7 ms·

Please don't do this. Microsoft chat services are the absolute worst. I've had to use Skype for years after Microsoft purchased it and it was bad. I have to use

Please don't do this. Microsoft chat services are the absolute worst. I've had to use Skype for years after Microsoft purchased it and it was bad. I have to use Teams for work and it's just abysmal. I don't know why but everything Microsoft touches in this space turns to absolute trash.

jbm 6y ago
I have had to move from Slack to Teams. Despite what everyone says about Slack, Teams is much, much worse because of the complex and incomprehensible integrations with Active Directory. I have had invitations to meetings that I can click on and that don't trigger the Teams app. The "Join meeting" button doesn't show up in Firefox, and even in Chrome, I get sucked into a redirect hell. I even have meetings created without the meeting invitation link - despite the meeting having been created within Teams itself. I have resorted to inviting people to Google meets just to get stuff clarified. But it's still better than Azure DevOps.
- easton 6y ago
  The other thing that sucks about Azure AD and Teams is that if you invite someone from outside your tenant into a meeting and their IT admin has disabled guest login into other tenants (not uncommon in places like banks where they don’t want people leaving credentials everywhere, even if heavily scoped), they will get a cryptic error message and you will never know that they got an error unless they call you out of band and tell you, and by that point you’re probably 15 minutes into the meeting. This was the reason the last place I worked switched to Zoom, since if you invited someone outside the org it just popped up a box asking them for a name.
HenryKissinger 6y ago
I too use Teams at work and I think it's fine. What do you dislike about it more specifically?
- tannhaeuser 6y ago
  It just doesn't work? I've tried multiple times on various projects, but "using" Teams on Linux or Mac is a sure way to loose contact with your team. Skype works much better (or at all I guess for me).
- BoysenberryPi 6y ago
  The 3 biggest problems I have with it are search, history, and stability. Scrolling back in time past a few weeks will frequently just crash Teams for me. The search Teams has is beyond basic and genuinely unhelpful most of the time, and I frequently just don't get my alerts despite being available and someone directly @ing me. Then there are tons of small problems like Teams automatically setting me as away if I don't touch my mouse for 15 minutes or sometimes I'll have Teams on a second monitor while working in a primary monitor and Teams will have set me as away for no reason. Also Teams threads are literally the worst UX I have ever had. I am not exaggerating
  - uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh 6y ago
    Yeah its really bad, as though the ui is a weird disjoint web of features instead of a heirarchical flow
- gdsdfe 6y ago
  Teams have the ugliest ux of any chat app
- cosmotic 6y ago
  I find teams to be buggy, confusing, and unresponsive. It also enables fairly undiscoverable and frustrating experiences like those sites within tabs. Then there's the notification overload and strange threading/discussions. I've gotten used to slack, hip chat, and old skype for business, but I have not yet got used to teams even after years is usage.
- AnonC 6y ago
