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MS Teams is the worst software I've ever used. This is not hyperbole. A room full of monkeys on a typewriter would never create something as bad as teams.

danuker 5y ago
> A room full of monkeys on a typewriter would never create something as bad as teams. Monkeys could barely create software if at all. That means you have set a low badness bar for Teams to surpass.
- mypastself 5y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem
- zeeZ 5y ago
  What if they were using GitHub copilot?
senectus1 5y ago
Lync was worse.
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  Oh, I remember how Lync had different maximum message lengths for the first message in a conversation vs subsequent ones. I believe it was using SIP internally and sending your first chat message in a "begin call" workflow, but it was always unpredictable when a new "call" would start or not. Horrible kludgey solutions...
- bluGill 5y ago
  I want lync back. I'm no longer 20, my eyes demand that I zoom everything in and then features disappear
Philip-J-Fry 5y ago
One day they just completely fucked the ability to paste code. It worked flawlessly before and then suddenly it removes indenting, bugs out and doesn't let you exit the preformatted code block. It's so bugged, it's like they didn't even test it. They couldn't have, one day it literally worked fine and the next it was unusable and could be replicated every single time. And why there isn't the ability to just delete the rich text formatting and write markdown I do not know. They can't build a bug free rich text editor or one with intuitive controls. It's the same problem I have with Jira, the rich text editor just does not work like it should.
- bennyp101 5y ago
  I like playing the "can I paste an image in today or not?" game - sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, sometimes I have to open the web version to do it, other times not ...
  - mrweasel 5y ago
    For a six month five people in our office couldn’t use the desktop client. Video meetings just didn’t work on the Mac.
  - ncann 5y ago
    The image thing is the most frustrating one. Most of the time someone sends me an image, I can see it in the chat, but as I click on it, the Teams UI bugs out and displays nothing.
  - thrower123 5y ago
    If somebody sends me an image, I can click on the thumbnail and open it full-size about once in five attempts. Usually it will just open up to a blank screen and fail to load the image.
- stevesimmons 5y ago
  The latest Teams bug I've encountered is an inability to write a bulleted list with more than one bullet. Each newline splits the list into a new message. No combination of Shift/Ctrl/Alt + Enter worked. This changed, as in broke, around a week ago. At least for me, on Win 11. Edit: Just remembered another Teams bug from a few days ago: cut text from the middle of paragraph, paste it back in earlier in the same paragraph, ... and it appears in a smaller font.
mypastself 5y ago
It’s among the worst I’m currently using, at the very least. The most amusing part is that you never feel like you’re on solid ground: given the app’s complexity, there is always some exotic new problem to be discovered at the least convenient time. At least the audio is consistently good, though.
mrweasel 5y ago
I must have used worse software, but not something that I can remember. The problem with Teams is that for all it’s flaws, I can pick an alternative. Clients expect Teams and are always surprised that we don’t really use it internally. Video call on Teams is actually pretty good, but everything else just seems half-baked, thrown together without a plan. The GUI is non-intuitive, basic features are unstable, absent or hidden away. Work for a company that doesn’t use ActiveDirectory and Exchange… well now your in for at really bad time.
- jimnotgym 5y ago
  > Work for a company that doesn’t use ActiveDirectory and Exchange… well now your in for at really bad time. Another way to think of it is that the deep integration to AD and Exchange is the major reason IT departments like Teams. The video and audio calling is fine, the chat works, although it seems to annoy Slack users. The meeting calendar syncs with Exchange. Planner boards give a simple Kanban setup. File storage with Sharepoint and Onedrive integration mean that the stored files work almost like they are on my computer.
aspaviento 5y ago
Linux version: - some times the left arrow to move the cursor doesn't work - some times images are displayed and others not - can't have more than 4 people on screen in a video call - the scroll is completely broken - can't get out of the immersive mode without closing the process (the back arrow doesn't work) And the list goes on and on...
- rleigh 5y ago
  Not Linux-specific! The Windows version suffers from at least 1, 2 and 4 in my experience.
- rapsey 5y ago
  As a cross platform desktop app developer I hate desktop linux. So many reinventions of the wheel that you have to support. Graphics, sound, video capture, GUI is all a mess.
  - Karsteski 5y ago
    Can you elaborate more? What would you prefer instead, with regards to developing for Linux?
    - rapsey 5y ago
