Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 decid…
Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?
451–460 of 814 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?
#452Long 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/…
Isn't teams just a reskinned SharePoint with messenging and conference capabilities added? Does it use tech from the Skype acquisition? I do remember everybody using Skype, it was so popular it created a verb of its own, we used to skype with each other. Microsoft paid what was an enormous amount for it back then, then basically let it rot. Really surprising.
The exception for this, is private channels (the ones with little padlocks next to their names). These are created in their own isolated SharePoint site outside of the parent "teams" SharePoint site. It's done this way because the access security around teams/channels is the SharePoint security system. It's a totally nuts way to do it.
Teams is basically built using existing MS technologies in the same way that incorrect LEGO bricks can be forced together if you try hard enough.
I don't think MS have the ability to build an application from ground up anymore.
---
[1] The one upside of this, is that if you only care about the files held in Teams, you can "Sync" the site to your PC, and it appears as a virtual folder in File Explorer.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?
#453Earlier 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…
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…
Re: Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?
#454I 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…
As I mentioned, in class, every single day I have to remind students to press the send button.
This tells me something very clearly: that they did not observe users actually using this app before they released it.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?
#455My 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 s…
As far as the keyboard's concerned I think it's three buttons - something like cmd-shift-m where on Slack it's just m. Drives me mad.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?
#456It's the same with other Microsoft products. Like someone else said, it doesn't matter how bad they are, money streams are basically guaranteed.
It's weird how their software almost feels like shareware or debian packages lurking in the repos unchanged for 10 years, just with ads and unresponsive UI.
Students and teachers really have no interest in being informed on the bottom of the screen that it's currently raining (we have actual windows for that), nor do we care that Ethereum's Ether fell by 10% in value this day.
Such things make no sense in an educational setting. Moreover even browsing the web when the teacher wants to show us some JS animation on a website (you know, such website that doesn't get updated, yet works, it's path starts with a tilde, and is only served via plaintext http) is uncomfortable, as Edge browser starts up with a screen filled with ads and random news articles about the war in Ukraine or political situation in the US.
I went quite off course, but Teams is no different. As soon as the teacher logs in to the computer, Teams is starting to launch. Why? It would be somewhat okay if it just launched in the background, but no, after 20 seconds a Teams window opens, wastes 5 seconds of lecture time, because it doesn't immediately have the Close button drawn.
Maybe theese are all just issues our IT team could solve, but given the immense amount of money siphoned into MS both by the school and the country's educational ministry, some reasonable defaults could be expected.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?
#457My 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 s…
Most frustrating for me is that I receive no call notifications. Well, sometimes I do, but most of the time I do not and I need to wait until a call has been missed before I see who’s called. Unless I happen to be in the chat window of the person who’s calling…then I can see the “join call” button active. It’s maddening and IT can’t solve it properly, and I’m not the only one at my company having this issue. Utter ga…
Then over the next two hours I get 30 notifications about people liking my comment and nothing for anything actually useful, like calls. It doesn't even pretend to let me turn off notifications for reactions without losing the whole channel's notifications.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?
#458I 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
I understand that. However, the way they implemented it was clumsy. See my comments below. For this, this is a serios time-waster. Every day I have to remind people use this feature incorrectly.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?
#459Re: Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?
#460Because it doesn't need to improve. It just needs to check some checkboxes. It's "free" as part of Microsoft Office 365. It allows the IT department to check a checkbox and de-incentivize them from looking at Slack. With Slack you have to pay for and is yet another app to administer. Many IT departments who are already Microsoft customers will have an easier time rolling that out than a new app. No new purchase order…
It's actually not free as part of all Office 365 plans, sadly. We discovered recently that we'd either have to downgrade(!!!) to the version with only web apps, or upgrade to the version with Exchange, to get teams. (Or, better yet, pay for a Teams-specific license since it's $0.25 cheaper than getting Exchange...) Of course, the whole reason that we were looking at it is that one vendor who says they prefer Teams fo…
https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-365/business/compa...