4 ms·

Teams is Skype, but worse. Seriously, it's just reskinned Skype with bolt-ons. You can see "skype" present in the address bar sometimes when you load Teams in

by branon 6y ago

Teams is Skype, but worse. Seriously, it's just reskinned Skype with bolt-ons. You can see "skype" present in the address bar sometimes when you load Teams in a browser. The Teams desktop application (at least on Linux) has references to Skype as well. Teams routinely uses between 200 and 500 MB of memory to run, which makes it the 2nd most memory-intensive program on my computer. On top of that, it doesn't even work that well. The entire app is slow on mobile, compared with desktop/web where only some parts are slow. Feature parity across platforms is very poor. You can't even join audio calls in Firefox, let alone use video. Some of the features that work well (searching for reaction GIFs) seem unnecessary, and it's almost insulting to see the amount of add-ins and superfluous crap that's available when the core of the program/service is so lacking in comparison. The only positive thing I can say about Teams is that its integration with the rest of Microsoft's services is convenient. It's nice to be able to see my calendar in Teams without opening Outlook. Tools for scheduling/joining/managing meetings also work well. If coworkers share Microsoft documents in a Teams channel, clicking them will (sluggishly) open the document in Teams, ready for editing. Outside of integration, the search function works passably, but is painfully slow. Group audio/video calls work fine too, but then again, they also worked fine back when the app was called Skype. All of the things that work, however, are damaged by how lukewarm and _slow_ the overall experience is. Even features as basic as IM are half-baked. Not many messages fit on the screen at once, and scrolling up to see past messages is a nightmare, since messages lazy-load only when they are made visible, or the scroll bar will reset its position and snap back down to the bottom. I read the article and the bullet-pointed list of data that Teams tracks doesn't seem like all that big of a deal to me. It makes sense that analytics would be running on everything you type into Teams. Always assume anything you use for work is wiretapped to hell and back, doubly so if Big Tech is involved. I am much more concerned about the fact that I don't even get a functional IM client out of the arrangement.

