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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?

#661

Post by relaxing »

petejansson wrote: post #639
b0afc375b5 wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, what's wrong with JIRA?

JIRA implementations I've seen don't help people see what's ahead; they focus on what's been done to date. If you're on a single, small team that has minimal dependencies on other teams, that can work, but if the project has any significant dependencies on other teams, it becomes very hard for anyone to understand how things are going.

That’s literally the point of the kanban board. I don’t understand how these projects were configured for that to be true — did they hide the backlog?

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

#662

Post by przemub »

baby wrote: post #343
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/…

It's really crazy how everyone had MSN back when I was younger. It was great, it had webcam stuff, personalization of font size and colors and such, plenty of emoticons, and even GAMES! I can't believe they managed to kill this amazing product. I do feel like FB is being killed in the same way, as it was an amazing product for many years and has slowly become ads and unrelated content in a noisy newsfeed :( I really…

It's because it's not enough any more to have a company with a stable source of income; investors expect a stable increase of income.

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

#663

Post by friendzis »

vultour wrote: post #586
friendzis wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Sure, if you're copying multiple messages in a conversation. Otherwise you're still able to select the name and time along with the message. Hijacking my clipboard with data I have not selected can fuck off.

In case of a single message yes. I guess sane default behavior is to copy content only with single message and content+metadate with multiple messages.

I guess we are in agreement then

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

#664

Post by jhickok »

vunuxodo wrote: post #225
krauses wrote: post #217

I’ve used Teams every day all day for the past 4+ years and I have had minor issues with it ~5 times. Hundreds of my fellow co-workers use it and I’ve not heard anyone run into the consistent issues you’ve described. We use it for 100% of our conference calls, sales calls, 1:1 working sessions, all-hands (hundreds of attendees), virtual trainings, new-hire onboarding, etc… I’d say it’s the most useful software we use…

I'm forced to use it on a Mac. Every. Single. Time. I try to navigate to the window through command-tab, it fails to actually put the window in focus. So I end up having to hunt through my XCode windows, IntelliJ windows, whatever other nonsense I have open - to find a message ping that I probably would rather not have received anyway.

When I share an application on my mac, Teams overlays directly on top of that application window every time and I have to move it out of the way. It is so annoying.

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

#665

Post by jhickok »

skc wrote: post #348

I work for a very large insurance company. Pretty much the whole company is on Teams. If Teams was as bad as this thread suggests we would have heard about it (I know this because company-wide we complain bitterly about the anti-malware cruft that gums up our machines daily) So it seems to me that we either got very lucky with our rollout or this thread represents a very vocal minority of people that are experiencing…

I think the worst part, by far, is the search. Trying to hunt down a message is a complete mess.

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

#666

Post by belter »

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…

The most basic of features, like freezing the screen while switching context in a presentation, is not available. A request for years by all users and available like for ever, in GotoMeeting or Webex.

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msteams/forum/all/freeze...

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msteams/forum/all/pausin...

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/tech-community-ideas/...

Thinking about it, what offers from Microsoft are not used just because somebody must use it...Or their company got it for free?

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

#667

Post by sandos »

I find it works extremely well. I can't remember a single crash, even though I started using it pretty early on in the pandemic, along with tens of thousands of other employees. It was clearly worse in 2020 though.

Edit: I do hate one thing, no way to share part of the screen! When using an ultrawide I always have to resort to lowering my resolution to a lowest common denominator 1080p to avoid people not being able to read what I share. Sharing one app doesn't work since I switch applications too much and want to share them all.

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

#668

Post by hiidrew »

Teams is alright imo. But working on collaborative documents in other apps is brutal, especially compared to GDrive and Figma's experience. I guess there are little incentives for them to improve when they already have 100s of fortune 500 companies under contract.

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

#669

Post by jabroni_salad »

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…

> - The size of the text chat column in a meeting cannot be changed and is very narrow, forcing you to find the same chat in the 'main' window

So evidently chats CAN be narrow if they want but god forbid you want to shrink down any of the windows to park on the edge of your secondary monitor. Why is the minimum window size so goddam huge?

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

#670

Post by osigurdson »

4whaitsworth99 wrote: post #629
osigurdson wrote: post #549

Honestly, I don't find it bad at all. It hardly ever crashes or drops connections and we use it a lot. My only beef is voice communication latency. It is definitely several hundred milliseconds - far worse than using a phone. This leads to very unnatural CB-radio type conversations (you almost need to say "over" when you are finished talking).

For what it's worth... I use teams all day for communication across all of the teams I work with in 3 different countries and have no latency issues. I agree with your assessment that it isn't bad though. I don't have any of the issues that everyone here is reporting. Everything just works, I can call any of the 1000s of people at our org and they can join effortlessly. I'd happily switch to whatever else to be less…

I might be exaggerating a little. However, that is one thing that we noticed when back in the office post covid. Small group (5-8 people) conversations flowed better. In small groups, low latency is very important. It matters less with one on one conversations and is unimportant for large meetings.

I want sub 50ms.

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