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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?

#641

Post by bluGill »

dmichulke wrote: post #631
bko wrote: post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Micro…

Following your reasoning I'd say your answer is a non-answer as well because > executives at Microsoft want the product to work well. IMO, everyone wants the product to work well (except probably competitors). So why doesn't it? I'm aware this is not an answer either :-)

> So why doesn't it?

Because microsoft saw competitors that look scary and so decided they needed an all new project released in a hurry. If they have been willing to spend a few years before release they could have a good product, but instead they rushed things to production.

Lync (later skype for business) worked pretty good, but lacks a lot of features (others have mentioned various chat things before then). If they had invested in that all along they probably could have made a stable teams, but the temptation is to call something done and milk profits out of it until you are behind someone more innovated.

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

#642

Post by prepend »

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…

> Promoting openness was anathema to their Product people "Why would you want people to see what you say? Privacy is the default". I got the impression MS internally is not a safe space to speak, and Teams has that same cultural baggage.

This is really weird to me too and makes collaborating within an org difficult. One of the big advantages of teams should be that we’re all in the same org and get paid and background checked. So there’s a base level of identity.

I can’t tag someone unless they are in a team. So yesterday I was in a thread in an R user group and couldn’t tag someone not in the group even though they had a relevant project. This was stupid.

So I would have to ask him to join the team just to talk on this one thread. And that didn’t happen so the thread was worse off.

That and the notifications are horrible and I have so many from the 30 teams I’m in (partly because of the above problem) I just ignore them.

If someone IMs me, I don’t know it unless I manually go to the pain that shows notifications that is usually behind other meetings.

I suspect no one at Microsoft uses Teams realistically. So it’s just full of met requirements on paper and not in reality.

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

#643

Post by lbriner »

I'm not sure I share the view that Teams is terrible although I do occasionally have problems but I think it does share a lot of traits with modern software that I will call "spongeware" because it feels spongy.

Back in the day with pure desktop apps, you had crisp quick feedback when you clicked things, a window would open or be dismissed. It was hard to cause serious timing bugs because 1) Most things were written in code compiled to platform sdks and 2) Not much was network based 3) THe app worked more quickly than your clicking

What happens when you add not only network, but app frameworks that feel more like browsers than desktop apps, you click things and it takes a second to spring back, you think you clicked a button but nothing happens so you click it again, maybe the app is sending telemtry back to base or maybe it is needlessly loading a dataset from the network instead of just a local dll. What does it add up to? 1,000,000 unrepeatable bugs based on random timings and lockups, based on people doing things they didn't realise like double-clicking at the same time that anti-virus is scanning the network or your internet provider is having a blip!

There are still apps from the old-school like Notepad++ on Windows which feels solid and which auto-updates really easily instead of dynamically updating when you are trying to work but somehow they are not cool or don't tick the promise of "cross-platform development" which mostly means it's a bit crap on all platforms instead of great on one.

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

#644

Post by prepend »

matwood wrote: post #589
InitialLastName wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everybody I know has used Zoom at this point, and has thus seen what dead-simple and "just works" telecom software can be (not to mention FaceTime, which seems to revel in "your never-owned-a-computer grandparent is happy to use this").

Dead simple is something like Meet. Click a link and you're on a video call with nothing to install. On iOS, FaceTime is also great. Zoom is a dumpster fire.

I’ve had lots of small annoying problems with Meet and find that the only people who use it are Googlers.

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

#645

Post by prepend »

maxerickson wrote: post #196
oneplane wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And those are in the same boat as Teams: it came with the bundle. (well, one could argue that plenty of people enjoy Outlook, but OneDrive is nothing special and SharePoint is just a bad Wiki going the SAP integration hell route)

SharePoint gives you versioned file storage that searches inside of files. It's a big step up from a network drive or whatever. (and that's just the really basic out of the box usage)

I find Shareapoint versioning pretty terrible in that it versions every change and doesn’t let me do tags or releases. So with office auto save I’ll have 700 versions of a file as people changed one sentence a minute for a few hours.

I actually prefer a network drive over SharePoint because there are fewer lock and sync issues.

Especially compared to Dropbox or Google Drive (or even OneDrive) it’s so hard to use for file sharing.

I literally would prefer mediawiki from the 2000s in terms of ui and support ability.

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

#646

Post by bachmeier »

planede wrote: post #444
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…

Also "we are paying for O365 already, we get Teams for free*".

If you're the one in charge of the budget, paying $12.50/month for each employee does not make sense if you're already paying for an alternative. (Assuming Business is sufficient; Enterprise would be a lot more.)

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

#647

Post by wincy »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #562
dustedcodes wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Slack is worse than Teams, no thanks.

Teams seems to consistently make me think I’m fat fingering things and I have to go back and type again when I open a new message and start typing. I seems like it’s storing something in a buffer then spewing it async out all at once in the wrong order when it catches up with my input. This happens multiple times a day on a 2017 i7 laptop.

Maybe Teams is an Intel make work program? Have it run slow on all but the most expensive new Intel processors?

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

#648

Post by mst »

kurisufag wrote: post #576
dustedcodes wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

why on earth would you use Discord in a company setting? I would rather just go back to IRC.

I've always regarded Slack as "IRC, but non-geeks will use it as well."

This model is not by any means entirely accurate but it's been an extremely effective heuristic.

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

#650

Post by mgkimsal »

yurishimo wrote: post #568
coldtea wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, "let's tie our codebase to the choice of ticket system forever as a means to commit documentation"

You can have both. Also, let's not pretend developers are wholly committed to writing comprehensive commit messages. A ticket number is useful if the change was relatively recent. If the organization moves to a different tool, chances are they are well aware of the potential history they are leaving behind.

and... I've never yet been in a team/project where being able to track/view/find issue/code pairings from years ago was ever remotely useful or helpful. If it was something in the last few months, sometimes people could dig in and try to understand a bit more by asking relevant people.

Finding a 'bug' introduced by someone from 4 years ago who doesn't work there any more, then finding the particular ticket that spawned it... this has never been high on the priority list of anyone I've ever worked with.

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