userbinator 6y ago
As someone who has worked on thirdparty clients for IM since the days of MSN Messenger (MSNP), the degradation is sad to see and extremely obvious. The backend protocol that Teams uses is essentially MS-Skype (as opposed to the "OG Skype" binary P2P one), with some Teams-specific additions. Even the authentication token is called the "skypetoken". The only good thing about that is it should make a thirdparty Teams client relatively straightforward, given that things like https://github.com/EionRobb/skype4pidgin https://github.com/EionRobb/skype4pidgin already exist. All the users see and complain about is the horrid sluggishness, and Electron and the "webapp everything" craze is mostly responsible for that, but the backend protocol itself is also a bloated abomination. A long time ago I wrote an MSNP client and used it right until MS finally shut down the servers a few years ago. It was a native Win32 application in a single binary <32KB and barely took any memory (at most a few MB). No audio or video, but IM and presence worked perfectly. Like HTTP, FTP, SMTP, and the other oldschool Internet protocols, MSNP is also a text-based protocol that runs directly over a socket. You could almost use it from a netcat if you really wanted to. It wasn't perfect but everything about it was in some ways sane. If I remember correctly, a single message would be a few dozen bytes of overhead. The Teams/MS-Skype protocol is a stark contrast. It runs over HTTPS, which is an advantage in some ways with the current trend of stuffing other protocols over it, but it's not like they simply took MSNP and tunneled it over HTTPS, which would've been a far saner approach --- it's radically different and everything is far less efficient and more complex to handle as a result. JSON everywhere. Each message has several hundred bytes of overhead, and more like kilobytes if you count the HTTP layer and everything below it. Things are split between .skype.com and .messenger.live.com with no real consistency. Trying to get presence to actually work reliably has been a nightmare (the official client apparently has problems with that too...) I'm not surprised there's no official documentation on the API/protocol, because it's a bloody mess. As you may guess, I have been trying to write a native client for it. Some of the features that work well (searching for reaction GIFs) seem unnecessary, and it's almost insulting to see the amount of add-ins and superfluous crap that's available when the core of the program/service is so lacking in comparison. This may be a rather controversial point, but software quality overall seems to have taken a steep nosedive not long after the whole "everyone can code/diversity/inclusion" movement took off. Yes, apparently everyone can code --- just not very well. I think things like all this proliferation of mostly-useless features are a symptom of that. We are simply seeing the results of quantity over quality in an industry which has shifted to rewarding sheer participation and "disruptive change" over a carefully deliberated path to perfection.
- unhammer 6y ago
  > The only good thing about that is it should make a thirdparty Teams client relatively straightforward Who can I throw money at to help make this happen? (Even one that only supported plain text chats and presence would be worth a lot, just so I don't have to have the whole beast running unless I'm actually in a video meeting)
2rsf 6y ago
> Teams is Skype Teams uses (or at least used) Skype for business' core under the hood
- hestefisk 6y ago
  And Skype for Business is actually their old Lync product and not related to Skype, the once famous VoIP startup.
  - 2rsf 6y ago
    Correct, they are hardly related although AFAIK some merging was done during the last years
simonh 6y ago
Teams may be based on Skype tech under the hood, but the Skype desktop and mobile apps are garbage fires in comparison. I regularly get messages come through to Skype mobile but not desktop even when I'm working on my desktop, the mobile app seems to need to crash and restart frequently, it's slow and unreliable responding to incoming calls which often get dropped, when they come to the app at all. Having said that now my organisation has decided to move decisively to teams, it's suddenly becoming unreliable. Maybe having trouble coping with increased usage. Maybe that was the problem with Skype too.
russellendicott 6y ago
Have you noticed that you can't copy and paste all the text from a conversation? At least the feature request has 2900 upvotes. https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/31918531-allow-copying-whole-chat-conversations#comments https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/su...
jodrellblank 6y ago
> "All of the things that work, however, are damaged by how lukewarm and _slow_ the overall experience is." Oh pssht, humans can't notice a response time of less than 2 seconds. Plus performance doesn't matter at all because you can add it later if you need it, which you don't. Anyway, you can't say it's slow until you've measured it and you can't complain until you have a fix. Besides, it's more important that the code is readable because it will be read much more often than it will be written. And furthermore, if you re-run the same thing a few times to warm the JIT up, discount startup time, ignore input and output time and network lag because they are external to the system and only measure the core function runtime, you'll find it's ackshually really fast (if you buy new hardware which is ifine because +$2000 computer spend is cheaper than developer time). And does a few seconds really matter, what were you going to do with that 10 seconds of response time, read a book or something? Slow? What do you mean "slow", launch time, hover response, switching response, time to finish redrawing a page? There's many things happening and you can't complain unless you narrow down exactly which specific sub-millisecond behaviour is taking too long for you - none of them? thought not. Stop questioning the dogma, hush.