      There is X and now wayland. If you are doing something beyond basic you can quickly fall into needing two different implementations for GUI things. There is jack, pulse, alsa and now pipewire for sound. On the system you can have multiple sound devices some available fully working only through pipewire, others fully working only through pulse. If you want your app to integrate into your desktop nicely (basic thing like using tray icons) you can have completely different behaviors on different distros because there is so much variability. Pipewire is now taking over a lot of things regarding audio/video. With fedora already fully on it. Great but the documentation is in a miserable state. Very few examples. Some distros while have pipewire running, using it for audio will just not work.
      - 5y ago
atraac 5y ago
I fully agree. I literally never felt this much hate and contempt for software as I do when I'm forced to use Teams every day. It's an absolute shitshow of a chat. And when I thought it couldn't get worse, they f*ked up ctrl+a selecting all text on Windows... I work in MS ecosystem, some MS products are great, some are really bad, most are ok-ish, but Teams is on a whole another level of bad.
- whatch 5y ago
  Ctrl + A is also broken on Mac. Quite surprised to see it is broken on Windows as well
- lokedhs 5y ago
  Then I presume you never had the misfortune of using Skype for Business? We used this prior to Teams, and in comparison, Teams is great. I'm guessing a lot of Teams users come from Skype for Business, so they are really happy with the improvements.
  - formerly_proven 5y ago
    SfB only did the non-persistent chat and A/V calls portion of Teams and is really more like a VoIP PBX. SfB calls still have better audio quality than Teams today - I'm guessing they've optimized bandwidth down to meet a "2/5 star rating" ("technically intelligible").
  - thrower123 5y ago
    Skype for Business was incredible next to Teams. Lightweight client (even though it was WPF), developer SDK that actually provided basic chat functionality, notifications that didn't automatically get lost in the scrum. I miss it a lot. The server infrastructure was a bit of a shitshow, if you ever had to maintain an on-premise deployment, and it must have been a complete clusterfuck to run the Skype for Business Online SAAS service they were offering. So I can understand why they did away with it, but I'm still very irritated that this many years into Teams, it's such an unfinished mess...
tsimionescu 5y ago
The audio/video part of Teams is almost flawless for me up to, say, 20 people. I was actually impressed with how well they handle multiple devices - joining a meeting from a phone and laptop at the same time, or moving from one to the other is done in the best possible way. Everything else is horrible - note taking is useless, the chat is full of visual noise and slow, the calendar is mostly useless and takes too long to update, file sharing is infamously convoluted etc. We currently use Slack for chat and Teams for audio/video calls and I quite like this setup. Slack is absolutely horrible for audio/video calls, so moving to it entirely is a no-go, hope the company will keep being ok to pay for both.
- kyriakos 5y ago
  To me teams appears that only one person can be heard talking at a time (bit hard to describe, someone can interrupt but it seems like there's some kind of limitation as to who is being heard). On the other hand on Google meet I noticed that conversation sounds closer to a normal meeting. Both have great sound quality other than that.
raphael_l 5y ago
I definitely agree with this sentiment in terms of general UX and performance. I can't find a lot of messages and files that I'm looking for because it's so badly structured. And it has a very noticeable lag whenever I perform any function (clicking on "Activity" out of "Chat" for example). The only good thing about it is video calling. Without testing this, I always feel it's much faster/smoother and has better screen sharing quality. Also the launch screen does a great job (in comparison to Zoom for example)
yc-kraln 5y ago
YMMV, for my use cases it seems to work really well. I wonder if your instance has been heavily "customized" with group policy, or something. Given the alternative for us would be slack+zoom+gsuite, which all have impressively daunting privacy concerns as well as pretty crappy usability themselves, I (and the people I am collaborating with regularly) am really happy with Teams.
exyi 5y ago
Second only to Azure dev oops. Next in line is Jira... why do corporations love this kind of software?
- IggleSniggle 5y ago
  These kinds of software are really good at having answers for “what-about”isms, so it doesn’t matter that the subjective experience is bad. For any objective “what-about” in terms of integration story or security story or whatever, they have a thousand different answers that can be applied, so the purchaser will always be convinced that all potential issues are addressed. The endless branching feature list also results in broken spaghetti code that creates a horrible subjective and inconsistent experience.
nunez 5y ago
I see you haven't used WebEx Spaces or Google Meet yet! Meet doesn't even have a desktop application! Of course you won't get reliable video unless you use Chrome. Teams is not great, but for an enterprise-tier collaboration solution that can do chat, voice, telephony, and video, it's better than its alternatives. It's far better than its predecessor, Skype for Business (fka Lync).
karlshea 5y ago
I haven't been able to reliably click on images in chat for six months.

