Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?

Post by pc86 » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 12:20 PM UTC

trelane wrote: post #566

i_am_jl wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'd be hard to argue that MS has a monopoly on real time collaboration software when Slack exists. It'd be similarly difficult to argue they're acting anti-competitively when Slack is thriving.

I think usually the argument is that they're leveraging an _existing_ foothold to gain advantage in a _new_ market. So the existing foothold is MS Office and MS Office 360, and the new market is messaging. How they gained this foothold in desktop productivity software is left as an exercise to the reader.

Post by pc86 » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 12:20 PM UTC

treeman79 wrote: post #507

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…

I recall decades ago picking up a book on J++ as a teenager. I quickly realized the entire point of the language was to sabotage Java. Not to be useful. Refused to use windows for rest of career after that.

Post by vultour » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 12:21 PM UTC

friendzis wrote: post #519

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 se…

Post by jiggawatts » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 12:23 PM UTC

joejag wrote: post #564

I had the joy of helping with a Teams to replace Slack rollout at the start of the Pandemic. During which I had multiple meetings with Engineers and Product folks at MS. Two reasons struck out as significant problems. The first was that Teams is Skype and Sharepoint mashed together with duct tape. When you'd ask for improved UX, it would all fall to "Ah yes, the Sharepoint team would have to do X so the other team ca…

Post by what-the-grump » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 12:23 PM UTC

analog31 wrote: post #30

It's the iPhone effect: If you use Teams, and something goes wrong, everybody is patient and sympathetic. If you use something else, then it's your fault for being "weird" or "cheap." In my case, my computer came from IT, pre-loaded with Teams, and it runs nearly flawlessly. But I've noticed something else about computers and software. You can have two people with similar jobs, similar computers, similar software, et…