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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?

#611

Post by andylynch »

xmcqdpt2 wrote: post #499
andylynch wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft also had MindAlign, which was an excellent no-nonsense group chat originally spun off from UBS (!) and widely liked by its users at various big firms, mostly banks- basically it was like IRC with management tools and record keeping added to meet compliance and audit needs. Bits got folded into Lync/ Skype for Business but those were never as good and certain customers are still using the original product.

I work at a bank and we currently (but for how long??) use Symphony which is "Slack but for finance" https://symphony.com/ It's way better than teams in core features, although integrations are missing, and it doesn't have call functionality.

Goldmans’ response to Bloomberg reporters looking at stuff they shouldn’t have… Symphony is pretty good. It does have video calling but I think many customers opt not to use it.

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

#612

Post by dachryn »

brodouevencode wrote: post #575
k_sze wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Can we use anti-trust laws to break it up?

Are you really suggesting to break up a company simply based solely on your dissatisfaction with the product?

the bundled packaging where they give it away for free to get market share is a well documented antitrust practice.

Lookup diapers.com for instance. Amazon sold diapers below cost to gain marketshare, took all customers from diapers.com, those guys went bankrupt, and Amazon upped the prices to higher levels than before.

I am not suggesting breaking up Microsoft and Teams, I am suggesting that giving away Teams for free should not be allowed, it needs to be fairly priced. But Microsoft has good lawyers of course.

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

#613

Post by jiggawatts »

AndrewVos wrote: post #435
thefz wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's bad about Azure?

So many things. One that is irritating me a lot right now is how complex it is to deploy to an "App Service" and how nothing seems to work. Also it's incredibly slow. https://github.com/Azure/webapps-deploy/issues/60 And the fact that we're locked into using it means I have to take my 50 second netlify deploy and migrate it to a 15 minute ADO deploy, losing out on loads of features and gaining none.

Just put your web app in a container and call it a day?

App Service can run containerised workloads just fine.

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

#614

Post by dachryn »

f1refly wrote: post #598
mfer wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's illegal to transfer PII to microsoft under GDPR though, so wouldn't it be like setting up a minefield for your employees to consciously choose ms teams for daily communications?

no its not illegal, it just needs a lot of lawyers to workout the details. GDPR does not block a lot of things, it only requires you to work out the proper procedures and paperwork. And that is where Microsoft is good at, the compliance support.

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

#615

Post by trelane »

pc86 wrote: post #582
trelane wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is using existing products to leverage yourself into a new market anticompetitive, or "how any company expands into a new market?"

Depends on the scale of your foothold

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

#616

Post by rjsw »

pc86 wrote: post #567
rjsw wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm trying to cleanup a Git tree right now where people haven't put JIRA tags in their commit comments, it is impossible to find out why a change was made, it isn't a totally stupid requirement.

"It's impossible to find out why a change was made" is a completely separate issue. Either the code is documented or it's not, completely polluting your history with JIRA tags isn't the answer - not least of all because like a sibling commenter said you're now forever tied to JIRA, or if you ever move off of JIRA, now get to choose between bringing JIRA tag information into the new ticketing system, or rewriting your…

The project has just moved to JIRA from Bugzilla. The original convention was to put the Bugzilla issue ID in commit comments, these IDs were carried forward when moving to JIRA so people can still search for them.

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

#617

Post by jdhzzz »

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…

Things I like (What?):

Ctrl-Shift-V pastes into TEAMs with no formatting. Should be part of the OS. Contrary to WebEx (what we came from for meetings), joining a TEAMs meeting from both PC and phone joins you as one participant, not 2.

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

#619

Post by bko »

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…

This is a bad answer. It's actually a non-answer. You can apply this to a lot of questions. Why does X ... Y (because X can get away with it).

There are real resources behind Microsoft Teams and a lot of people want it to be good. They may not get much of a signal about how well their product is doing compared to competitors because lock-in effects, but I can guarantee you the product managers and executives at Microsoft want the product to work well.

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

#620

Post by jiggawatts »

RaiausderDose wrote: post #277
bluedino wrote: post #36

Can't even copy and paste code etc What a joke.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/send-code-snippet...

Haha.. I tried that.

In the editor it inserted half a page of blank lines for no reason.

Then it sent the snippet with an ENORMOUS bold heading, also for no reason.

Then the 4-line script was truncated to 3 lines so as to confuse the person receiving it.

Fantastic quality.

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