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As another comment said, this is pretty basic stuff. Though I am not surprised. The Teams client is pretty bad. It's slow and clunky. It tries to do way too muc
by suprfnk 6y ago
As another comment said, this is pretty basic stuff. Though I am not surprised. The Teams client is pretty bad. It's slow and clunky. It tries to do way too much while succeeding at very few things.
The desktop client chat _still_ doesn't have a "reply to message" feature, while the mobile client has had it for, what, more than a year? This is a feature that _should_ cost a competent engineer no more than what, a week? to implement. The team should take a note out of Discord's or Telegram's book to improve the chat experience. It's really very bad.
In the meantime the latest noticeable additions were mostly fluff like extra ways to show webcam stream backgrounds, and a "cinema-like" webcam-view.
It's interesting that the same company can produce both Teams, being pretty bad, and VS Code, being very good.
- Quarrelsome 6y ago> It's interesting that the same company can produce both Teams, being pretty bad, and VS Code, being very good. Surely this demonstrates the wide variance you get with software and how important professional discipline is?
- LarvaFX 6y agoI would say it does.
- lifeisstillgood 6y agoI would like to agree here, but to emphasise "discipline" being an organisational not individual issue. Given that there are certainly competent emgineers at MSFT and most could carve out a week of coding without anyone noticing, what is missing is high level organisational insistence on good professional discipline - and it's so easy to just let that slip. For example a comment earlier mentioned the chat feature is broken but they rushed out video background changes. This of course is a response to zoom - and it's possible to argue it's a strategic necessity - but it suggest the top level product management is blowing around in internally company winds rather than user needs.
- Quarrelsome 6y ago> and it's possible to argue it's a strategic necessity I would argue its a strategic failure. Purely reacting to the competition is something that has led to countless Microsoft disappointments (e.g. Zune, Bing).
- jschwartzi 6y agoTeams is pretty crappy software but it works really well as an integrated chat system and it fits nicely in our organization.
- boogies 6y ago> It's interesting that the same company can produce both Teams, being pretty bad, and VS Code, being very good. The former it develops by itself, the latter has a codebase others are Free to contribute to (as long as they don’t agree to the official binary’s EULA, which isn’t required to use VS Codium).
- watwut 6y agoPretty bad is understatement. It is very bad, especially if you are split into two organizations.
- bluedino 6y agoThe Skype client is total garbage as well, so apparently nobody at Microsoft can make a chat client.
- toast0 6y agoMaybe nobody recently, Comic Chat was epic (and certainly guilty of embrace and extend)
- oarsinsync 6y ago> and certainly guilty of embrace and extend But the only thing it managed to extinguish was itself. IRC long outlived comic chat (and thank goodness for that, IMO).
- Spooky23 6y agoI talk about the universal law of chat client entropy. Chat peaked in 2000/2001 with AIM and Yahoo. Everything else get worse over time. Chat isn’t a product that can stand alone, so it’s always attached to another agenda. Skype was an interoperable phone with chat attached. Teams is a SharePoint client that has chat.
- quesera 6y agoI don't think there was anything about AIM/Yahoo that was better than IRC.
- Spooky23 6y agoNormal people could use it! The UI was pretty simple. IRC at some level had all of the features, but a learning cliff. My company at the time had E2E encryption with client certificates on AIM.
- quesera 6y agoRight, that's the sadness of it. IRC clients were lacking, and the "auth for free" that came with AIM/Yahoo (and now Facebook) made the difference. It would have been 100x simpler to create a compelling GUI client for IRC (back in the day, they sort of exist now), than to build an entire new protocol, server infrastructure, and GUI client to support a branded and controlled chat. Never mind multiple competing and incompatible versions of same. Conflicting interests, obviously. But as a technology, "chat" did not improve materially between 1990 and 2010 or so.
- PretzelPirate 6y agoThe “reply” feature is already implemented but it’s been sitting in an internal ring for forever!
- eznzt 6y agoDiscord does not have a "reply to message" feature either, it just copies and pastes the message into your input field. You can freely edit the quoted message, and if the user you replied to edits his message, yours won't get updated.
- notamy 6y agoDiscord does have this, just not publicly available yet. It's in active development still, see ex. https://github.com/discord/discord-api-docs/pull/2118 https://github.com/discord/discord-api-docs/pull/2118
- edgyquant 6y agoTeams is a Slack competitor not Discord. Slack does have this.
