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Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?

• nomy99 4y ago
  is it?
• alkonaut 4y ago
  I have had zero crashes since it came out (I use it on Windows and iOS), and I switch devices in call frequently. While some parts of its UX are questionable, it’s not stability or performance I have problems with. Are you using it on Windows?
• oleglustenko 4y ago
  What will be the better alternative, that much functional with that much integrations? In reality if you have to choose something for corporate section. In comparison to slack for example, MS Teams looks pretty solid
• bborud 4y ago
  OK, let's not mince words. It is so bad because you, all of you who suffer under this, don't give IT managers and decision makers enough shit for choosing this crap. You don't stand up for yourself, you don't refuse to use it, and you do nothing to improve your situation because you think you can't. Right now most of you are shaking your head. "It isn't that simple". "I can't do anything about this". "It isn't my place". You are wrong. You can do something about it, but it is going to take a bit of backbone and a bit of initiative. You may lack a backbone. Grow one. Don't whine. Whining accomplishes nothing and communicates that you have given up. You find better alternatives, recruit others to your cause and force badly run organizations to change -- essentially by leading a revolt. There is only so much a manager can do when employees say "no". And it is easier to say "no" when more people say "no". If you have ever been a manager you know perfectly well that if you can't get your people to do as you say, you are done. A leader who can't make people follow isn't a leader. It can be a career killer. Lots of managers have nightmares about this. You can use that to your advantage. If you don't want to use Teams: find an alternative, start using it, recruit others to your cause and stand up to whomever says "you can't".
  • Uehreka 4y ago
    Yup. On my team at a previous company we just started a team Slack when the company moved to Teams. If people wanted to get in touch with us faster, they had to use Slack. If they wanted a meeting with us, we’d send them a Zoom link. It was passive aggressive for sure, but it allowed us to not have to use Teams as much. I’m sure there are some draconian companies that will actually fire you for refusing to fall in line on this stuff, but for many reasonable people, it’s pretty difficult to fire high performing people for something this trivial.
  • JeremyNT 4y ago
    I've worked at the same place for years, and they switched to Teams a couple of years ago. I can't change their decision, but I can work for somebody else, and having to suffer through this crapware is pushing me in that direction. "Must use Teams" is a huge red flag for any potential job offer.
    • prepend 4y ago
      I use alternate tools in addition to Teams. And I use my budget to pay for other tools.
      • JeremyNT 4y ago
        Sadly, I'm suffering from a top down "you must use Teams" mandate. I hate Teams, but here, I'm going to have to be on it anyway. Slack and other clones are better... but fragmenting communication between two different platforms (one of which must be Teams) is worse than just dumping everything into Teams and being done with it.
        • bborud 4y ago
          About a decade ago I started working in a company with about 30k employees (?) that had really stringent top-down mandates. You had to get a standard laptop, installed by our IT partner, with a 50Mb mail quota and all manner of seriously outdated MSFT tools. To add insult to injury, a fairly huge chunk of money would be charged to our budget per person for this. I'll get back to the cost issue. I did something no middle manager had done before me. I said "no". And my boss backed me up on it. I got called into meetings with people with long titles and yelled at. I was told that this was insubordination, unproductive behavior and whatnot. I calmly explained that this didn't change anything because the equipment, software and service levels were not of acceptable quality and especially not at the cost to our budget. The answer remained "no". Note that I was willing to be fired over this. I'd rather not have a job there than have to accept having to work with tools that would have made my day miserable. I made this perfectly clear. So our organization existed wholly outside the company's internal network. We leased a broadband connection, set up our own internal infrastructure behind a couple of firewalls, had qualified people configure the network infrastructure, set up mail, calendaring etc with a better service provider, set up collaboration tools internally etc. The cost? In the first year it was about the same as we would have paid for laptops, network, services etc in the existing regimen. The reason was that everyone got to pick their own computers - which were on the order of 6-7 times more expensive than the standard company laptop. All of our services were cheaper and orders of magnitude better. The second year we didn't have to buy everyone new computers so we had money to pay our own IT staff. People who worked for us, in our offices who you could walk over to and talk to. Stuff got done. (We still could have bought ourselves expensive laptops every 4 years and still spend less money than the standard IT setup in the company) Several things happened over the next years. Some of the systems were better integrated with the mothership. Employees from the rest of the company started to "bum rides" off of us. That is, they got accounts on our IT infrastructure, got access to our network etc. Because it allowed them to work more efficiently. There were clashes over security policy etc. These were resolved through