When something is both universally hated and almost always chosen above less hated competitors, that’s usually a sign that there’s some kind of market failure. Maybe it’s anticompetitive conduct by the provider (like Microsoft using its market power on Outlook/Exchange to push other services like Teams over its competition), or a principal-agent problem (like the person paying for Teams not actually having to live with most of the shittiness).
Maybe it’s anticompetitive conduct by the provider (like Microsoft using its market power on Outlook/Exchange to push other services like Teams over its competition)
That’s exactly what it is. They leveraged their dominance/monopoly in one market to gain a stranglehold on another market. It’s not exactly a new tactic for Microsoft either.
It’s as simple as this really. It’s included therefore a subscribing company can just not renew a slack, Zoom, or whatever contract and say “hey we saved money”
They actually just decoupled teams from o365 in preparation for this exact situation. As of April 30th you no longer get teams with your tenant skus anymore unless you are grandfathered in to the older skus that bundled it.
And also all of their competition also kinda sucks. So like, Teams is worse enough that if you’re using it every day you’ll hate it but not worse enough that if you use it once or twice you’ll notice.
Not trying to simp for TEAMS, but what issues are people having? Every now and then I have to go in and change mic and speakers back to laptop, presumably from some update our IT deployed.
Other than that and wanting it to show on MY screen when I’m transmitting sound, I can’t think of any improvements. Works better than the conference calls we used to have.
how resource heavy and slow for what it is, how notifications break a lot of the time, how obtuse and unintuitive it usually is to do some simple stuff like sharing meetings and how everything thats not an absolute core feature will glitch out 8 times out of 10.
i’m sure some of these were fixed while they broke other stuff, they fuck around with it all the time. im thankfully not being forced to use it for a while right now.
We used Teams at the last org I worked at, we rarely had issues. The UI wasn’t bad in my eyes, we had integrated our phone system into teams too. Calling someone on the other side of the country via teams was simple.
Admittedly the service did get worse before I left and there were a couple of Microsoft outages which cut all our text based communications for a day (phone system still worked)
I’m using slack right now but would prefer something self-hosted but that’s well out of the scope of the current mob I’m with.
Eh, it works pretty well in our org. We use it for almost all of our meetings, and we have pretty much no issues. Then again, our entire team is on macOS and we have it integrated at the corporate level (so meeting rooms and whatnot use it), and it’s a pretty solid experience.
My main complaints are:
chats absolutely suck
seems to use a bunch of resources
people we interview seem to have issues (I’m guessing the webapp sucks?)
We use Slack for text communication and impromptu video chats, so the chat issues don’t bother me all that much.
On macOS, with virtual desktops, it steals focus even on the desktop that it is not in! If I pick an empty desktop from Mission Control, then Finder should be the app with focus. J. F! C!! No other app fucks it up this badly. This also means I can never ever use command+tab to go back to the Teams window because it thinks that window is already showing. So every time I need to go back to view Teams, I need to go to Mission Control and go back to the desktop where it is really showing. Fuck! You! Microsoft!
Oh! When typing a message it underlines misspelled words but doesn’t do autocorrect or even suggestions. It just sits there staring at you. So you have to double click the word and retype the whole thing and hope you spell it right this time. J! F! C! Again, no other app integrates with macOS dictionary this poorly.
During screen sharing it puts a control bar across the top center of the screen which blocks 75% of the menu bar of the main running app in full screen. With no way to dismiss it early. I just have to sit there fuming for 300 seconds at the start of every screen share until it goes away.
We use 2FA, and the integration is miserable. It literally never has a clean login. The app always starts with an error banner about some unknown problem and there is a button to take some action. But what you don’t know is that in the background it is doing something for like 300 seconds quietly without telling you and when it is done then it will pop the beginning of 2FA. But also, if you are a damned fool and press that action button, it starts the whole secret process over again. You could probably enter an infinite loop of pressing the button and never being able to log in. And don’t tell me it’s our 2FA system because all the other apps work fine with it.
All I want are badges. This is asynchronous communications. When I reach a pause point I will check Teams for any new messages. But it won’t badge the app icon. So … oh fuck it! Spent too much time on this reply all ready
the universal hate teams gets warms my heart.
the ubiquitousness of it dumbfounds me though.
fuck teams.
When something is both universally hated and almost always chosen above less hated competitors, that’s usually a sign that there’s some kind of market failure. Maybe it’s anticompetitive conduct by the provider (like Microsoft using its market power on Outlook/Exchange to push other services like Teams over its competition), or a principal-agent problem (like the person paying for Teams not actually having to live with most of the shittiness).
That’s exactly what it is. They leveraged their dominance/monopoly in one market to gain a stranglehold on another market. It’s not exactly a new tactic for Microsoft either.
