7 ms·

Considering the state of Teams they really needed Discord for their amazing technology of actually being semi responsive

milkytron 6y ago
Maybe... Teams is utter garbage in my opinion, but I don't think acquiring Discord would solve that. Skype seems like a similar acquisition, and look how that turned out.
- krzepah 6y ago
  Microsoft has trouble with UI design and it only got worse. Think about the "help" buttons that are on win system preferences, instead of directing you to the option they send you to google or bing. It's ridiculous.
  - me_me_me 6y ago
    UI design? Teams has no UI design, but haphazardly aranged buttons that are hard to spot. I can't describe how bad of experience it is to use. How does a corp that actively pushes their users/clients into using Teams makes no UX effort.
    - mopsi 6y ago
      The whole Settings app also feels like something thrown together in a really primitive GUI scripting language that doesn't support anything besides text and its alignment. This is the old disk management utility: https://i.imgur.com/AqhYewC.jpg https://i.imgur.com/AqhYewC.jpg This is the new one: https://i.imgur.com/DNb0qJl.jpg https://i.imgur.com/DNb0qJl.jpg While the old was far from perfect, it at least gave visual hints to how partitions relate to disks. The new """design""" is just plain text, some of which is clickable and will reveal "Properties" button. It's up to you to find the hidden clickspots. I can't believe they are releasing such garbage. Sometimes I wonder: does Satya Nadella use Windows? How is he not raging every time he opens the Settings app?
      - airstrike 6y ago
        That's one painful side-by-side
        bronson 6y ago
        “Just throw it in a webview and let’s grab an early lunch.”
    - tyingq 6y ago
      Decision makers are pretty forgiving of an application that comes bundled with something else they had to buy anyway. And it is "good enough", despite being worse than competitors, for things like hosting video meetings.
    - beckingz 6y ago
      I hoped that getting vaccinated would make me love microsoft more, but the teams UI is just so bad. Not to mention the pain that is moving between office 365 apps.
    - bigger_cheese 6y ago
      My Org went from Skype for Business to Teams. Teams is 1000x better. The part I like is how it integrates with outlook. My workflow is pretty email oriented so being able to send an email meeting request and have that meeting seamlessly show up in teams app is really nice. Same thing when you receive an email from someone you can click their name and dial them via teams (you could do this with skype to but it was dodgy). Group calls, screen sharing etc. is miles better than Skype.
      - haecceity 6y ago
        Copying text works randomly...
  - vkou 6y ago
    IF you want a really ridicilous example of Microsoft's inability to deal with UX, try changing literally anything that has to do with sound in Windows, and tell me how many separate sound-related configuration applications there are, and what are the paths to opening them. Then, ask someone who never used Windows XP to explain to you what each of those configuration applications is responsible for. (So they won't be able to lean on the crutch of "Oh, this one is the exact same thing as the sound application in Windows 98...")
    - tinus_hn 6y ago
      One of the reasons of course is that every driver feels the need to add their great pane to the control panel applet, so now Microsoft can’t change anything to the applet or all the drivers break.
      - InitialLastName 6y ago
        3 of those settings panes are baked directly into Windows 10 and have nothing to do with any 3rd-party drivers. If the sound isn't enough, the power management is even worse. I count at least 5 different panes to configure different subsets of screen saver, sleep, hibernate and power on/off behavior, all from Windows itself with no 3rd-party software involved.
        vkou 6y ago
        I believe (but can't confirm, because I don't own enough wierd audio equipment) that third-party drivers can embed controls into one of those settings panes. But yes, your point still stands. There's no good reason for this mess, and Microsoft needs to put someone who cares in charge of Windows UX.
        InitialLastName 6y ago
        > I believe (but can't confirm, because I don't own enough wierd audio equipment) that third-party drivers can embed controls into one of those settings panes. That would be an improvement on the current status quo, where each third-party device adds its own new settings pane.
- remir 6y ago
  If you think Teams is garbage, try dealing with the admin side of Teams. UX nightmare.
dekerta 6y ago
Teams definitely feels like it was rushed to market to take advantage of the pandemic. I'm really sad our company moved us from Slack to Teams. It's so much worse, especially on Linux