reviews and formal approvals. Some of these were unnecessarily tense. Mostly because they laid bare the fact that the people who got upset about "the rebels" tended to be poorly qualified and had a habit of being bullies. Eventually the culture slid backwards as good leaders left the company and were replaced with people who didn't actually know how to build an effective culture. A lot of the "freeloaders" were kicked out, which I felt was unnecessary and shortsighted. (In my book this was just basic poor judgement: if you can improve collaboration by spending a few hundred dollars per year per person, that should be a trivial decision. You just do it). In parallel with this there was the production side. Rather than spending 6-9 months asking for virtual machines operated by incompetent consultants only available through a ticket system(), and with tons of paperwork to get anything done, we made use of AWS. A decade ago most of the IT leadership of the company had no idea what AWS was. It was obvious we wouldn't ask them for anything because they weren't qualified to help. We got started by ignoring two families of rules. IT procurement and how to pay for stuff. We used a credit card to buy AWS resources, which our boss then expensed. This meant that we were up and running 1-2 hours after making the decision. No twiddling thumbs for half a year while people have to go to meetings and write documents of exactly what we need, and pay a fortune for third rate service on obsolete hardware. This too went through a maturation process. I'm sure someone went through the formal procurement procedures (I wasn't involved in that). AWS started billing us via invoice. Since we are in Europe we also needed a few formal agreements on proper data handling by AWS etc. All of that happened. A few years later we were the biggest AWS customer in our region. The funny thing is that when I spoke to the Group CEO about this, he had no idea that it started as an act of insubordination and that we really hadn't given the IT organizations any choice. Because there is always someone ready to take credit for other people's results. I'm not saying that people should put their career on the line to do what we did. Because you kind of have to take that risk. But what I am saying is that unproductive top down mandates can be pushed back if you have people with some backbone. Even in companies where obedience is a big thing. () I'm sure lots of IT services companies do this, but the company that delivered IT services to my former employer had a policy of closing tickets as soon as they could. Even when issues were not resolved. They could then misrepresent these cases as "closed". I don't think anyone really called them out on this practice. This meant that any non-trivial problem had to be filed again and again and again.
• taylodl 4y ago
  Interesting. I'm not experiencing any of these problems running Teams on a Mac. What I have noticed is Teams doesn't seem to manage it's memory very well and after a few days of use it'll really bog your system down. Simply restarting Teams solves the problem for me. I find I need to restart Teams every week or two.
• futhey 4y ago
  Their goal was to get a bunch of users. Their team figured out how, and went out and got a bunch of users very rapidly. Mission accomplished. Microsoft was very happy. Oh– It's a buggy video call solution and poor replacement for Slack? Yeah, not important. They're at over 270m users in an ecosystem of 350m Office 365 users. There's no "less buggy version of Teams" out there with market share to attract by making minor improvements to the software. It does exactly what it's supposed to, and what Skype for Business already did. The biggest thing moving the roadmap forward is Teams capability to do "Office 365 Enablement" - i.e. win new users into the Office 365 ecosystem. There's a lot of things Microsoft can do to accomplish that. Some of them may be new Teams features. Some of them are tweaks to pricing and bundling and other unsexy things like that. Some of them may eventually be bug fixes or fun features that make Teams more enjoyable to use. But, at this point, your best chance of getting minor features built, is to hope internal Microsoft employees find it annoying enough to prioritize, just so they can see the feature fixed. Because Teams does what it's supposed to, decently well, and well enough to succeed massively in the marketplace for "generic video call software I don't have to pay a bunch of extra money for".
• sathishvj 4y ago
  The chat button for Teams on my macbook pro does not show up. On another older macbook pro, it works. I've seen this random issue showing up on forums, and there's never any working solution. It's just so weird, and I can't participate in any chat conversations. :shrug:
• stalfosknight 4y ago
  Because it's just a webpage bundled with an obese web browser masquerading as a standalone desktop app.
• AtNightWeCode 4y ago
  Never had any of these issues but. * The volume is STILL too low after all these years. * You can't be in more than one meeting at the same time. Even working with Teams is difficult while being in a meeting even though this has been improved. If you stay within same account that is, otherwise, you still lose. * You are much more limited as logged-in than as guest meaning half of the attendees are guests even if they have accounts. * Multiple Teams accounts simple does not work. * Creating a guest account in a third-party (Teams) tenant is among the biggest mistake one can do. MS seems randomly force you to login to any or all the associated tenants for your account. You downloaded that document from a customer once and VS like, now before you deploy something to your private tenant in Azure, let me force you to login to that customer that you once got a doc from.
