4 ms·

You're looking at teams like a chat app, but teams is more like a platform that happens to offer a chat feature. Yes, it does chat, but it also does audio/video

by Joeri 5y ago

You're looking at teams like a chat app, but teams is more like a platform that happens to offer a chat feature. Yes, it does chat, but it also does audio/video conferencing, and document sharing, and contact management, and meeting scheduling, and a bunch of other features. And those chats aren't your grandpappy's text-based IRC, they are rich text, with complete archival and full text search, and a graph API to access all of that. On top of that you have the first party add-ons, like Microsoft Viva, which turns it into a blend between a wiki and a social media platform and an e-learning platform. And then you have third party addons, literally hundreds upon hundreds of them, which integrate all kinds of SaaS products right into the teams UI. Frankly it's a miracle teams and slack work as well as they do, given how much they're asked to do. The reason teams and slack are so much slower than the chat products of old is because they are not the same product category at all. It's like comparing microsoft word to notepad++. Yes, word is clearly an inferior way to quickly edit a plain text file, but obviously anyone complaining about that is missing the point of word. A fair question to ask is whether we should have platforms like slack and teams. Why are we rebuilding a tiling OS inside of a webpage, and then wrapping that webpage in an electron container, and then complaining that it gobbles up RAM like crazy?

vladvasiliu 5y ago
> A fair question to ask is whether we should have platforms like slack and teams. Why are we rebuilding a tiling OS inside of a webpage, and then wrapping that webpage in an electron container, and then complaining that it gobbles up RAM like crazy? I agree with you. I think this is exactly the issue. I get that Teams and the chat apps of old are not the same category, but I think it's a fair question to ask whether this new category is relevant. MS Outlook already had a calendar which, somehow, loaded much quicker than the one in Teams. Even the calendar in Outlook web loads so much quicker than Teams it's not even funny. I also understand that there are much more functions in Teams (which people may or may not use), but those are all supported by the backend servers at Microsoft, they don't run locally. Teams is basically a web-browser. So I'm not sure that this functionality is an excuse for what are local UI issues. When I type in the message box, I input text. Maybe some rich text or something, but still, nothing that Word 97 couldn't have handled while being blazing fast on a 486 (aside maybe from emojis, but they can't possibly be the reason why everything is so slow). The same can be said about the lagging animations in the contact list. These all happen locally, with nothing to ask from a complex web service or having to implement some complex function.

by Joeri 5y ago

vladvasiliu 5y ago

> A fair question to ask is whether we should have platforms like slack and teams. Why are we rebuilding a tiling OS inside of a webpage, and then wrapping that webpage in an electron container, and then complaining that it gobbles up RAM like crazy? I agree with you. I think this is exactly the issue. I get that Teams and the chat apps of old are not the same category, but I think it's a fair question to ask whether this new category is relevant. MS Outlook already had a calendar which, somehow, loaded much quicker than the one in Teams. Even the calendar in Outlook web loads so much quicker than Teams it's not even funny. I also understand that there are much more functions in Teams (which people may or may not use), but those are all supported by the backend servers at Microsoft, they don't run locally. Teams is basically a web-browser. So I'm not sure that this functionality is an excuse for what are local UI issues. When I type in the message box, I input text. Maybe some rich text or something, but still, nothing that Word 97 couldn't have handled while being blazing fast on a 486 (aside maybe from emojis, but they can't possibly be the reason why everything is so slow). The same can be said about the lagging animations in the contact list. These all happen locally, with nothing to ask from a complex web service or having to implement some complex function.