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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?

#751

Post by nikau »

vel0city wrote: post #696
nikau wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It probably also depends what you are used to. Younger people have only ever used bloated laggy stuff like teams and don't know any better. I miss the days of just having a dedicated desk phone - it rings, you answer, and talk instantly. Teams in comparison pops up a call dialogue box, have to navigate the mouse to answer (because the answer hotkey doesn't work most of the time), wait for it to connect, fuck around f…

> I miss the days of just having a dedicated desk phone I don't really. It tied me to my desk. Now my extension is wherever I want to work, not just at my desk. Its on my cell phone, its on my work laptop, its wherever I am. Loads of desk phones didn't have any Bluetooth support so using a headset meant getting a probably expensive maybe proprietary thing with EHS support (or a mechanical handset lifter!!!). When I w…

Yeah its probably a half rose coloured glasses and half the era and implementation of deskphone.

I had an pre-voip Avaya phone with 24 speed dials - for each contact it had a red/green LED next to the speed dial button that showed if they were busy. If it was green you could just press it and call. It had a proper headset port so no ghetto lifter :)

Teams has available status also, but I find its pretty much useless as people either fake their status to avoid being hassled, or its synced to their outlook calendar that has so much junk in it that they show as busy all day.

Roaming around wasn't much of an issue either, I just had forward to cell phone if it wasn't answered after a certain number of rings.

We also had integration with windows so tel: links and dialling from contacts worked as expected.

In the end I've learnt to live with teams, I made a small "chat" script that uses a teams url [0] to open a chat with a person from the command line vs hunting through the awful laggy ui, another AHK script to make a global mute hotkey based on a library I found on github, and another script I wrote to fix the audio device.

[0] https://teams.microsoft.com/l/chat/0/0?users=xxxx

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

#752

Post by [deleted] »

mission_failed wrote: post #626
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…

Searching Oh god the searching It's so bad it must be actively designed to not work. Find a result that is outside the current cached chats and want to see the posts around it for context? Just click the result... To show only the result on page?? Lol gfy, you have to manually scroll allllllllll the way back through months of texts. Let's lump together text chats meeting chats, org chart and sharepoint/teams files, a…

[deleted]

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

#753

Post by telcal »

dagaci wrote: post #483

This thread is incredibly negative, this is a suprise because our entire company relies on teams for remote working and it works pretty damned well. Interestingly teams usage seems to be still rising post-pandemic, something competitors are not seeing (and competitors include its own Skype product), teams even managed to surpass Slack in third part plugin support. So i'm not really buying this thread as repsentative,…

I guess it's like any product review, those with poor experiences are more likely to voice their opinion.

Our org uses Teams and sure, there are some negatives (search, I'm looking at you) I've never had any of the issues the parent has and I've been using it daily since it first came out. I also use Slack (less frequently) and prefer Teams, but Slack's search is much better.

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

#754

Post by rnk »

dachryn wrote: post #608
planede wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

remember when Slack tried to file an antitrust complaint about these anti-competitive practices? Yeah well somehow that got silenced real quick. Microsoft is evil under the surface, with extreme close ties to governments, regulators, ...

I'm skeptical that even mighty microsoft can make anti-competitive claims go away by complaining to their favorite regulators. They were beat up by that. Can you provide more info?

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

#755

Post by rnk »

me_again wrote: post #712
skeletal88 wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I love that alignment description, that reminds me of what it was like when I was at Microsoft. Fancy VPs always did unclear things. Above them in my chain was some kind of president who had no clear role either.

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

#756

Post by jupp0r »

kevincox wrote: post #548
jupp0r wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Throw JIRA into the mix while you're on it.

Also can I choose my own OS or am I stuck with the "approved" one or two.

You can choose which job to take and you can ask what OS they'll allow you to use before you sign any offer.

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

#757

Post by jerojero »

Lazare wrote: post #261
jerojero wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forums weren't replaced by discord. Forums were replaced by Reddit. Although you post still stands, I think you're very wrong in thinking about the reasoning why people use one or another platform. Let's think about discord for a minute, why is everyone using it? And what are they using it for? I think the answers here are rather simple, people have a need for communication with peers; this communication usually take…

> Forums weren't replaced by discord. Forums were replaced by Reddit. Although you post still stands, I think you're very wrong in thinking about the reasoning why people use one or another platform. There may be some contexts where that's true, but overwhelmingly I've seen Discord replacing forums, particularly for small, closed groups. Wheereas I've never so much as heard of any group adopting a private subreddit!…

People used private forums before? Pretty much every country and even cities have their own subreddit, games all have their own "official" subreddits, and every hobby under the sun also has their own subreddit. I think that's what forums would be replacing. Maybe I'm not old enough but forums were rarely a very private affair, imo.

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

#758

Post by jerojero »

eertami wrote: post #550
jerojero wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forums weren't replaced by discord. Forums were replaced by Reddit. Although you post still stands, I think you're very wrong in thinking about the reasoning why people use one or another platform. Let's think about discord for a minute, why is everyone using it? And what are they using it for? I think the answers here are rather simple, people have a need for communication with peers; this communication usually take…

> mainly that it's not very good for long-form or persistent messaging like a forum. Discord recently added Forum Channels to try and capture this segment as well. https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/6208479917079-...

Yes, I saw. It's kind of an awful feature though.

I think the best approach to a mix of forum and discord-like communities is the app "aether.app" though it had a weird protocol behind it and has been abandoned. But the UI/UX although still perfectible seemed to hit a very nice sweet-spot for me.

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

#759

Post by jerojero »

auggierose wrote: post #324
jerojero wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forums weren't replaced by discord. Forums were replaced by Reddit. Although you post still stands, I think you're very wrong in thinking about the reasoning why people use one or another platform. Let's think about discord for a minute, why is everyone using it? And what are they using it for? I think the answers here are rather simple, people have a need for communication with peers; this communication usually take…

What is a horizontal community? Why you cannot build one with Discord? Which tool do you use instead for this task then?

I tried to set up a community with left-leaning people (politics). So we didn't really want the owner - admin - moderator structure that discord offered, instead we wanted a more open way for the community to self manage.

The biggest problem came from the fact that we had been all in a discord server in the past that was deleted by the owner after a political disagreement. So in order for that to not happen again we wanted to have a more "community owned" system so that no one would be able to wield such power without some degree of community acceptance.

Sadly, it was not possible to do such a thing on discord as there ALWAYS has to be an owner to the server that's a single individual. Some of these problems can be solved through bots (you can implement very good voting bots) but you're always fighting against the natural structure of the platform, so no solution is ideal.

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

#760

Post by verinus »

asciimov wrote: post #346
virgulino wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to forget that 26 years ago, starting in 1996, we had Microsoft NetMeeting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_NetMeeting A very good VOIP / videoconferencing / white-boarding / application sharing client present on almost all Windows computers, open standards interoperable, with an official ActiveX Control and public API. You could easily embed it into your HTML site (IE compatible only), or drag and drop i…

It's been a long time since I heard mention of NetMeeting. I remember using NetMeeting in late 97 or early 98 on a 33.6 kbps modem. One of the most memorable parts was the area were you could find other random people to chat with on audio. I had many enjoyable conversations with various people on there, something that I don't think would work well today with the increased number of horrible netizens.

I remember NetMeeting from around 2000 when we used it to at university to do shared desktop sessions for some team assignments... worked pretty well as far as I remember.
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