- decebalus1 6y ago
  Teams has been rushed to market 4 years ago..
  - wussboy 6y ago
    And it was still better than the dumpster fire that was Skype for Business. I loved how it would push a message to the device that it thought you were active on, but that there wasn't a centralized storage of messages. Messages sent to Device 1 didn't exist on Device 2.
    - tracker1 6y ago
      That was so bad... you'd reply to a message at lunch on your way back, get to your desktop, and couldn't get messages at all... even if you sent one out. That was the absolute most frustrating thing.
- alwayshasbeen 6y ago
  Teams was present long before the pandemic.
- thow-01187 6y ago
  I wonder whether the near universal unpleasant experiences mentioned in this thread aren't caused by bad ports of MS Teams to Mac/Linux/Android. I use Teams solely on Windows, and the calls/video are flawless, recording just works, captions and audio transcripts are fairly accurate. The chat portion has minor warts, but it does get the job done. Markdown syntax works for most of the message formatting needs. Webhooks are easy to implement.
curiousgal 6y ago
Been using Teams for school for two years now and have zero complaints.
- doublerabbit 6y ago
  Been using Teams for work for two years and I have so many complaints.
  - k12sosse 6y ago
    Great points here.
- ehsankia 6y ago
  Have you used other software like Discord though to have a frame of reference?
- happytoexplain 6y ago
  Sometimes you need to be a "power user" to encounter all a product's flaws. I've been using it professionally for 3.5 years, and I touch pretty much every feature. I had high hopes because I loved a lot of the decisions they were making, so I started maintaining a list of issues/bugs. I reported them when I had time to describe them well. After a year, it got into the hundreds, with some that were pretty dramatic, and I stopped caring enough to continue, because it was clearly not going to be the product I was hoping it could be. Since then, the most obvious problem that has happened is slowdown. It takes full seconds to do most navigation/loading in our (large) team. The whole affair made me truly sad, frustrated, and angry.
  - tracker1 6y ago
    I think my biggest pet peive is the existence of Files/Wikis per/channel... when most of the time, you kind of one one set per team. Or the proliferation of Team groups themselves. Goes from pretty simple/useful to crazy bloated. Another irksome thing is you can tether the wiki along with files to onedrive via the sharepoint backend links... but the format of the wiki is in a proprietary format, and even if you did get it, it doesn't sync the other way, read only local.
formerly_proven 6y ago
MS already owned Skype for over half a decade before they made Teams and Teams voice/video chat is still vastly inferior than Skype. How would owning a bunch more IP that they‘re ignoring help?
- InitialLastName 6y ago
  Not just that, but you can no longer sign up for a Skype (even "for business") account if your organization has Teams through Office 365, but Teams doesn't interoperate well with Skype so if you, for business reasons, need to communicate with a Skype user without using a personal Skype account, you're SOL.
fuzzy2 6y ago
But the main problem with Teams is its low-performance GUI (Electron-based). And from what I hear about Discord, it's the same there. There's other minor problems like insane chat latency, but I can work with that. Voice and Video generally works fine.
- vimacs2 6y ago
  That is absolutely not "the main problem" with Teams. It's UI is not very well thought out at all and notifications work with the reliability of a rooster on ketamine. The only three value propositions Teams has over Discord are: * Support for threads - albeit again very inelegantly. * The ability to embed web apps as tabs in a Teams page - this is my favourite feature * Integration with Office 365
vehementi 6y ago
Discord doesn't have particularly amazing technology, what do you mean?
- herbst 6y ago
  They combined a lot of things others were doing well too and combined it into a resource hungry piece of software. I too am not really impressed
  - anticensor 6y ago
    Correcting for you, into one resource hungry piece of software.
    - herbst 6y ago
      Thanks :) a / an / one / ... still gets me sometimes.
  - vehementi 6y ago
    It's not that they didn't do it well or anything, and they've clearly scaled up to this insane load but they aren't afaik using crazy algorithms or something special like that. They just did the obvious "we'll have a hosted app that does this AND this"

milkytron 6y ago

Maybe... Teams is utter garbage in my opinion, but I don't think acquiring Discord would solve that. Skype seems like a similar acquisition, and look how that turned out.