• karottenreibe 4y ago
  All of this thread I read so far is complaining on a very high level. Compare the teams era to the pre teams era where companies often either had no meeting software and experience at all and onsite visits or phone calls was the only option, or they used Skype for business which was arguably even worse. Then the minor annoyances of teams seem small in comparison. That's not too say these things shouldn't be improved, but bundling teams with office for free sure made my communications with most of my customers 1000% easier.
• mikmeh 4y ago
  I miss slack at work
• JD1967 4y ago
  I still can't be logged into multiple Teams accounts from my Windows desktop - but I can from my iOS phone! A Microsoft product that works more cleanly on Apple iOS than it's own Windows. When you're a consultant working with multiple companies, it's vital to be able to access multiple Teams accounts. Now I have to log out and log in to the various accounts, or use the browser version. Then fun ensues when you schedule a Teams meeting in Outlook and you don't remember which Teams account you were logged into - I've connected to my own meeting, and I (along with everyone else in the meeting) is waiting for the host (me) to start the meeting - but I created it while logged into some other Teams account. Now I have to log out and log in and try to find the right account. There also needs to be a way to have it sort the attendee list by the ORDER THEY JOINED. Most recent people at the bottom. Right now, it sorts by name and I have to keep scrolling the list of attendees, which keeps changing as people join, and try to figure out if the person(s) I am waiting for are there.
• MauroIksem 4y ago
  We've been using teams in our org since inception and i haven't experienced any of these issues.
• metadat 4y ago
  Pretty simple root cause: Bureaucracy combined with lack of shared vision. I support your need to vent, it's undisputably a magnificently huge pile of stinky garbage. Given the amount of resources poured in, it'd be hard to do worse.
  • tdeck 4y ago
    What's particularly sad is that they're just cloning an existing thing. The "vision" need be nothing more than "see this, make something exactly like it that works". Google made similar mistakes with Google Chat but thankfully nobody uses that.
    • mBVth4DiupvBPY4 4y ago
      Nah, Google's mistakes with Chat are myriad but the biggest one is that they didn't make Slack. They added like one feature on top of Hangouts (threaded group chats), completely redesigned the entire interface (and the Gmail and Meet interfaces while they were at it), changed a bunch of words to make it seem like they copied Slack, and then said "enjoy using this new turd we pushed out". (Okay, they also added a tiny bit of Markdown-based text formatting. Because why not use the least intuitive, most complicated possible solution, and then not document half of it.)
• anm89 4y ago
  Simply put, Microsoft has existed for 30 years with nothing but disdain for their customers and it has never once hurt them. So why stop now? Microsoft exists because of weak minded people who choose it because it's the front runner and are scared that choosing anything else may make them responsible for a choice they have made(same vein as no one ever got fired for choosing IBM, until that wasn't true anymore). In this sense I think there is almost a stockholm syndrome element where the worse it is, the more people trapped in it feel that that's what makes it good and enterprisey. If it wasn't the only choice why would any put up with it otherwise? I'm sure in 2043 they'll finally muster up the engineering resources to get copy/paste working in Teams though, for the last 10 customers on Trillion dollar a year enterprise maintenance contracts.
  • urbandw311er 4y ago
    If you had some concrete examples I might read with more interest but TBH this just comes across as a rather emotional whinge.
• gardenhedge 4y ago
  Large companies don't seem to be able to produce good software consistently.
  • metadat 4y ago
    What are the exceptions to this proposed rule? I can't think of any off the top of my head. JPL isn't a large company.
    • rotifer 4y ago
      Java and the JVM from Sun/Oracle. People may not like the language (or the company), but it's good, well-engineered software.
      • metadat 4y ago
        Yeah, the JVM is good. But unfortunately Oracle can't consistently produce good software. Java remains a fluke, successful in spite of Oracle.
    • guidedlight 4y ago
      Oracle database is rock solid.
      • metadat 4y ago
        Lol, sure- for certain use-cases, it works fine. But the only way it stays consistently good is because Big-O severely limits the scope. The Oracle DB internal team culture is just plain depressing. Stuck 30 years in the past in terms of development practices, little or no innovation is allowed. Function names are limited to four or five characters, and the source control is literally from the nineties. Maybe that's the secret to success: Trap enough H1Bs and use the whip. I suppose it all depends on how you define "good quality". Across many dimensions, Oracle is somehow better than average. Maybe it's because, for all it's faults, Oracle does always prioritize security what "quality", whatever management decides that means. Sure beats the Google strategy of constantly murdering anything that isn't Gmail or Search. Is this even a real strategy, or just the lack of one?