danuker 5y ago

> A room full of monkeys on a typewriter would never create something as bad as teams. Monkeys could barely create software if at all. That means you have set a low badness bar for Teams to surpass.

mypastself 5y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem
zeeZ 5y ago
What if they were using GitHub copilot?

senectus1 5y ago

Lync was worse.

tsimionescu 5y ago
Oh, I remember how Lync had different maximum message lengths for the first message in a conversation vs subsequent ones. I believe it was using SIP internally and sending your first chat message in a "begin call" workflow, but it was always unpredictable when a new "call" would start or not. Horrible kludgey solutions...
bluGill 5y ago
I want lync back. I'm no longer 20, my eyes demand that I zoom everything in and then features disappear

Philip-J-Fry 5y ago

One day they just completely fucked the ability to paste code. It worked flawlessly before and then suddenly it removes indenting, bugs out and doesn't let you exit the preformatted code block. It's so bugged, it's like they didn't even test it. They couldn't have, one day it literally worked fine and the next it was unusable and could be replicated every single time. And why there isn't the ability to just delete the rich text formatting and write markdown I do not know. They can't build a bug free rich text editor or one with intuitive controls. It's the same problem I have with Jira, the rich text editor just does not work like it should.

bennyp101 5y ago
I like playing the "can I paste an image in today or not?" game - sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, sometimes I have to open the web version to do it, other times not ...
- mrweasel 5y ago
  For a six month five people in our office couldn’t use the desktop client. Video meetings just didn’t work on the Mac.
- ncann 5y ago
  The image thing is the most frustrating one. Most of the time someone sends me an image, I can see it in the chat, but as I click on it, the Teams UI bugs out and displays nothing.
- thrower123 5y ago
  If somebody sends me an image, I can click on the thumbnail and open it full-size about once in five attempts. Usually it will just open up to a blank screen and fail to load the image.
stevesimmons 5y ago
The latest Teams bug I've encountered is an inability to write a bulleted list with more than one bullet. Each newline splits the list into a new message. No combination of Shift/Ctrl/Alt + Enter worked. This changed, as in broke, around a week ago. At least for me, on Win 11. Edit: Just remembered another Teams bug from a few days ago: cut text from the middle of paragraph, paste it back in earlier in the same paragraph, ... and it appears in a smaller font.

mypastself 5y ago

It’s among the worst I’m currently using, at the very least. The most amusing part is that you never feel like you’re on solid ground: given the app’s complexity, there is always some exotic new problem to be discovered at the least convenient time. At least the audio is consistently good, though.

mrweasel 5y ago

I must have used worse software, but not something that I can remember. The problem with Teams is that for all it’s flaws, I can pick an alternative. Clients expect Teams and are always surprised that we don’t really use it internally. Video call on Teams is actually pretty good, but everything else just seems half-baked, thrown together without a plan. The GUI is non-intuitive, basic features are unstable, absent or hidden away. Work for a company that doesn’t use ActiveDirectory and Exchange… well now your in for at really bad time.

jimnotgym 5y ago
> Work for a company that doesn’t use ActiveDirectory and Exchange… well now your in for at really bad time. Another way to think of it is that the deep integration to AD and Exchange is the major reason IT departments like Teams. The video and audio calling is fine, the chat works, although it seems to annoy Slack users. The meeting calendar syncs with Exchange. Planner boards give a simple Kanban setup. File storage with Sharepoint and Onedrive integration mean that the stored files work almost like they are on my computer.

aspaviento 5y ago

Linux version: - some times the left arrow to move the cursor doesn't work - some times images are displayed and others not - can't have more than 4 people on screen in a video call - the scroll is completely broken - can't get out of the immersive mode without closing the process (the back arrow doesn't work) And the list goes on and on...