- eznzt 6y agoTrue. I brought up Discord because the comment mentioned Discord.
- Tade0 6y agoIt's interesting that the same company can produce both Teams, being pretty bad, and VS Code, being very good. I think it was simply rushed to production. I remember VS Code not being that amazing at the start (slow etc.), but with time, effort and love put into it, it grew to become a competent IDE. Teams was horrible when it first came out, but I'm noticing some improvements in performance and stability since then.
- dheera 6y agoI don't understand why every advertised feature of Teams can't be done with a web interface, like Slack. Even with Slack I see no reason for a desktop client, which looks to me like just a widget-less browser running slack.com inside. I didn't need an app for that. And with the web client I can inject JS/CSS as I please (e.g. to prevent sending typing indicators).
- nitrogen 6y agojust a widget-less browser running slack.com inside That's pretty much what it is.
- rkangel 6y agoThe most obvious one is screen sharing - that requires some access that isn't possible through the browser. Also, interacting well with audio and video hardware might need native support. Discord is another interesting datapoint. You can access that through the browser or natively, but their team has said that the native client means (among other things) better access to audio codecs for better quality audio and things like noise cancellation.
- com2kid 6y ago> The most obvious one is screen sharing - that requires some access that isn't possible through the browser. Browsers have had screen sharing for awhile. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Screen_Capture_API/Using_Screen_Capture https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Screen_Capt... It doesn't work well across all OSs (see the Wayland discussion from a few days ago....) but it is there.
- cglong 6y agoYeah the Teams webapp supports screen sharing (and does it pretty well)! I particularly like the way Edge (and I assume Chrome) let you choose to just share a specific browser tab.
- snowwrestler 6y ago
- ZiiS 6y agoVS Code is used by the people who write it; this is _very_ significant on resulting quality.
- paxys 6y agoPretty sure it's the same for Teams
- prepend 6y agoI doubt it. It definitely seems like Teams is not used by the dec team building Teams. If it is, I feel so bad for that dev team. I bet this is a situation where even if required, there’s a Slack channel or even IRC server that’s actually used.
- paxys 6y agoWhat do you think they use then? Slack?
- Plasmoid2000ad 6y agoI'm confused, are you suggesting the team that write the code for Teams don't use it?
- antoineMoPa 6y agoAs a datapoint, I use Teams on Linux (desktop app) and I have to say that I love it. I would not say it is slow and clunky as you say.
- linker3000 6y agoAs another datapoint, I also use Teams on Linux (Mint 20) and although it's generally fine to use, on a couple of occasions it has completely frozen my desktop PC about 1 hour into a meeting and I've had to hit the power button to get going again.
- elygre 6y agoWait, a client app is able to freeze your Linux computer to the extent that you have to power off your computer?
- AshamedCaptain 6y agoI would not surprised. The MS Teams client here uses more RAM than all the other programs I have on my desktop, including but not limited to my desktop environment itself (Gnome) and Firefox with plenty of open tabs.
- linker3000 6y agoYep, I haven't had the inclination to investigate, but I suspect it's something like a memory leak that eats up all the (16GB) RAM and then swaps the system to death. Maybe if I was patient enough I could get an alternative console prompt and poke around, but when you need to get back into that meeting....
- jschwartzi 6y agoThe Windows client is really really slow. Nearly every time I click on it and start typing I get about 10 characters in before it pauses and does something for about 15 to 60 seconds, and then I can finish my message when it's done.
- arpa 6y ago
- mytailorisrich 6y ago> It's interesting that the same company can produce both Teams, being pretty bad, and VS Code, being very good. In huge companies like Microsoft teams working on completely different products can be as separate as if they were working for different companies. It's not inconceivable that the first link between those teams is at executive management level.
- Shivetya 6y agoHaving both Teams and Skype, we are slowly depreciating Skype, the one feature I miss most in Skype is that it is very easy to have just a list of who is active and who is not where in Teams you have a list of people you have chatted with but that is different than keeping track of people by favorites.
- theschmed 6y ago> The desktop client chat _still_ doesn't have a "reply to message" feature FYI for those who like to reply, you can put a > and a quote box will appear, you can copy and paste the message you wish to quote. To exit the quote box, type "Alt-Enter" twice