• Spooky23 4y ago
  It’s good enough.
  • lucasgonze 4y ago
    ...for the business strategy: 1. Neutralize the threat from Slack (AKA Salesforce) 2. Give Enterprise sales teams a checklist item 3. Don't spend a dime more than necessary on software development 4. Integrate with the rest of the MS enterprise product line On top of those goals, the internal sponsors of Teams have to survive the savage internal politics at Microsoft, so the product is designed to threaten no important factions.
    • Spooky23 4y ago
      Remember that Microsoft has had a UC/chat app forever. Teams in comparison to Skype for Business is an improvement.
      • lucasgonze 4y ago
        Yes, I agree. Skype is even worse, maybe just because it's older and has been neglected longer.
• tails4e 4y ago
  We use zoom but are switching to teams. As an engineer my absoutley must have feature is screen sharing with collaborative annotation. I waited with bated breath for the 'active annotation' feature that was on the teams roadmap for months to be released. And then it was. To my horror it was the epitome of bloat. It essentially takes a screenshot of the presenters desktop and then starts a whiteboard session. It takes a good 30 seconds to enable, and as it's a screenshot the screen being presented can no longer be interacted with until annotation is stopped. The 'active' part of the name active annotation is just adding insult to injury. It's static annotation at best. I couldnt have imagined a more poorly conceived feature, but here it is. Microsoft, please for the love of engineers fix it!
  • josephcooney 4y ago
    I am not a zoom user, but I do use the "write on someone else's screen" feature quite often in slack when screen-sharing, and what you're describing in teams sounds like utter crap.
    • solardev 4y ago
      Everything in Teams ranges from "utter crap" to "half assed effort but mostly still just crap". It's the most "me-too" app I've ever had the displeasure of being forced to use... sigh.
• fancyfredbot 4y ago
  It isn't because Microsoft lacks good programmers. My guess would be that someone believes they need to have every feature from slack, zoom, WebEx, meet etc, and also integrate tightly with every Skype/SharePoint/OneNote feature, and also run on at least four platforms. But they aren't willing to give people time to do this.
  • peterfarkas 4y ago
    This is spot on. I remember thinking that they added so many features very early on, even though they were still struggling with the most basic ones. And it sounds like they still do.
  • mysterydip 4y ago
    When I end a meeting, Teams helpfully shows a window that states something like "meetings is just one of the many things we do!" to which I want to reply, "maybe you shouldn't do more".
  • cjbgkagh 4y ago
    That’s what they get for consistently paying less than other FANG companies.
  • mr_toad 4y ago
    > It isn't because Microsoft lacks good programmers. Their products targeted to other programmers seem to be nicer to work with. E.g. VS Code, C#, SQL Server. The products aimed at the ‘knowledge workers’, like Teams, and SharePoint are garbage.
    • psnehanshu 4y ago
      I wonder how there's so much difference. Don't programmers working at VS Code and Teams interact with each other?
      • rawoke083600 4y ago
        Could very well be that the PM/PO of the VSCode project has actual dev-experience as well ?
• _yb2s 4y ago
  Absolutely incredibly garbage, how do they have the audacity to ship something so bad? The few times I tried to use it for large important meetings were a total shit show. I experienced a situation where everyone could see and hear only about half of the other meeting participants, but not the same set for everyone. It was really incredibly confusing for everyone involved.
• mikece 4y ago
  It certainly doesn't help that it's an Electron app and a fat one at that.
• guidedlight 4y ago
  I suggest you try the web app version, it’s faster and more stable. In fact, I believe Microsoft will replace the desktop client with a web app shell. You can try it out today; 1. Install the Microsoft Edge Web browser on Mac or Windows 2. Log into https://teams.microsoft.com https://teams.microsoft.com 3. Click … > Apps > Install this site as an app 4. Enjoy!
  • listless 4y ago
    Desktop version is electron
    • naikrovek 4y ago
      that is changing "soon" (with an ever-changing definition of "soon")
      • gorbypark 4y ago
        What is the “new” version’s tech stack? I always thought that with the Office and Windows team slowly adopting React Native for some features that they would redo Teams with that. Realistically they could start out with a React Native shell and just use web views for most functionality at first to replace Electron (and eventually, hopefully, rewrite some core functionality in RN and/or actually native bits).
        • naikrovek 4y ago
          .net native application per platform, with WebView2 views but logic moved to some .net language, probably C#. I believe all application logic is moving to .net with the visible elements being HTML & CSS, but do not remember where I read it, so take it with a grain of salt. if there was mention of react native, I do not remember it, but I gloss right over mentions of most web frameworks, so it may play a role.