rleigh 5y ago
Not Linux-specific! The Windows version suffers from at least 1, 2 and 4 in my experience.
rapsey 5y ago
As a cross platform desktop app developer I hate desktop linux. So many reinventions of the wheel that you have to support. Graphics, sound, video capture, GUI is all a mess.
- Karsteski 5y ago
  Can you elaborate more? What would you prefer instead, with regards to developing for Linux?
  - rapsey 5y ago
    There is X and now wayland. If you are doing something beyond basic you can quickly fall into needing two different implementations for GUI things. There is jack, pulse, alsa and now pipewire for sound. On the system you can have multiple sound devices some available fully working only through pipewire, others fully working only through pulse. If you want your app to integrate into your desktop nicely (basic thing like using tray icons) you can have completely different behaviors on different distros because there is so much variability. Pipewire is now taking over a lot of things regarding audio/video. With fedora already fully on it. Great but the documentation is in a miserable state. Very few examples. Some distros while have pipewire running, using it for audio will just not work.
    - 5y ago

atraac 5y ago

I fully agree. I literally never felt this much hate and contempt for software as I do when I'm forced to use Teams every day. It's an absolute shitshow of a chat. And when I thought it couldn't get worse, they f*ked up ctrl+a selecting all text on Windows... I work in MS ecosystem, some MS products are great, some are really bad, most are ok-ish, but Teams is on a whole another level of bad.

whatch 5y ago
Ctrl + A is also broken on Mac. Quite surprised to see it is broken on Windows as well
lokedhs 5y ago
Then I presume you never had the misfortune of using Skype for Business? We used this prior to Teams, and in comparison, Teams is great. I'm guessing a lot of Teams users come from Skype for Business, so they are really happy with the improvements.
- formerly_proven 5y ago
  SfB only did the non-persistent chat and A/V calls portion of Teams and is really more like a VoIP PBX. SfB calls still have better audio quality than Teams today - I'm guessing they've optimized bandwidth down to meet a "2/5 star rating" ("technically intelligible").
- thrower123 5y ago
  Skype for Business was incredible next to Teams. Lightweight client (even though it was WPF), developer SDK that actually provided basic chat functionality, notifications that didn't automatically get lost in the scrum. I miss it a lot. The server infrastructure was a bit of a shitshow, if you ever had to maintain an on-premise deployment, and it must have been a complete clusterfuck to run the Skype for Business Online SAAS service they were offering. So I can understand why they did away with it, but I'm still very irritated that this many years into Teams, it's such an unfinished mess...

tsimionescu 5y ago

The audio/video part of Teams is almost flawless for me up to, say, 20 people. I was actually impressed with how well they handle multiple devices - joining a meeting from a phone and laptop at the same time, or moving from one to the other is done in the best possible way. Everything else is horrible - note taking is useless, the chat is full of visual noise and slow, the calendar is mostly useless and takes too long to update, file sharing is infamously convoluted etc. We currently use Slack for chat and Teams for audio/video calls and I quite like this setup. Slack is absolutely horrible for audio/video calls, so moving to it entirely is a no-go, hope the company will keep being ok to pay for both.

kyriakos 5y ago
To me teams appears that only one person can be heard talking at a time (bit hard to describe, someone can interrupt but it seems like there's some kind of limitation as to who is being heard). On the other hand on Google meet I noticed that conversation sounds closer to a normal meeting. Both have great sound quality other than that.

raphael_l 5y ago

I definitely agree with this sentiment in terms of general UX and performance. I can't find a lot of messages and files that I'm looking for because it's so badly structured. And it has a very noticeable lag whenever I perform any function (clicking on "Activity" out of "Chat" for example). The only good thing about it is video calling. Without testing this, I always feel it's much faster/smoother and has better screen sharing quality. Also the launch screen does a great job (in comparison to Zoom for example)

yc-kraln 5y ago

YMMV, for my use cases it seems to work really well. I wonder if your instance has been heavily "customized" with group policy, or something. Given the alternative for us would be slack+zoom+gsuite, which all have impressively daunting privacy concerns as well as pretty crappy usability themselves, I (and the people I am collaborating with regularly) am really happy with Teams.

exyi 5y ago

Second only to Azure dev oops. Next in line is Jira... why do corporations love this kind of software?

IggleSniggle 5y ago
These kinds of software are really good at having answers for “what-about”isms, so it doesn’t matter that the subjective experience is bad. For any objective “what-about” in terms of integration story or security story or whatever, they have a thousand different answers that can be applied, so the purchaser will always be convinced that all potential issues are addressed. The endless branching feature list also results in broken spaghetti code that creates a horrible subjective and inconsistent experience.

nunez 5y ago

I see you haven't used WebEx Spaces or Google Meet yet! Meet doesn't even have a desktop application! Of course you won't get reliable video unless you use Chrome. Teams is not great, but for an enterprise-tier collaboration solution that can do chat, voice, telephony, and video, it's better than its alternatives. It's far better than its predecessor, Skype for Business (fka Lync).

karlshea 5y ago

I haven't been able to reliably click on images in chat for six months.