Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad? • Hacker News Board

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

#511

Post by hnbad » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 11:04 AM UTC

Jaruzel wrote: post #466

Duber wrote: post #426

And don't forget about multi-tenant support. If you have multiple accounts or your account has access to multiple tenants, you can only really work in one of them at a time. You have to log out and log in to each of them. Totally unusable. Slack got this well from day zero. I can't understand how 6 years later MS Teams still doesn't support well this simple and common scenario.

Inline external teams (from other tenants) has been in beta for a while now - last time I heard, they kept having issues with the security model. At the very least, MS should let us run multiple copies of Teams, one for each tenant. The only way around it right now, is to have the desktop client open and then the web client for a different tenant.

You can switch tenants on the fly without having to "log in" again but it essentially restarts most of the app from scratch every time you switch compared to Slack which essentially treats different workspaces like different tabs.

I think philosophically the cause is that MS 365 and Azure AD are very much built on the idea of having isolated tenants with cross-tenant guests being local copies (the documentation for implementing Azure auth for apps explicitly recommends against mixing tenants) and tenant switching was clearly an afterthought. But there's really no reason not to allow having entirely separate copies of Teams for the different tenants just like you can have multiple copies of Edge signed into different accounts.

On the other I would be wholly unsurprised to learn that there are some obscure data sharing violations happening in the Slack client when you are connected to multiple Slack workspaces and Teams avoids them through rigorous isolation.

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

#512

Post by dustedcodes » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 11:05 AM UTC

That’s why they integrate it directly into Windows 11 and force everyone to have/use Trams whether they like it or not. They are already rubbing their hands when they can report their DAU to make it look like people actually like Teams.

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

#513

Post by dustedcodes » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 11:05 AM UTC

zmmmmm wrote: post #402

Teams doesn't have to be good to succeed. It just has to exist. It's not even very important how good it is. Given it exists, IT will make everyone use it on Microsoft's behalf regardless of how bad it is. Or another way to look at it is that the real customers for Teams are IT departments. It makes their lives easier because they don't have to do anything and it meets all the compliance requirements they are suppose…

Someone should make job board where people can filter out companies that use Teams instead of Slack or Discord.

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

#514

Post by nullcontext » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 11:06 AM UTC

Clearly because they've done a poor job of integrating and then forcing adoption of the stickers and gif inputs. They should've threatened to call forth a Skypening if the users failed to enthusiastically and relentlessly toss questionable stickers and gifs onto every other line in a work IM. From every colleague. From LoB to shining LoB. Cross-silos and spanning every Org... until the market is fully forcefully penetrated.

One day we'll all make the switch to sticker based conversating, but until they push it feverishly and madly like the world is ending that evolution will be just out of our grasp. They simply halfassedly work to make it actively bad and don't really have the drive to make it truly sinister like they should. Somehow it would drive gains in the share price quarter over quarter like any sufficiently evil dark pattern spec software always does automagically.

Frustratingly Microsoft is just not laser-focused enough on driving the adoption of a campaign to hit those KPI's it seems.

/s

(I weep for the death of Lync daily)

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

#515

Post by jupp0r » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 11:07 AM UTC

Time to look for a new employer who values your time and productivity.

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

#516

Post by jupp0r » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 11:09 AM UTC

dustedcodes wrote: post #513

zmmmmm wrote: post #402

Teams doesn't have to be good to succeed. It just has to exist. It's not even very important how good it is. Given it exists, IT will make everyone use it on Microsoft's behalf regardless of how bad it is. Or another way to look at it is that the real customers for Teams are IT departments. It makes their lives easier because they don't have to do anything and it meets all the compliance requirements they are suppose…

Someone should make job board where people can filter out companies that use Teams instead of Slack or Discord.

Throw JIRA into the mix while you're on it.

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

#517

Post by jupp0r » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 11:12 AM UTC

mfer wrote: post #508

zmmmmm wrote: post #402

Teams doesn't have to be good to succeed. It just has to exist. It's not even very important how good it is. Given it exists, IT will make everyone use it on Microsoft's behalf regardless of how bad it is. Or another way to look at it is that the real customers for Teams are IT departments. It makes their lives easier because they don't have to do anything and it meets all the compliance requirements they are suppose…

If the software works well but isn’t compliant with laws a lot of companies will have issues with it. There are a bunch of regulations these days. GDPR is just one of them. A lot of tools are just not compliant. IT departments have to take those into account. Especially at public companies. Microsoft does a good job at that and tends to make it easy for the IT departments, too

There are plenty of large public companies not using Teams. I always found this to be a strange argument.

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

#518

Post by skeletal88 » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 11:12 AM UTC

Galanwe wrote: post #336

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 don't know what happened, but they took a lot of time integrating technologies from Skype (peer-to-peer) with their own tech (which was more telecom/server based) I was at Skype at the time, working on this very migration, so maybe I can shed some light on what happened. There were a number of failures (on Microsoft part mainly) that made the whole thing col…

Someone I know who worked there said that after the sale to Ms they had 4 levels of managers between a developer and Ballmer. A year later it was 8 levels. Maybe he was exxagerating, but that was also adding to the problems

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

#519

Post by friendzis » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 11:14 AM UTC

roydivision wrote: post #379

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 s…

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

I want this feature in any "enterprise" chat app. In fact, more often than not if I copy multiple messages from multiple authors I want to have author/time metadata. For the very same reason we leave replied-to content in emails.

I agree that there should be mechanism to copy text only and even a setting to chose the default behavior.

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

#520

Post by FridgeSeal » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 11:15 AM UTC

s1mon wrote: post #253

I hate how Teams really can’t handle full-duplex conversations, at least with transpacific calls. You pretty much need to speak, pause, and then hope that only one person speaks next, or there’s a series of “sorry, you go ahead…” until someone manages to get started again. Background noise removal and feedback removal is poor compared to the competition. I much prefer Zoom for video/voice conferencing and Slack for t…

> I hate how Teams really can’t handle full-duplex conversations, at least with transpacific calls.

Half my teammates live in the same city and duplex conversations basically don't work. It's not just "my internet is bad", I can jump on discord with my friends, and watch 3 people stream stuff (in higher quality) simultaneously, and have multiple people talking simultaneously and be able to clearly hear all of them.