          • FastEatSlow 4y ago
• JoeMascuve 4y ago
• holografix 4y ago
  Everyone saying teams is garbage. It’s not. It’s like you’re complaining about the kid who got a C in class. Guess what? They passed the exam. Microsoft brutalised Slack with a C grade app that was “bundled for free”. For 80% of people, teams is just fine.
  • deanebarker 4y ago
    Agreed. I use both apps simultaneously (I have them both open right now). Admittedly, Teams uses a lot more RAM, but I have a lot of RAM. I would never know this unless I checked it.
    • sangupta 4y ago
      my 64GB RAM Macbook freezes when using Teams - should I get more ;)
    • mdtusz 4y ago
      On Linux, the official teams application crashes constantly and most often doesn't work at all for video or audio. Fine, I'll use the browser version then. Except the browser version won't load 50% of the time, brings my laptop to an absolute crawl as soon as you start a video call using up 100% cpu, and frequently will crash any other teams or outlook tabs, or often times the browser entirely. It's borderline unusable on Linux, and I've reverted to using it on my android tablet where it is only marginally better and still has issues constantly with audio, as well as crashing when starting up, or "updating" and somehow running two simultaneous instances of the app with only one visible. Also the notifications for when someone calls has never once worked on the tablet, while simultaneously I'll get nonstop repeating notifications for meeting chat messages from a week ago. I'm sure for many people it works just fine, but for many others that aren't exactly on the Microsoft happy path, it's a nightmare.
    • nwallin 4y ago
      It's kinda ridiculous though. My work PC has 16GB of RAM and I periodically hit issues with heavy swapping and routinely causes my computer to BSOD or freeze irrecoverably. Obviously it's not just Teams and its 1.2GB of usage, but it's a significant contributor. (glass house disclaimer: the application I develop uses a ton of RAM, especially with a debug build) Meanwhile I bought a personal computer for myself with none of my work stuff on it, and I got one with 4GB of RAM because for me that's plenty.
• jlbbellefeuille 4y ago
  Microsoft wants people to RTO /s
• musicale 4y ago
  Teams is buggy, clunky, and unreliable, though fairly feature rich. I find things like Google stuff/Slack/Discord to be somewhat more reliable and less unpleasant to use (even if Discord is another clunky Electron app.) But few things can compare to Zoom's astonishingly cavalier attitude toward security and privacy, and Zoom seems unavoidable in many contexts.
  • kortex 4y ago
    I will say at least their security game has been stepping up. They've really curtailed what information is available through their apis by default. Still not...great. But at least trending in the right direction. On the other hand, the privacy situation... jesus I've never seen more analytics and cookies in my life than when I inspect my profile page on zoom.us.
    • kimi 4y ago
      > They've really curtailed what information is available through their apis by default. Maybe. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32901768 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32901768
• anonym29 4y ago
  1 word - Electron. The next version will still make heavy use of Chromium, but no longer via Electron.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• outside1234 4y ago
  Instead of asking this question you should be asking "how do I parley this into a new MacBook Pro M2?" :)
• analog31 4y ago
  It's the iPhone effect: If you use Teams, and something goes wrong, everybody is patient and sympathetic. If you use something else, then it's your fault for being "weird" or "cheap." In my case, my computer came from IT, pre-loaded with Teams, and it runs nearly flawlessly. But I've noticed something else about computers and software. You can have two people with similar jobs, similar computers, similar software, etc. One person will have crashes and problems all the time, and the other person, smooth sailing. Nobody knows why. It doesn't matter whether they're IT experts or homemakers. In the words of a former office-mate: "I got a new computer, and spent two days setting it up exactly the way I want it, and yet it still crashes all the time." That person was a very sharp and productive programmer, yet he was swearing at his computer almost continually.
  • vel0city 4y ago
    I often find the "spent two days setting it up exactly the way I want it" means they've tweaked so many things those users didn't fully understand into incompatible setups which causes a lot of that friction, while those who just roll with mostly the defaults have much smoother sailing. Forcing the square peg into the round hole often results in extra challenges. Sometimes its just easier to use the round peg, even if its not perfectly what you'd like. I tend to just roll with the defaults and only change settings when I really need to. I tend to experience a good bit less friction than a lot of my coworkers who flip every switch into something other than the default.
  • alar44 4y ago
    That's what happens when you start fucking with defaults. You get farther and farther away from a stabile baseline. 2 days to set up a PC tells me they are just fucking with too much stuff. I have the same problem. But my parents, who aren't tech savvy, have 0 problems because they aren't fucking with the workings of their PC changing defaults and making customizations.