  Not GP, but Teams on Windows 10 is a great example of how Electron apps can be terrible. It is sluggish, uses a lot of RAM and causes other Chromium based apps to run out of memory, crashes every so often, has serious issues with logging in after a password change, is not really feature rich, its User Voice forum for voting on issues and feature requests has many that have been asked for years by a lot of people but not prioritized and so on. I have reinstalled MS Teams many times, cleared all its cache folders many times, removed all Office and other credentials from Credential Manager many times, made registry changes, logged out explicitly and logged in many times. These are routine activities I have to do just to use it because my organization has a subscription and won’t use any other tool (Skype for Business was abandoned after it reached some amount of stability over several years). In summary, MS Teams is a dysfunctional tool that reflects the dysfunctional organization behind it. I can’t think of any other reason why it should be so badly maintained. Every time I think of Windows and other MS applications like Teams, I can’t help but wonder what big productivity and time suckers these are. They seem to be the lowest common denominator in the IT world.
belltaco 6y ago
Teams is so much better than Slack and WebEx. Are you on Mac OS? Heard more complaints on that platform.
- perryizgr8 6y ago
  To be fair Macos is full of bugs. Even first party apps are buggy and laggy. So it is not hard to believe that third party stuff is less supportive.
random5634 6y ago
God - skype went to hell - absolute garbage new interface etc. It's something maybe with their tech stack that does not handle realtime audio etc and then on design side it's all non-usable social network type stuff? I honestly could not believe how badly they trashed skype - instead of it becoming WhatsApp it just imploded at least for my use case. I use teams, while confusing it seems miles better than previous effort (zoom still by far the best for video).
- cbkeller 6y ago
  Well that's probably at least in part because a major motivation for that acquisition was not to actually improve the underlying technology. To quote verbatim one of my favorite hn posts of all time (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18411779 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18411779): A series of headlines: 2009 - NSA offering 'billions' for Skype eavesdrop solution [1] 2011 - Microsoft buys Skype for $8.5 billion. Why, exactly? [2] 2012 - Skype replaces P2P supernodes with Linux boxes hosted by Microsoft [3] 2013 - Microsoft handed the NSA access to encrypted messages. Subhead: Skype worked to enable Prism collection of video calls [4] 1. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/12/nsa_offers_billions_for_skype_pwnage/ 2. https://www.wired.com/2011/05/microsoft-buys-skype-2/ 3. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/05/skype-replaces-p2p-supernodes-with-linux-boxes-hosted-by-microsoft/ 4. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-collaboration-user-data
  - goldforever 6y ago
    WOW!
  - random5634 6y ago
    Interesting. I did some work overseas in out of the way places - did supernodes used to be potentially very close to you if you had your own network that was limited back to larger internet?
    - cbkeller 6y ago
      Potentially yes: the supernodes were just other "regular users who had sufficient bandwidth" which could be quite efficient if you were all in, say a remote region with good local bandwidth but little connection back to the rest of the world. Obviously though, this P2P structure would make interception of message content by Skype corporate rather implausible! There's a pretty good figure and explanation in the ars article above.
perryizgr8 6y ago
> Teams for work and it's just abysmal Teams is a 7 star resort with free beer and wine, when compared to google chat.
- Ygg2 6y ago
  That is like saying a crack den is better than living in an open grave. I mean yes, but why compare them even?
  - perryizgr8 6y ago
    Because my company's response to asking for Teams/Slack is "why do you need it when we have google chat/meet?" Google has positioned gchat as an alternative to Slack/Team.
    - Ygg2 6y ago
      <Insert J. Jonah Jameson laugh> https://media.tenor.com/images/43009a72264654dcca101de9bc5cb6b6/tenor.gif https://media.tenor.com/images/43009a72264654dcca101de9bc5cb... I guess clueless company is clueless.
TuringNYC 6y ago
I couldn’t even log into Skype after the acquisition!
- throw03172019 6y ago
