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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?

#701

Post by prepend »

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 use alternate tools in addition to Teams. And I use my budget to pay for other tools.

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

#702

Post by JohnFen »

capableweb wrote: post #551
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.

It's not about the specific technologies a company uses, but rather how that choice gets made. Teams is chosen in companies where the organization is so big that "unification" is seen as a big plus. What you're out after, are smaller organizations where choices are made based on what people working with those things actually want to use. So look for headcount rather than what chat program they use, because the headco…

> It's not about the specific technologies a company uses, but rather how that choice gets made

But sometimes specific products are simply less than ideal no matter how they're used. I consider Teams to be one of those.

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

#703

Post by roydivision »

jdhzzz wrote: post #617
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…

Things I like (What?): Ctrl-Shift-V pastes into TEAMs with no formatting. Should be part of the OS. Contrary to WebEx (what we came from for meetings), joining a TEAMs meeting from both PC and phone joins you as one participant, not 2.

Probably not intentional.

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

#704

Post by JohnFen »

gigel82 wrote: post #697
wizofaus wrote: post #655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would assume Microsoft is using teams in house I wouldn't. But surely there's someone here that actually knows? It does seem hard to believe their own engineers would put up with all the issues it has. Edit: the only evidence I could find you're right was at https://www.microsoft.com/insidetrack/blog/new-microsoft-tea... . But whether it's the primary tool their devs use for communication I don't know.

Yup, almost everyone at MS is using Teams internally. When they collaborate externally they use whatever the partner prefers. For example, there is a Discord server for ReactNative contributors and collaborators with a bunch of MS folks on it. I guess it's also possible there's a Team for Meta folks to talk to MS directly but I somehow doubt it - or at least, I doubt it gets used very much if it exists :)

> Yup, almost everyone at MS is using Teams internally

Really? So they have to know how awful it is. That makes its continued awfulness even more perplexing.

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

#705

Post by JohnFen »

nl wrote: post #376
philippejara wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kind of crazy to look back and see just how much worse we are today than some years ago with regards to this stuff. I remember an old social media named Orkut, had pretty much everything facebook had and more, also had a huge userbase in brazil and india(?) iirc, but just goot overtaken by facebook. Original skype would probably work better than zoom does today with a few tweaks(I assume, could be wrong there wh…

WTF is it with this weird "things were better in the old days" nostalgia? They really, really weren't! > Original skype would probably work better than zoom does today with a few tweaks When it came out, Skype was amazing because it let you get video calls on your computer. The audio was flaky (I paid for a number for a work line and yeah - wasn't good!), the video broke up all the time, and it dropped out a lot. But…

> WTF is it with this weird "things were better in the old days" nostalgia? They really, really weren't!

A lot of things really, really were. Some weren't.

Generally speaking, I do think that modern software tends to be worse in terms of usability, robustness, and resource usage. But it tends to be prettier and have more "features", so that's something.

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

#706

Post by stephen_g »

rowanG077 wrote: post #572
rjsw wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm trying to cleanup a Git tree right now where people haven't put JIRA tags in their commit comments, it is impossible to find out why a change was made, it isn't a totally stupid requirement.

Or you just write sensible commit messages. Commits together with the messages should require as little out of band information as possible.

The best thing about cross-linking between Git and an issue tracker is that when you have multiple commits for one ticket (very common), they can all link back to one ticket. Having the extra context from discussion is useful, but obviously that can be summarised in the commit message. So being able to instantly get a list of commits that link to the one ticket is the really invaluable feature that I don’t know of any good way of doing another way.

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

#707

Post by JohnFen »

Lutger wrote: post #445
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/…

Isn't teams just a reskinned SharePoint with messenging and conference capabilities added? Does it use tech from the Skype acquisition? I do remember everybody using Skype, it was so popular it created a verb of its own, we used to skype with each other. Microsoft paid what was an enormous amount for it back then, then basically let it rot. Really surprising.

> Microsoft paid what was an enormous amount for it back then, then basically let it rot.

They didn't just let it rot. They actively ruined it.

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

#708

Post by JohnFen »

thekingofrome wrote: post #263
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/…

TIL people in the US use SMS

SMS is universal and free in the US, and you don't have to juggle a bunch of different messaging services.

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

#709

Post by JohnFen »

Kostic wrote: post #243
jknoepfler wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Communications software needs to run when and only when I want it to run. Who in the heck are you to tell me when to run an application on a device I own?

Do you also start/stop the modem on your phone whenever you need it? For the majority of people it makes sense to have a comms app always running as they come to expect that from the smartphones. Granted, there should be an easy way to configure this behavior for advanced users.

> Do you also start/stop the modem on your phone whenever you need it?

Yes, I do (effectively). My phone spends a large percentage of the day in airplane mode.

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

#710

Post by me_again »

Galanwe wrote: post #336
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/…

> 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…

MS engineer who worked on Lync. I feel like the Skype acquisition was poorly handed too, but interesting how the perceptions differ.

We were folded into the Skype org, with Tony Bates -who I maintain had no idea what he was doing- reporting to Ballmer. Fine. But he and his henchman (Mark something?) embarked on a quest to make everyone do by-the-book Scrum. That, screwing around with corelib, and the ill-omened liveid migration process meant that Skype didn't improve in any way users cared about for several years. Meanwhile, the competitive landscape changed and the only Skype feature anyone ever used - being able to call your grandma in another country for cheap or free - lost its differentiation. It was clearly over by the time my mom told me she had whatsapp.

Nobody I knew had any animus towards Skype engineers and we were entirely willing to help... but what anyone actually wanted was kind of unclear.

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