    • SanjayMehta 4y ago
      When I used to run Windows, the very first thing I would do would be to turn off all the GUI animations, and switch the desktop back to "classic Windows" desktop, resulting in a usually more stable machine. So it depends on which direction you push the customizations.
• outside1234 4y ago
  I see that nobody here had to use Skype for Business or WebEx... This is the better future people!
  • culanuchachamim 4y ago
    Those are nightmare! And not to speak about Skype for business predecesor, Microsoft Lync.
    • userbinator 4y ago
      At least they were native.
• llama052 4y ago
  Microsoft focuses entirely on MVP (minimum viable product) and they expand their use-cases to include more features at a minimal amount of effort. Polish and use-ability don't matter when they can sell anything if it has XYZ feature. If you look at the teams roadmap it's more and more features.
• bluedino 4y ago
  Can't even copy and paste code etc What a joke.
  • nwallin 4y ago
    Three backticks then a space. Then paste the code. then hit enter 4-5 times until it sends it. I don't know where I learned this eldritch incantation--it certainly wasn't in the documentation--but it works.
    • pxc 4y ago
      > this eldritch incantation It's the spawn of an unholy union between Markdown and WYSIWYG. Triple backticks is the opening (and closing) sequence of characters used to denote multiline snippets of 'preformatted text' or code in Markdown. Pressing enter 5 times is what happens because Microsoft insists on preventing you from writing actual Markdown, even as an option. Single backticks works (and you can use a second backtick to close 'exit' that formatting mode), but delightfully, it only works if you're typing, and not if you copy and paste.
      • tom9729 4y ago
        The space wasn't necessary previously, and pasting code DID work, and then an update silently broke it and it's been like that ever since. Now you're supposed to use the formatting toolbar to insert a snippet. What a joke!
        • pxc 4y ago
          So you used to be able to compose long messages in a decent editor and paste them in, and now you can't. Ugh.
  • RaiausderDose 4y ago
    https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/send-code-snippets-in-a-message-in-teams-5406fe2b-2771-4b9a-bd73-656914f6ab3c https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/send-code-snippet...
• amanzi 4y ago
  I wonder how many of these complaints are due to Teams itself or if it's due to the crappy "corporate" builds deployed to the PCs? My guess is that it's more due to the crappy corporate builds since I've seen so many of them that don't have up-to-date drivers (or have missing drivers), and many of them have multiple competing security scanning software, along with over-strict policies and restrictions that affect Teams.
  • kayodelycaon 4y ago
    It’s Teams. On a intel Mac with no management software, it is a shitty, buggy mess.
    • kbcool 4y ago
      Works beautifully on an M1. I never have any of the issues that colleagues do on their heavily IT mutilated PCs.
      • brynjolf 4y ago
        Must be that they are not true Scotsmen, if they were it wouldn't eb an issue and if it si an issue it for sure never happened to you
      • mattgreenrocks 4y ago
        It’s not great on my Intel Mac. Code formatting via backticks is only applied if I type the last backtick slowly. If I type normally, it just interprets it as non-markup.
• yawnxyz 4y ago
  This happens because of how Microsoft approaches product development and design. On many product teams, PMs end up doing not only the product design decisions but even designs much of the products themselves. This works for them because it focuses product cycles on releasing what "matters" to the customer, but it ends up cutting craft and quality. This makes their products poor to use, but is also what drives revenue into their hands. They don't really need to be the best or the fastest. They just have to have decent products that aren't the worst (I prefer Teams over Webex), and glom those products together into an affordable package. For better or worse, Microsoft product suites are like the Olive Garden of the product world. edit: whoa, got more comments than I thought. For disclosure, I did a brief stint as a PM intern there way back in the day. Wanted to join as a UX designer intern, but got shoe-horned into the PM role
  • jagged-chisel 4y ago
    I suggest that Teams only gets used because it’s included in the enormous license that companies buy for Exchange and/or Office and the most popular alternative has its own fees. Large companies don’t want to fork over another licensing fee in the tens of thousands of dollars for Slack when they’re getting Teams “free.”
    • Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
      Exactly. Nobody likes it. We use it because we have to. We have to because it was already paid for.
      • analog31 4y ago
        Also, most users haven't ever experienced software that's any better, with a few rare exceptions such as Excel. We programmers have it so good. "How can people put up with such bad software" is a recurring theme, and not unique to Teams or even Microsoft.