  You didn’t miss anything. I had the same troubles but managed to do it after a few hoops.
wyqydsyq 6y ago
Skype was always garbage software, even long before Microsoft bought it
- SilverRed 6y ago
  The competitors were also pretty trash though. Skype never improved while the rest of the landscape did.
  - wyqydsyq 6y ago
    Pretty standard Microsoft strategy really. Once they decide they dominate a market they figure there's no reason to invest another cent into improving their product offering. See also: Internet Explorer
blondie9x 6y ago
Microsoft has bought Linkedin, Skype, Bungie, Bethesda, Github etc. Is this what tech has become? The titans are buying up everything and tech becomes 5 companies in the US and 3 or so in China? Feels better to have a wide breath of companies for healthy competition and innovation.
- robjan 6y ago
  These companies can't live off VC cash forever. Getting acquired by Google / Microsoft is usually part of the business plan.
  - ksm 6y ago
    Then perhaps (SV startup?) companies should start thinking about creating profitable businesses in the first place instead of living on borrowed money?
    - Mindwipe 6y ago
      Should. Don't.
- airstrike 6y ago
  Microsoft acquiring those companies doesn't really hurt competition. Tech M&A (and particularly the list of examples you pick) is often driven by the desire to acquire talent, technology or capabilities that you don't already have, expanding the scope of the company. If you can integrate the acquired asset with your existing offerings, the theory goes, you will be able to create something greater than the sum of the parts.
  - arcanon 6y ago
    It is also used by companies to acquire talent they used to have, but lost.
- senectus1 6y ago
  They have accumulated a cash war chest that is so big it's a liability... their way to deal with that is to acquire and offset costs and taxes which enables them to get bigger faster. The system is working. but only really for the biggest.
harmeswoul12 6y ago
Hopefully, things are different under Satya, who wisely has kept GitHub at arms length. But it is hard to think of other US large cap companies with such a record of being a Destroyer of Acquisitions.
- quantified 6y ago
  Hopefully. Minecraft is another example of something they didn’t abjectly fuck up. It’s possible for them to do the right thing. From what I see over my spawn’s shoulders, Discord is substantially better than Slack. Hope they don’t kill Discord with enterpriseyness and keep it more on the gamer side.
- Mindwipe 6y ago
  GitHub had some value as an independent concern though. Discord doesn't. Either it has to start monetising so it doesn't lose money (which it could do regardless of Microsoft so the acquisition doesn't add much value) or Microsoft justifies the acquisition by integrating it with it's other services (probably gaming) and taking advantage of the user base. So it doesn't feel like the same can apply.
Acrobatic_Road 6y ago
>Microsoft chat services are the absolute worst That's exactly why they should do this. Discord needs to die. We should be cheering this on.
- da39a3ee 6y ago
  Explain?
  - Acrobatic_Road 6y ago
    There are better alternatives that respect user privacy and freedom, i.e. that actively encourage alternative clients instead of banning people for using them over bloated electron garbage.
    - meddlepal 6y ago
      Ah yes..., the things nobody really cares about except for a tiny (vocal) minority.
      - Acrobatic_Road 6y ago
        Things nobody cares about such as privacy and freedom? I don't think this one is a very hard sell. It's just an education problem.
        mdoms 6y ago
        If users cared about privacy no one would use Google/Android. If they cared about freedom they wouldn't use Apple/iphone. Frankly those issues, important as they may be to you, are low priorities for most users.
        saagarjha 6y ago
        You just eliminated the two most popular smartphone platforms. What choice do they have?
potatoman22 6y ago
Teams isn't that bad haha, it works fine.