krzepah 6y ago
Microsoft has trouble with UI design and it only got worse. Think about the "help" buttons that are on win system preferences, instead of directing you to the option they send you to google or bing. It's ridiculous.
- me_me_me 6y ago
  UI design? Teams has no UI design, but haphazardly aranged buttons that are hard to spot. I can't describe how bad of experience it is to use. How does a corp that actively pushes their users/clients into using Teams makes no UX effort.
  - mopsi 6y ago
    The whole Settings app also feels like something thrown together in a really primitive GUI scripting language that doesn't support anything besides text and its alignment. This is the old disk management utility: https://i.imgur.com/AqhYewC.jpg https://i.imgur.com/AqhYewC.jpg This is the new one: https://i.imgur.com/DNb0qJl.jpg https://i.imgur.com/DNb0qJl.jpg While the old was far from perfect, it at least gave visual hints to how partitions relate to disks. The new """design""" is just plain text, some of which is clickable and will reveal "Properties" button. It's up to you to find the hidden clickspots. I can't believe they are releasing such garbage. Sometimes I wonder: does Satya Nadella use Windows? How is he not raging every time he opens the Settings app?
    - airstrike 6y ago
      That's one painful side-by-side
      - bronson 6y ago
        “Just throw it in a webview and let’s grab an early lunch.”
  - tyingq 6y ago
    Decision makers are pretty forgiving of an application that comes bundled with something else they had to buy anyway. And it is "good enough", despite being worse than competitors, for things like hosting video meetings.
  - beckingz 6y ago
    I hoped that getting vaccinated would make me love microsoft more, but the teams UI is just so bad. Not to mention the pain that is moving between office 365 apps.
  - bigger_cheese 6y ago
    My Org went from Skype for Business to Teams. Teams is 1000x better. The part I like is how it integrates with outlook. My workflow is pretty email oriented so being able to send an email meeting request and have that meeting seamlessly show up in teams app is really nice. Same thing when you receive an email from someone you can click their name and dial them via teams (you could do this with skype to but it was dodgy). Group calls, screen sharing etc. is miles better than Skype.
    - haecceity 6y ago
      Copying text works randomly...
- vkou 6y ago
  IF you want a really ridicilous example of Microsoft's inability to deal with UX, try changing literally anything that has to do with sound in Windows, and tell me how many separate sound-related configuration applications there are, and what are the paths to opening them. Then, ask someone who never used Windows XP to explain to you what each of those configuration applications is responsible for. (So they won't be able to lean on the crutch of "Oh, this one is the exact same thing as the sound application in Windows 98...")
  - tinus_hn 6y ago
    One of the reasons of course is that every driver feels the need to add their great pane to the control panel applet, so now Microsoft can’t change anything to the applet or all the drivers break.
    - InitialLastName 6y ago
      3 of those settings panes are baked directly into Windows 10 and have nothing to do with any 3rd-party drivers. If the sound isn't enough, the power management is even worse. I count at least 5 different panes to configure different subsets of screen saver, sleep, hibernate and power on/off behavior, all from Windows itself with no 3rd-party software involved.
      - vkou 6y ago
        I believe (but can't confirm, because I don't own enough wierd audio equipment) that third-party drivers can embed controls into one of those settings panes. But yes, your point still stands. There's no good reason for this mess, and Microsoft needs to put someone who cares in charge of Windows UX.
        InitialLastName 6y ago
        > I believe (but can't confirm, because I don't own enough wierd audio equipment) that third-party drivers can embed controls into one of those settings panes. That would be an improvement on the current status quo, where each third-party device adds its own new settings pane.
remir 6y ago
If you think Teams is garbage, try dealing with the admin side of Teams. UX nightmare.