        • ragebol 4y ago
• ncann 4y ago
  For an app made by one of the largest software companies out there, Teams devs can't figure out how to format code snippet/log snippet in a readable way. The font is way too big and they waste half the app's width for things other than the message.
• WesleyJohnson 4y ago
  I agree, it's bad. We were on Slack before, but switched to teams when going all in on Office 365. I really wanted to use the "Teams" feature in teams, along with chat for general chats not specific to projects. That never panned out. We'd never see communications, even with notifications, in the "Teams" area of teams. When I did think to look at the conversations, all of the additional whitespace and padding the Mac client adds (not sure if it's all clients) on the messages in the "Teams" area just made it very difficult to consume context around a single discussion. There were another annoyances, but we didn't use it long enough for me to remember what they were. We now just use the "Chat" portion of teams for all conversations and rename multi-person conversations with the project name. Starting a new chat with the same group of people for a different project is far more difficult than it needs to be, but I understand that's probably not the use case with how we're using it. Search is abysmal. When clicking a result, you jump to the message but it is invariably devoid of any contextual information. It's just the message, by itself, in the chat window. It's only use is finding the date/time for the message you need, then scrolling back (for minutes sometimes) until you find the conversation from 3 weeks ago. And then, all the reverse infinite-scroll loading makes the client slow down to a crawl. We routinely have issues with images not displaying. Sometimes loading the larger version works, many times it does not. We routinely have issues with messages going completely missing in 1:1 chats. The sender can screenshot and show the message was sent, but the recipient never receives it, even after restarting the client. I often get notifications of a new message in a 1:1 chat and when I goto the chat, I'm at the end of the channel and the message isn't there. I have to scroll up and then scroll back down so the infinite-scroll will load the missing message. When in the new message box, I can CMD + UPARROW to edit my last message. This is useful because I make a lot of typos and fix them after sending/reading. A bad habit, perhaps, but it's how my process works. Anyway, this doesn't work if I someone has sent a message after mine. Teams is not smart enough to let me edit my last message with CMD + UP unless it was the last one sent. I have to switch to the mouse to make the edit. Also, if I CMD + UP in time to make an edit, submit it, then realized I missed another typo (it happens), CMD + UP no longer works. I have to manually focus the "Type a new message" box again and then it'll work. At that point I've touched my mouse, so I usually just opt to right click + edit the last message. Sometimes after waking up my Mac, the teams window is missing. This happens to outlook too. CMD + TAB to focus the app doesn't retrieve it. I usually have to "launch" teams or outlook again (while it's still technically open) to get the window to reappear. No other App on my Mac does this, just Teams and Outlook. Given how we use Teams, I like to "pin" chats for specific projects. I'm limited to how many I can pin. Why? This one is minor: Gifs loaded with giphy can be paused. Copy/pasted gifs cannot. They auto play forever, which is annoying when it's the team chat I keep focused 90% of the day, but the conversation is slow that day. I'm sure there are other things I'm missing.
• jrib 4y ago
  My company is transitioning to Teams and I find it frustrating. So much so that I collect my complaints in a confluence page. I could be wrong on some of these, so happy to be corrected! No links You can’t link to conversations. This means if you want to add context to a Jira ticket or in a code comment, you can’t easily do so. Inconsistent UI The UI between a Teams channel and a chat with multiple people is not consistent. Direct chats: - do not have the ability to thread; so you end up with quotes all over the place and interleaved conversations. - don’t support ``` for code blocks. Channel chats do. Why? I have no clue. Notifications in channels are easy to miss It’s really easy to miss notifications from channels unless you get messaged directly about it. The emojis are bad They aren’t customizable, but even the ones that are available are not great. Compared to Slack Teams lacks these features that I find useful in Slack: - Don’t have time to address something immediately and don’t want to forget about it? Right click → Remind me later. - Instead of struggling to communicate a screen location, draw on the screen when a co-worker is sharing their display. Ok, Teams introduced this recently. But the first time I tried it, I ended up stuck in annotation mode and had to quit Teams to be able to interact with my applications… - Integration with Jira for automatic linking to mentioned issues by Jira Issue Key, e.g., PROJ-123. I think this one is just a limitation because my company hasn't added the integration. - Notifications when when activity occurs in Bitbucket or Jira. Ditto. The hold music sucks The music played when alone on a call sucks. I suppose this is more subjective than the rest…
  • metaltyphoon 4y ago
    Doesn’t matter… teams is free with an office 365 subscription and slack is not, therefore lots of companies will prefer it.
    • jrib 4y ago
      Agreed. Especially with slack raising prices, I understand the business decision.
      • winrid 4y ago
        Not if people quit because talking to each other is made to be a terrible experience.