jbm 6y ago

I have had to move from Slack to Teams. Despite what everyone says about Slack, Teams is much, much worse because of the complex and incomprehensible integrations with Active Directory. I have had invitations to meetings that I can click on and that don't trigger the Teams app. The "Join meeting" button doesn't show up in Firefox, and even in Chrome, I get sucked into a redirect hell. I even have meetings created without the meeting invitation link - despite the meeting having been created within Teams itself. I have resorted to inviting people to Google meets just to get stuff clarified. But it's still better than Azure DevOps.

easton 6y ago
The other thing that sucks about Azure AD and Teams is that if you invite someone from outside your tenant into a meeting and their IT admin has disabled guest login into other tenants (not uncommon in places like banks where they don’t want people leaving credentials everywhere, even if heavily scoped), they will get a cryptic error message and you will never know that they got an error unless they call you out of band and tell you, and by that point you’re probably 15 minutes into the meeting. This was the reason the last place I worked switched to Zoom, since if you invited someone outside the org it just popped up a box asking them for a name.

HenryKissinger 6y ago

I too use Teams at work and I think it's fine. What do you dislike about it more specifically?

tannhaeuser 6y ago
It just doesn't work? I've tried multiple times on various projects, but "using" Teams on Linux or Mac is a sure way to loose contact with your team. Skype works much better (or at all I guess for me).
BoysenberryPi 6y ago
The 3 biggest problems I have with it are search, history, and stability. Scrolling back in time past a few weeks will frequently just crash Teams for me. The search Teams has is beyond basic and genuinely unhelpful most of the time, and I frequently just don't get my alerts despite being available and someone directly @ing me. Then there are tons of small problems like Teams automatically setting me as away if I don't touch my mouse for 15 minutes or sometimes I'll have Teams on a second monitor while working in a primary monitor and Teams will have set me as away for no reason. Also Teams threads are literally the worst UX I have ever had. I am not exaggerating
- uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh 6y ago
  Yeah its really bad, as though the ui is a weird disjoint web of features instead of a heirarchical flow
gdsdfe 6y ago
Teams have the ugliest ux of any chat app
cosmotic 6y ago
I find teams to be buggy, confusing, and unresponsive. It also enables fairly undiscoverable and frustrating experiences like those sites within tabs. Then there's the notification overload and strange threading/discussions. I've gotten used to slack, hip chat, and old skype for business, but I have not yet got used to teams even after years is usage.
AnonC 6y ago
Not GP, but Teams on Windows 10 is a great example of how Electron apps can be terrible. It is sluggish, uses a lot of RAM and causes other Chromium based apps to run out of memory, crashes every so often, has serious issues with logging in after a password change, is not really feature rich, its User Voice forum for voting on issues and feature requests has many that have been asked for years by a lot of people but not prioritized and so on. I have reinstalled MS Teams many times, cleared all its cache folders many times, removed all Office and other credentials from Credential Manager many times, made registry changes, logged out explicitly and logged in many times. These are routine activities I have to do just to use it because my organization has a subscription and won’t use any other tool (Skype for Business was abandoned after it reached some amount of stability over several years). In summary, MS Teams is a dysfunctional tool that reflects the dysfunctional organization behind it. I can’t think of any other reason why it should be so badly maintained. Every time I think of Windows and other MS applications like Teams, I can’t help but wonder what big productivity and time suckers these are. They seem to be the lowest common denominator in the IT world.

belltaco 6y ago

Teams is so much better than Slack and WebEx. Are you on Mac OS? Heard more complaints on that platform.

perryizgr8 6y ago
To be fair Macos is full of bugs. Even first party apps are buggy and laggy. So it is not hard to believe that third party stuff is less supportive.

random5634 6y ago

God - skype went to hell - absolute garbage new interface etc. It's something maybe with their tech stack that does not handle realtime audio etc and then on design side it's all non-usable social network type stuff? I honestly could not believe how badly they trashed skype - instead of it becoming WhatsApp it just imploded at least for my use case. I use teams, while confusing it seems miles better than previous effort (zoom still by far the best for video).

cbkeller 6y ago
Well that's probably at least in part because a major motivation for that acquisition was not to actually improve the underlying technology. To quote verbatim one of my favorite hn posts of all time (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18411779 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18411779): A series of headlines: 2009 - NSA offering 'billions' for Skype eavesdrop solution [1] 2011 - Microsoft buys Skype for $8.5 billion. Why, exactly? [2] 2012 - Skype replaces P2P supernodes with Linux boxes hosted by Microsoft [3] 2013 - Microsoft handed the NSA access to encrypted messages. Subhead: Skype worked to enable Prism collection of video calls [4] 1. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/12/nsa_offers_billions_for_skype_pwnage/ 2. https://www.wired.com/2011/05/microsoft-buys-skype-2/ 3. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/05/skype-replaces-p2p-supernodes-with-linux-boxes-hosted-by-microsoft/ 4. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-collaboration-user-data
- goldforever 6y ago
  WOW!
- random5634 6y ago
  Interesting. I did some work overseas in out of the way places - did supernodes used to be potentially very close to you if you had your own network that was limited back to larger internet?
  - cbkeller 6y ago
    Potentially yes: the supernodes were just other "regular users who had sufficient bandwidth" which could be quite efficient if you were all in, say a remote region with good local bandwidth but little connection back to the rest of the world. Obviously though, this P2P structure would make interception of message content by Skype corporate rather implausible! There's a pretty good figure and explanation in the ars article above.

perryizgr8 6y ago

> Teams for work and it's just abysmal Teams is a 7 star resort with free beer and wine, when compared to google chat.