They bundle teams with o365. The cost to integrate another messaging client is more than simply adding Teams to your already expensive bundle.
It’s as simple as this really. It’s included therefore a subscribing company can just not renew a slack, Zoom, or whatever contract and say “hey we saved money”
They actually just decoupled teams from o365 in preparation for this exact situation. As of April 30th you no longer get teams with your tenant skus anymore unless you are grandfathered in to the older skus that bundled it.
And also all of their competition also kinda sucks. So like, Teams is worse enough that if you’re using it every day you’ll hate it but not worse enough that if you use it once or twice you’ll notice.
Slack seems great, I’ve had no problems with it
Second this. Slack is glorious.
Huh, it’s funny, my company uses Webex and I’d probably prefer Teams.
It’s ubiquitous because it was added for free to Office 365, so companies would use it instead of its competitors
Microsoft changed that for new customers a couple weeks ago and it’s now a separate subscription
The standard make it free until it’s ubiquitous then start charging for it
Not trying to simp for TEAMS, but what issues are people having? Every now and then I have to go in and change mic and speakers back to laptop, presumably from some update our IT deployed.
Other than that and wanting it to show on MY screen when I’m transmitting sound, I can’t think of any improvements. Works better than the conference calls we used to have.
how resource heavy and slow for what it is, how notifications break a lot of the time, how obtuse and unintuitive it usually is to do some simple stuff like sharing meetings and how everything thats not an absolute core feature will glitch out 8 times out of 10.
i’m sure some of these were fixed while they broke other stuff, they fuck around with it all the time. im thankfully not being forced to use it for a while right now.
To add: how I have “2 unread messages”, but nothing when filtered for unread. My phone will forever have 2 unread messages.
We used Teams at the last org I worked at, we rarely had issues. The UI wasn’t bad in my eyes, we had integrated our phone system into teams too. Calling someone on the other side of the country via teams was simple.
Admittedly the service did get worse before I left and there were a couple of Microsoft outages which cut all our text based communications for a day (phone system still worked)
I’m using slack right now but would prefer something self-hosted but that’s well out of the scope of the current mob I’m with.
If you ever reach a point where self-hosting does become a possibility, I’d recommend checking out Mattermost.
Not sure how long it’s been since your last org, but a lot has changed in the Teams universe as of late (and mostly not for the better).
Eh, it works pretty well in our org. We use it for almost all of our meetings, and we have pretty much no issues. Then again, our entire team is on macOS and we have it integrated at the corporate level (so meeting rooms and whatnot use it), and it’s a pretty solid experience.
My main complaints are:
We use Slack for text communication and impromptu video chats, so the chat issues don’t bother me all that much.
so your main complaints are that its most basic usecase sucks, but it works quite well. which is it?
Chats are not the most basic use case for Teams, meetings are. And meetings work pretty well.
On macOS, with virtual desktops, it steals focus even on the desktop that it is not in! If I pick an empty desktop from Mission Control, then Finder should be the app with focus. J. F! C!! No other app fucks it up this badly. This also means I can never ever use command+tab to go back to the Teams window because it thinks that window is already showing. So every time I need to go back to view Teams, I need to go to Mission Control and go back to the desktop where it is really showing. Fuck! You! Microsoft!
Oh! When typing a message it underlines misspelled words but doesn’t do autocorrect or even suggestions. It just sits there staring at you. So you have to double click the word and retype the whole thing and hope you spell it right this time. J! F! C! Again, no other app integrates with macOS dictionary this poorly.
During screen sharing it puts a control bar across the top center of the screen which blocks 75% of the menu bar of the main running app in full screen. With no way to dismiss it early. I just have to sit there fuming for 300 seconds at the start of every screen share until it goes away.
We use 2FA, and the integration is miserable. It literally never has a clean login. The app always starts with an error banner about some unknown problem and there is a button to take some action. But what you don’t know is that in the background it is doing something for like 300 seconds quietly without telling you and when it is done then it will pop the beginning of 2FA. But also, if you are a damned fool and press that action button, it starts the whole secret process over again. You could probably enter an infinite loop of pressing the button and never being able to log in. And don’t tell me it’s our 2FA system because all the other apps work fine with it.
All I want are badges. This is asynchronous communications. When I reach a pause point I will check Teams for any new messages. But it won’t badge the app icon. So … oh fuck it! Spent too much time on this reply all ready
No markdown support, emojis are typed with a parenthesis, search is meh, notifications are buggy, spellcheck is broken
Oh and file sharing basically doesn’t work
on android, it is the only app I have found that’s not compatible with my keyboard. You read that right. How the hell do you fuck that up?