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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?

#711

Post by futhey »

Their goal was to get a bunch of users. Their team figured out how, and went out and got a bunch of users very rapidly. Mission accomplished. Microsoft was very happy.

Oh– It's a buggy video call solution and poor replacement for Slack? Yeah, not important.

They're at over 270m users in an ecosystem of 350m Office 365 users. There's no "less buggy version of Teams" out there with market share to attract by making minor improvements to the software.

It does exactly what it's supposed to, and what Skype for Business already did. The biggest thing moving the roadmap forward is Teams capability to do "Office 365 Enablement" - i.e. win new users into the Office 365 ecosystem.

There's a lot of things Microsoft can do to accomplish that. Some of them may be new Teams features. Some of them are tweaks to pricing and bundling and other unsexy things like that. Some of them may eventually be bug fixes or fun features that make Teams more enjoyable to use.

But, at this point, your best chance of getting minor features built, is to hope internal Microsoft employees find it annoying enough to prioritize, just so they can see the feature fixed.

Because Teams does what it's supposed to, decently well, and well enough to succeed massively in the marketplace for "generic video call software I don't have to pay a bunch of extra money for".

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

#712

Post by me_again »

skeletal88 wrote: post #518
Galanwe wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

It's generally engineer -> engineering manager (10 people) -> group engineering manager (100 people) -> VP -> fancy VP -> CEO.

Depth of org in a company is logN(number of employees) where N is the number of reports a manager has. At Microsoft there's order of 100K full time employees and N is about 10, so depth is about 6. This seems fairly unremarkable to me, though obviously there are other ways to do it.

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

#713

Post by obert »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #431
obert wrote: post #368

As long as companies keep paying for it, the signal given is “keep going like this”. CIOs’ fault.

CIOs don't care about user happiness but about cost, compliance, security, and general ass-coverage. MS is really good at ticking those boxes for companies. MS Live is included with a lot of other stuff they also need. So, they sign for a site license and then they get to use outlook, office 365, and all the rest of the stuff that companies need (or think they need). It's a package deal, alternative solutions would b…

> CIOs don't care about user happiness but about cost, compliance, security, and general ass-coverage.

exactly what I meant. And users should complain about their CIOs rationale, when they choose a product ignoring usability, openness, etc

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

#714

Post by motherfscker »

apecat wrote: post #700
kylen wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. It might even be that while the engineering team is aware of the faults, the MS exec team considers Teams to be brilliant. At the senior level the role becomes a sales role - you are continuously selling your output, team, product, vision, etc internally to the other execs, board, etc. It's important therefore to present whatever you are producing as exceptional. So you look for indicators that support your pitc…

Was looking for a good place to post this in the thread but I'll just drop it here. Microsoft Teams still lacks multi-account support on desktop. As in, you can't sign on to several business organizations like you can in Slack. It's so dumb and disqualifying. Utter nightmare if you work with several organizations. https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/idea/c9995dc8-... I've bookmarked that page and I check in…

The fun part is that this functionality already has been added to teams (for over a year now), it’s just disabled and hidden by default. Might be worth enabling it if you use multiple orgs. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams/track...

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

#715

Post by AndrewVos »

jiggawatts wrote: post #613
AndrewVos wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would love to get this done quick. Do you have a link to something usable?

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

#716

Post by bborud »

JeremyNT wrote: post #678
bborud wrote: post #673

OK, let's not mince words. It is so bad because you, all of you who suffer under this, don't give IT managers and decision makers enough shit for choosing this crap. You don't stand up for yourself, you don't refuse to use it, and you do nothing to improve your situation because you think you can't. Right now most of you are shaking your head. "It isn't that simple". "I can't do anything about this". "It isn't my pla…

I've worked at the same place for years, and they switched to Teams a couple of years ago. I can't change their decision, but I can work for somebody else, and having to suffer through this crapware is pushing me in that direction. "Must use Teams" is a huge red flag for any potential job offer.

I think you under-estimate the amount of power you have if something is really important.

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

#717

Post by costcofries »

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…

Nobody with decision making power actually cares whether any of the software in use in enterprises works well or not.

^this just isn't true. There's three camps of people. 1) The people who use Teams today and think it works just fine, they even enjoy it and find it simple to use (these people exist). 2) The people who use teams but are annoyed by many small issues that together cumulate to a poor UX. 3) People who will never like Teams for many reasons but make a point about being as vocal as possible about their hate.

Decision makers and leaders care about 1 and 2, which imho is good. I do agree that Teams isn't perfect and I also agree that it plays best, for now, with IT ecosystems. That said, end user love is critical and I think fixing that for group 2 will only help to secure Teams' undeniable comp advantage.

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

#718

Post by blodkorv »

vegai_ wrote: post #581
planede wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yep, and the logical conclusion would be to stop paying for O365.

There are no real alternatives to office-365 for a majority of the companies out there.

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

#719

Post by llama052 »

tryauuum wrote: post #281
llama052 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How hard is it to get codeblocks working instead of them focusing on every use case on the planet. It's so damn terrible.

Backticks suck, but you can insert code block with syntax highlighting from menu

Yeah nothing better than clicking through 2 different nested menus to insert code.

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

#720

Post by llama052 »

TideAd wrote: post #99
llama052 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How hard is it to get codeblocks working instead of them focusing on every use case on the planet. It's so damn terrible.

Always a 50/50 shot whether typing three tick marks ``` will do what I want, or do nothing.

Yeah it never works for me on the mac osx desktop client. Even the regular quote tickets don't work.
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