Ygg2 6y ago
That is like saying a crack den is better than living in an open grave. I mean yes, but why compare them even?
- perryizgr8 6y ago
  Because my company's response to asking for Teams/Slack is "why do you need it when we have google chat/meet?" Google has positioned gchat as an alternative to Slack/Team.
  - Ygg2 6y ago
    <Insert J. Jonah Jameson laugh> https://media.tenor.com/images/43009a72264654dcca101de9bc5cb6b6/tenor.gif https://media.tenor.com/images/43009a72264654dcca101de9bc5cb... I guess clueless company is clueless.

TuringNYC 6y ago

I couldn’t even log into Skype after the acquisition!

throw03172019 6y ago
You didn’t miss anything. I had the same troubles but managed to do it after a few hoops.

wyqydsyq 6y ago

Skype was always garbage software, even long before Microsoft bought it

SilverRed 6y ago
The competitors were also pretty trash though. Skype never improved while the rest of the landscape did.
- wyqydsyq 6y ago
  Pretty standard Microsoft strategy really. Once they decide they dominate a market they figure there's no reason to invest another cent into improving their product offering. See also: Internet Explorer

blondie9x 6y ago

Microsoft has bought Linkedin, Skype, Bungie, Bethesda, Github etc. Is this what tech has become? The titans are buying up everything and tech becomes 5 companies in the US and 3 or so in China? Feels better to have a wide breath of companies for healthy competition and innovation.

robjan 6y ago
These companies can't live off VC cash forever. Getting acquired by Google / Microsoft is usually part of the business plan.
- ksm 6y ago
  Then perhaps (SV startup?) companies should start thinking about creating profitable businesses in the first place instead of living on borrowed money?
  - Mindwipe 6y ago
    Should. Don't.
airstrike 6y ago
Microsoft acquiring those companies doesn't really hurt competition. Tech M&A (and particularly the list of examples you pick) is often driven by the desire to acquire talent, technology or capabilities that you don't already have, expanding the scope of the company. If you can integrate the acquired asset with your existing offerings, the theory goes, you will be able to create something greater than the sum of the parts.
- arcanon 6y ago
  It is also used by companies to acquire talent they used to have, but lost.
senectus1 6y ago
They have accumulated a cash war chest that is so big it's a liability... their way to deal with that is to acquire and offset costs and taxes which enables them to get bigger faster. The system is working. but only really for the biggest.

harmeswoul12 6y ago

Hopefully, things are different under Satya, who wisely has kept GitHub at arms length. But it is hard to think of other US large cap companies with such a record of being a Destroyer of Acquisitions.

quantified 6y ago
Hopefully. Minecraft is another example of something they didn’t abjectly fuck up. It’s possible for them to do the right thing. From what I see over my spawn’s shoulders, Discord is substantially better than Slack. Hope they don’t kill Discord with enterpriseyness and keep it more on the gamer side.
Mindwipe 6y ago
GitHub had some value as an independent concern though. Discord doesn't. Either it has to start monetising so it doesn't lose money (which it could do regardless of Microsoft so the acquisition doesn't add much value) or Microsoft justifies the acquisition by integrating it with it's other services (probably gaming) and taking advantage of the user base. So it doesn't feel like the same can apply.

Acrobatic_Road 6y ago

>Microsoft chat services are the absolute worst That's exactly why they should do this. Discord needs to die. We should be cheering this on.

da39a3ee 6y ago
Explain?
- Acrobatic_Road 6y ago
  There are better alternatives that respect user privacy and freedom, i.e. that actively encourage alternative clients instead of banning people for using them over bloated electron garbage.
  - meddlepal 6y ago
    Ah yes..., the things nobody really cares about except for a tiny (vocal) minority.
    - Acrobatic_Road 6y ago
      Things nobody cares about such as privacy and freedom? I don't think this one is a very hard sell. It's just an education problem.
      - mdoms 6y ago
        If users cared about privacy no one would use Google/Android. If they cared about freedom they wouldn't use Apple/iphone. Frankly those issues, important as they may be to you, are low priorities for most users.
        saagarjha 6y ago
        You just eliminated the two most popular smartphone platforms. What choice do they have?

potatoman22 6y ago

Teams isn't that bad haha, it works fine.