4 ms·

> They have all these engineers, and it's not like it's difficult to make a chat program. Teleconferencing, sure, that's difficult. But most of the problems I h

> They have all these engineers, and it's not like it's difficult to make a chat program. Teleconferencing, sure, that's difficult. But most of the problems I hear about is "Teams crashed" or "Wouldn't connect" or "Makes my machine run unbearably slow". The answer is hidden in your question already. "not difficult" + "all these engineers" = overengineering.

garren 4y ago
I've had to use Teams daily for the past two jobs I've had. Over-engineered is not what comes to mind when describing the app. It's not a complicated app, the UI isn't overwhelming, and if anything it seems like it lacks functionality. Visual Studio - that's seems over-engineered (excellent app in many respects, but still...) The whole Lync thing felt over-engineered. MS has more than a few good examples of over-engineering, but Teams doesn't strike me as one of them. I'm sure Teams has crashed on me at least once in using it for the past 3-4 years, but if so then it has been extremely rare - I wouldn't call it a crashy app. I've experienced performance issues with it, particularly when I've got my laptop hooked up to a larger monitor and I'm sharing my screen. There too though, I've learned to live with it and Teams works fine for me day to day. However, I do see it as a lowest-common-denominator slack clone, and I agree with others here in that the overall Teams experience is lacking compared to slack. It feels like MS is trying to do something different with it, but it hasn't worked. They keep pushing it so hard though that more and more people find themselves having to interact with it. Similarly, more and more shops pick it up because "nobody ever got fired for choosing Microsoft" and they're probably already neck-deep in Azure and O365 anyway. Teams is not particularly buggy, it's not crash prone, it seems like it's missing some functionality, and other functionality seems like an afterthought (e.g., the wiki feature). It's just not a great app.
- stevesimmons 4y ago
  > Teams is not particularly buggy, it's not crash prone, it seems like it's missing some functionality, and other functionality seems like an afterthought. My current bugbear with Teams is it cannot open Office files in the native Office applications, which I have installed, by default. Sure, you can manually select "Open in..." each time and pick "Desktop application". But when you do "Change default", there are only two options: "Always open Word, PowerPoint and Excel files in (A) Teams, (B) Browser (default)". There's no option "(C) Desktop application"! Come on guys, how hard can this be? What PM decided that option (C) should be left out? I mean, it's not as if the native Word, Excel and PowerPoint applications haven't been industry standards - and the basis for MS's success - for 30 years...
mrcartmeneses 4y ago
No. It’s over managed. If I was handed teams I could vastly improve it on my own over a 6 month period. However the most significant change would be replacing Azure AD/B2C for auth with literally any other auth solution. I’d need a year to overhaul AD/B2C and would probably want to hire a team of two more devs so we could get it right for all use cases. Even then it could be so broken that it’s almost impossible to fix in place.
- fingerlocks 4y ago
  I must be misunderstanding. Are you saying the auth mechanism is largely responsible for all the problems with Teams? Like if they added, I dunno, OAuth Login-with-Facebook, then magically all the crashes, disconnects, UI latency, bloated features, broken input text box and other poor UX design issues would somehow resolve themselves? Login is the one thing that I literally did once, on first app launch, and never thought about ever again.
  - mrcartmeneses 4y ago
    No I’m not saying that at all. I’m saying there’s plenty wrong with it, but the thing that would take the LONGEST to fix is Azure B2C, because that’s a whole beast in itself and is tightly coupled with all of the other MS products from Windows to Minecraft, to many many thousands of Web Apps that were unfortunate enough to have used it. As a user who has multiple Microsoft accounts (due to years of contracting), I can’t log in to teams. Edit: Teams has lots of problems, fixing AD/B2C is by far the hardest because it is a legacy pile of garbage used in thousands of production apps

garren 4y ago

I've had to use Teams daily for the past two jobs I've had. Over-engineered is not what comes to mind when describing the app. It's not a complicated app, the UI isn't overwhelming, and if anything it seems like it lacks functionality. Visual Studio - that's seems over-engineered (excellent app in many respects, but still...) The whole Lync thing felt over-engineered. MS has more than a few good examples of over-engineering, but Teams doesn't strike me as one of them. I'm sure Teams has crashed on me at least once in using it for the past 3-4 years, but if so then it has been extremely rare - I wouldn't call it a crashy app. I've experienced performance issues with it, particularly when I've got my laptop hooked up to a larger monitor and I'm sharing my screen. There too though, I've learned to live with it and Teams works fine for me day to day. However, I do see it as a lowest-common-denominator slack clone, and I agree with others here in that the overall Teams experience is lacking compared to slack. It feels like MS is trying to do something different with it, but it hasn't worked. They keep pushing it so hard though that more and more people find themselves having to interact with it. Similarly, more and more shops pick it up because "nobody ever got fired for choosing Microsoft" and they're probably already neck-deep in Azure and O365 anyway. Teams is not particularly buggy, it's not crash prone, it seems like it's missing some functionality, and other functionality seems like an afterthought (e.g., the wiki feature). It's just not a great app.

stevesimmons 4y ago
> Teams is not particularly buggy, it's not crash prone, it seems like it's missing some functionality, and other functionality seems like an afterthought. My current bugbear with Teams is it cannot open Office files in the native Office applications, which I have installed, by default. Sure, you can manually select "Open in..." each time and pick "Desktop application". But when you do "Change default", there are only two options: "Always open Word, PowerPoint and Excel files in (A) Teams, (B) Browser (default)". There's no option "(C) Desktop application"! Come on guys, how hard can this be? What PM decided that option (C) should be left out? I mean, it's not as if the native Word, Excel and PowerPoint applications haven't been industry standards - and the basis for MS's success - for 30 years...

mrcartmeneses 4y ago

No. It’s over managed. If I was handed teams I could vastly improve it on my own over a 6 month period. However the most significant change would be replacing Azure AD/B2C for auth with literally any other auth solution. I’d need a year to overhaul AD/B2C and would probably want to hire a team of two more devs so we could get it right for all use cases. Even then it could be so broken that it’s almost impossible to fix in place.

fingerlocks 4y ago
I must be misunderstanding. Are you saying the auth mechanism is largely responsible for all the problems with Teams? Like if they added, I dunno, OAuth Login-with-Facebook, then magically all the crashes, disconnects, UI latency, bloated features, broken input text box and other poor UX design issues would somehow resolve themselves? Login is the one thing that I literally did once, on first app launch, and never thought about ever again.
- mrcartmeneses 4y ago
  No I’m not saying that at all. I’m saying there’s plenty wrong with it, but the thing that would take the LONGEST to fix is Azure B2C, because that’s a whole beast in itself and is tightly coupled with all of the other MS products from Windows to Minecraft, to many many thousands of Web Apps that were unfortunate enough to have used it. As a user who has multiple Microsoft accounts (due to years of contracting), I can’t log in to teams. Edit: Teams has lots of problems, fixing AD/B2C is by far the hardest because it is a legacy pile of garbage used in thousands of production apps