, and here's how to use it" strategic overview. In fact it isn't awful, it's just simply non-existent.

This is before you even get to the absolute horribleness of the logging in / logging out / multiple windows opening / redirection hell user experience.

And then - layer on Teams on top of this - it is absolutely opaque about whether Teams is trying to be a sort of "glue" for all of the above (it fails) or a replacement (it fails) or a standalone thing (it mostly fails). There's a sort of half-assed attempt to make bits of Teams sort of work with bits of Sharepoint, but no, actually it turns out it doesn't, quite...

It's just such a weird thing. As I say, the individual experiences are sometimes quite good - Word is really excellent in-browser for example - but the overall piece is just absolutely insane. I'm slightly at a loss as to how to onboard and train organisations with few IT skills when a veteran like me (20+ years in the business) is absolutely baffled by it.

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