dekerta 6y ago

Teams definitely feels like it was rushed to market to take advantage of the pandemic. I'm really sad our company moved us from Slack to Teams. It's so much worse, especially on Linux

decebalus1 6y ago
Teams has been rushed to market 4 years ago..
- wussboy 6y ago
  And it was still better than the dumpster fire that was Skype for Business. I loved how it would push a message to the device that it thought you were active on, but that there wasn't a centralized storage of messages. Messages sent to Device 1 didn't exist on Device 2.
  - tracker1 6y ago
    That was so bad... you'd reply to a message at lunch on your way back, get to your desktop, and couldn't get messages at all... even if you sent one out. That was the absolute most frustrating thing.
alwayshasbeen 6y ago
Teams was present long before the pandemic.
thow-01187 6y ago
I wonder whether the near universal unpleasant experiences mentioned in this thread aren't caused by bad ports of MS Teams to Mac/Linux/Android. I use Teams solely on Windows, and the calls/video are flawless, recording just works, captions and audio transcripts are fairly accurate. The chat portion has minor warts, but it does get the job done. Markdown syntax works for most of the message formatting needs. Webhooks are easy to implement.

curiousgal 6y ago

Been using Teams for school for two years now and have zero complaints.

doublerabbit 6y ago
Been using Teams for work for two years and I have so many complaints.
- k12sosse 6y ago
  Great points here.
ehsankia 6y ago
Have you used other software like Discord though to have a frame of reference?
happytoexplain 6y ago
Sometimes you need to be a "power user" to encounter all a product's flaws. I've been using it professionally for 3.5 years, and I touch pretty much every feature. I had high hopes because I loved a lot of the decisions they were making, so I started maintaining a list of issues/bugs. I reported them when I had time to describe them well. After a year, it got into the hundreds, with some that were pretty dramatic, and I stopped caring enough to continue, because it was clearly not going to be the product I was hoping it could be. Since then, the most obvious problem that has happened is slowdown. It takes full seconds to do most navigation/loading in our (large) team. The whole affair made me truly sad, frustrated, and angry.
- tracker1 6y ago
  I think my biggest pet peive is the existence of Files/Wikis per/channel... when most of the time, you kind of one one set per team. Or the proliferation of Team groups themselves. Goes from pretty simple/useful to crazy bloated. Another irksome thing is you can tether the wiki along with files to onedrive via the sharepoint backend links... but the format of the wiki is in a proprietary format, and even if you did get it, it doesn't sync the other way, read only local.

formerly_proven 6y ago

MS already owned Skype for over half a decade before they made Teams and Teams voice/video chat is still vastly inferior than Skype. How would owning a bunch more IP that they‘re ignoring help?

InitialLastName 6y ago
Not just that, but you can no longer sign up for a Skype (even "for business") account if your organization has Teams through Office 365, but Teams doesn't interoperate well with Skype so if you, for business reasons, need to communicate with a Skype user without using a personal Skype account, you're SOL.

fuzzy2 6y ago

But the main problem with Teams is its low-performance GUI (Electron-based). And from what I hear about Discord, it's the same there. There's other minor problems like insane chat latency, but I can work with that. Voice and Video generally works fine.

vimacs2 6y ago
That is absolutely not "the main problem" with Teams. It's UI is not very well thought out at all and notifications work with the reliability of a rooster on ketamine. The only three value propositions Teams has over Discord are: * Support for threads - albeit again very inelegantly. * The ability to embed web apps as tabs in a Teams page - this is my favourite feature * Integration with Office 365

vehementi 6y ago

Discord doesn't have particularly amazing technology, what do you mean?

herbst 6y ago
They combined a lot of things others were doing well too and combined it into a resource hungry piece of software. I too am not really impressed
- anticensor 6y ago
  Correcting for you, into one resource hungry piece of software.
  - herbst 6y ago
    Thanks :) a / an / one / ... still gets me sometimes.
- vehementi 6y ago
  It's not that they didn't do it well or anything, and they've clearly scaled up to this insane load but they aren't afaik using crazy algorithms or something special like that. They just did the obvious "we'll have a hosted app that does this AND this"