by branon 6y ago

userbinator 6y ago

As someone who has worked on thirdparty clients for IM since the days of MSN Messenger (MSNP), the degradation is sad to see and extremely obvious. The backend protocol that Teams uses is essentially MS-Skype (as opposed to the "OG Skype" binary P2P one), with some Teams-specific additions. Even the authentication token is called the "skypetoken". The only good thing about that is it should make a thirdparty Teams client relatively straightforward, given that things like https://github.com/EionRobb/skype4pidgin https://github.com/EionRobb/skype4pidgin already exist. All the users see and complain about is the horrid sluggishness, and Electron and the "webapp everything" craze is mostly responsible for that, but the backend protocol itself is also a bloated abomination. A long time ago I wrote an MSNP client and used it right until MS finally shut down the servers a few years ago. It was a native Win32 application in a single binary <32KB and barely took any memory (at most a few MB). No audio or video, but IM and presence worked perfectly. Like HTTP, FTP, SMTP, and the other oldschool Internet protocols, MSNP is also a text-based protocol that runs directly over a socket. You could almost use it from a netcat if you really wanted to. It wasn't perfect but everything about it was in some ways sane. If I remember correctly, a single message would be a few dozen bytes of overhead. The Teams/MS-Skype protocol is a stark contrast. It runs over HTTPS, which is an advantage in some ways with the current trend of stuffing other protocols over it, but it's not like they simply took MSNP and tunneled it over HTTPS, which would've been a far saner approach --- it's radically different and everything is far less efficient and more complex to handle as a result. JSON everywhere. Each message has several hundred bytes of overhead, and more like kilobytes if you count the HTTP layer and everything below it. Things are split between .skype.com and .messenger.live.com with no real consistency. Trying to get presence to actually work reliably has been a nightmare (the official client apparently has problems with that too...) I'm not surprised there's no official documentation on the API/protocol, because it's a bloody mess. As you may guess, I have been trying to write a native client for it. Some of the features that work well (searching for reaction GIFs) seem unnecessary, and it's almost insulting to see the amount of add-ins and superfluous crap that's available when the core of the program/service is so lacking in comparison. This may be a rather controversial point, but software quality overall seems to have taken a steep nosedive not long after the whole "everyone can code/diversity/inclusion" movement took off. Yes, apparently everyone can code --- just not very well. I think things like all this proliferation of mostly-useless features are a symptom of that. We are simply seeing the results of quantity over quality in an industry which has shifted to rewarding sheer participation and "disruptive change" over a carefully deliberated path to perfection.

unhammer 6y ago
> The only good thing about that is it should make a thirdparty Teams client relatively straightforward Who can I throw money at to help make this happen? (Even one that only supported plain text chats and presence would be worth a lot, just so I don't have to have the whole beast running unless I'm actually in a video meeting)

2rsf 6y ago

> Teams is Skype Teams uses (or at least used) Skype for business' core under the hood

hestefisk 6y ago
And Skype for Business is actually their old Lync product and not related to Skype, the once famous VoIP startup.
- 2rsf 6y ago
  Correct, they are hardly related although AFAIK some merging was done during the last years

simonh 6y ago

Teams may be based on Skype tech under the hood, but the Skype desktop and mobile apps are garbage fires in comparison. I regularly get messages come through to Skype mobile but not desktop even when I'm working on my desktop, the mobile app seems to need to crash and restart frequently, it's slow and unreliable responding to incoming calls which often get dropped, when they come to the app at all. Having said that now my organisation has decided to move decisively to teams, it's suddenly becoming unreliable. Maybe having trouble coping with increased usage. Maybe that was the problem with Skype too.

russellendicott 6y ago

Have you noticed that you can't copy and paste all the text from a conversation? At least the feature request has 2900 upvotes. https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/31918531-allow-copying-whole-chat-conversations#comments https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/su...

jodrellblank 6y ago

> "All of the things that work, however, are damaged by how lukewarm and _slow_ the overall experience is." Oh pssht, humans can't notice a response time of less than 2 seconds. Plus performance doesn't matter at all because you can add it later if you need it, which you don't. Anyway, you can't say it's slow until you've measured it and you can't complain until you have a fix. Besides, it's more important that the code is readable because it will be read much more often than it will be written. And furthermore, if you re-run the same thing a few times to warm the JIT up, discount startup time, ignore input and output time and network lag because they are external to the system and only measure the core function runtime, you'll find it's ackshually really fast (if you buy new hardware which is ifine because +$2000 computer spend is cheaper than developer time). And does a few seconds really matter, what were you going to do with that 10 seconds of response time, read a book or something? Slow? What do you mean "slow", launch time, hover response, switching response, time to finish redrawing a page? There's many things happening and you can't complain unless you narrow down exactly which specific sub-millisecond behaviour is taking too long for you - none of them? thought not. Stop questioning the dogma, hush.