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European Commission Trials Matrix to Replace Teams

euractiv.com

111–120 of 196 posts

Re: European Commission Trials Matrix to Replace Teams

#111
post #52
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key is the money. I’ve used matrix for years, ran my own federated server for a while. I’ve been critical of the user experience and issues with how it’s handled by the matrix team before but I acknowledge that by and large these problems can be fixed with money. Big players need to put their big boy pants on and throw a couple coins from their farcically large coin purse and they can drive a stake through the wr…

And this is the part I hope Europe gets. They don't have nearly as much money to throw at Matrix as Microsoft can throw at Teams, but they do have massive resources, and I bet that since Matrix doesn't have many of the same shitty KPIs as Slack and Teams, those resources can go much further.

Microsoft may have money, but it certainly does not seem like it is being spent on Teams in an effective way.

Re: European Commission Trials Matrix to Replace Teams

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes good enough is good enough. Slack, Teams, Matrix, whatever, as long as you're meeting most daily driving requirements, everything else is maintenance and long tail quality of life improvement (imho). What else are Teams users going to get out of Microsoft chasing an ever increasing enterprise valuation and stock price target with regards to their user experience? Email just works, make teams comms that just…

Yea, if you have to waste an extra 15 minutes per day due to bad UX who cares, it’s much better that you get the self-satisfied feeling of sticking it to “the man” (American big tech). I mean it only adds up to 90 days of your life wasted over a 30 year career. European peoples time has a lower salary value anyways. UX doesn’t even matter that much, the political meme of the day is much more important.

Microsoft Teams already is already terrible UX, we have nowhere to go but up. Perhaps you are unaware, and if so, you should be thankful you don’t have to lose time using it. There are objectively better solutions available.

Re: European Commission Trials Matrix to Replace Teams

#114
post #14

Can someone that uses Matrix compare it to Zulip? Which would have been my "obvious" choice. Is it functionally comparable, discussion threads and all? Or is it much closer to something like Discord?

Matrix is a decentralised encrypted chat protocol on which you could build something like Zulip, except decentralised and end-to-end encrypted. Element is the actual app being trialled here, which feels more like Slack and/or Signal than Zulip. The point is that you get something you can selfhost while also interoperating with other deployments… while also encrypting the data end-to-end with Signal protocol.

> on which you could build something like Zulip

I hope that at some point a focus of the Matrix project will become why this isn’t being done. A better developer experience would supercharge the ecosystem, IMO.

Matrix should be the default for anyone building a chat app, but for some reason it’s not.

Re: European Commission Trials Matrix to Replace Teams

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, if you have to waste an extra 15 minutes per day due to bad UX who cares, it’s much better that you get the self-satisfied feeling of sticking it to “the man” (American big tech). I mean it only adds up to 90 days of your life wasted over a 30 year career. European peoples time has a lower salary value anyways. UX doesn’t even matter that much, the political meme of the day is much more important.

Microsoft Teams already is already terrible UX, we have nowhere to go but up. Perhaps you are unaware, and if so, you should be thankful you don’t have to lose time using it. There are objectively better solutions available.

I too hate Microsoft teams but it can always get worse, you have no idea.

Re: European Commission Trials Matrix to Replace Teams

#116
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Element is buggy Someone should tell the CEO/CTO of Element

Speaking as the CEO/CTO of Element... the classic Element apps on mobile were buggy, thanks to being a ~10 year old codebase with no shared code between platforms and effectively the 1st generation Matrix client. Which is why we replaced them over the last few years with Element X, with all the heavy lifting shared between iOS & Android via matrix-rust-sdk (effectively a 3rd gen Matrix SDK). That said, 70% of our use…

I’m excited to watch the talk. I’m generally critical of Matrix, but that’s because I want it to succeed. Lately I find you’ve been doing a lot of things right, so I hope you keep going!

Re: European Commission Trials Matrix to Replace Teams

#117
post #52
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key is the money. I’ve used matrix for years, ran my own federated server for a while. I’ve been critical of the user experience and issues with how it’s handled by the matrix team before but I acknowledge that by and large these problems can be fixed with money. Big players need to put their big boy pants on and throw a couple coins from their farcically large coin purse and they can drive a stake through the wr…

And this is the part I hope Europe gets. They don't have nearly as much money to throw at Matrix as Microsoft can throw at Teams, but they do have massive resources, and I bet that since Matrix doesn't have many of the same shitty KPIs as Slack and Teams, those resources can go much further.

The lack of shitty KPIs is the main thing. Hiring 10 full time devs to work on Matrix would probably be more effective than 500 full time devs on Slack/Teams with most of them stuck on weird Product Manager goals and renaming things to Copilot 365 Teams with Copilot.

Re: European Commission Trials Matrix to Replace Teams

#118

This does not bode well. Matrix is honestly not good, as someone who has tried to use it. It's slow, janky, often unstable, and poorly standardized. My suggestion: https://threema.com/en/products/work (hosted) or https://zulip.com/ (OSS self-hosted).

When did you try it? Both Matrix the protocol and implementations like Element X have improved immeasurably over the last year or so.

Element X is in some cases still a downgrade from Element. For instance there doesn't seem to be a way to create local key backups anymore. Also, that calls between Element and Element X are incompatible means both apps need to be installed in order to receive calls from all contacts.

Still, I love Matrix and hope that these issues will be resolved in time.

Re: European Commission Trials Matrix to Replace Teams

#119
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zoom came along with a securre video/voice chat, sure it's American, but it was by far the world leader Microsoft then used its monopoly in office tools to push Teams to everyone You can't compete with a trillion dollar company offering your product as a bundle your clients already pay for, even if your product is better. Even VC money runs out eventually

To be fair, Microsoft already had Skype (for Business) and NetMeeting before that. It's not like they were new to that market. NetMeeting existed for more than a decade before Zoom even came into existence. Zoom had COVID-19 play in it's favor, that's about it.

Skype for Business is the VoIP component for Teams, now. Sharepoint is the file service for Teams, too.

Basically, Teams is a front end for a bunch of old Mircosoft cloud services... plus chat. Actually more than one chat as teams channels chat is a separate tech stack from private chat. It used to be much more monlothic and then the Sharepoint people got their hooks into it.

Re: European Commission Trials Matrix to Replace Teams

#120
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Threema: proprietary, outside EU Zulip: lacks encryption, interoperability

Threema is Swiss, which is a regional EFTA member. It's end-to-end encrypted and the clients are open-source. Zulip has client-server encryption, which is fine if you control the server.

Threema is still vendor lock-in.
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