• cgb223 4y ago
  From a financial point of view the answer is because you’re not paying for it Teams is bundled with Office 365 to steal marketshare from other companies like Discord who charge a bit more and are a stand alone service. It’s why Salesforce bought Slack. CFOs at Fortune 500 companies want to be efficient with their spending so they won’t buy an extra license if their existing bundle is “good enough” Teams is “good enough” so Microsoft doesn’t invest in it as much as other more profitable areas
  • paxys 4y ago
    They aren't in the same market as Discord. It's Teams vs Slack.
  • rchaud 4y ago
    Nobody considering Office 365 is thinking of Discord as a Plan B.
• scumola 4y ago
  It's not just chat. It hooks into dozens of MS products (planner, excel, ...), Office365, Azure and a bunch of different services. It has to be compliant with government and Military standards if the domain falls into one of those categories. If it was just chat, it would probably by much less of a bloated mess of crap. The problem is that MS never makes just a simple tool anymore. They want it to hook into every other MS platform and product line and before you know it, the new product is slow and bloated again...
• zac23or 4y ago
  Only someone on the development team has the answer. But it's normal for MS to rush with a product, only to get better after years. I remember that IE only gets good after IE 4, and SQLServer only after some versions too.
• wilde 4y ago
  > I am literally forced to use this app at work... Exactly. You are not the customer. Your IT admin is. And they have to convince your security team while managing spend. Why wouldn’t they pick the “free” option that your company has already approved for deployment?
• nothrowaways 4y ago
  Related question, why are Google products so good, relative to Microsoft?
  • tdeck 4y ago
    Try chat.google.com sometime.
• ramoz 4y ago
  I like Teams. Works fine on my Mac.
• tonymet 4y ago
  I've had many critical bugs, including the video on/off & audio mute button failing during calls, the "join call" UI being broken / missing, join links being broken despite working for other callers. I don't honestly think they are taking responsibility for quality issues or feedback.
• Mandatum 4y ago
  Because they have no boring Enterprise competitor. Why invest in something you don’t have to compete on because you know the competitor will always be better, but your price is what eats their marketshare. They compete on price with companies that don’t give a shit about employees. Which is most.
• tonymet 4y ago
  It's a natural side effect of adoption. Slack and other messaging apps are typically adopted organically by the end-user . They are "sold" via good product experience. Teams on the other hand is adopted by IT administrators who receive the product bundled an appreciate the ease of activation over the user experience.
• csours 4y ago
  Is it bad? It's the best meeting tool my company has ever used. The things you're asking it to do seem normal, but each of those things is a different device with a different context. It's not surprising to me that it's hard to switch contexts. I regularly start meetings on my home WiFi and then get in a vehicle and switch to cellular data. I've only have had short interruptions, which is MUCH better than most tools I've used.
• n8cpdx 4y ago
  At least it doesn’t totally change the UI and hide all important elements when you start a screen share (Zoom). My experience has been pretty positive overall, at least for calling. Channels don’t work as well as slack, but it’s decent. The big trick is to run it in a browser so you avoid any electron overhead. It is fully featured in browser.
  • TurkishPoptart 4y ago
    Can you tell me what you mean by electron overhead? Does that mean, like, the CPU resources it exhausts in the browser as opposed to the app is capped or reduced? Thanks
    • n8cpdx 4y ago
      It’s a whole separate instance of chromium running to support the one app vs one instance of your browser running all of your websites and apps. I run Outlook, Slack (multiple instances), Teams, and Todoist as tabs in my browser rather than apps, and the experience is much better than using the native apps.
• rwky 4y ago
  I use teams, slack and zoom for video conferencing. Of all of them zoom is the best imho. (Not that I'm a fan of any of them). It seems to just work the most. Slack has weird issues with screen sharing only working sometimes apart from that it's not bad. Teams randomly doesn't launch and for the past month the calendar integration has vanished with no sign of return. Why are they so bad? It's Microsoft. Everything they do is bad these days. Hell earlier today I tried to block pushes from admins to a GitHub repo could I find the button? Nope. In Gitlab it's a drop-down. [/endrant]
  • tmpz22 4y ago
    I use Slack all day every day, and frequently use Slack huddles as a more instant alternative to spinning up a zoom meeting (huddles are more discoverable because you can instantly see channels with a active huddle, and its good for more of a general hang out / paired session that doesn't demand a more static meeting). I've not once had trouble with the screen sharing, though in the initial rollout of the feature to our org audio was a bit glitchy - that hasn't been an issue for us in the past ~6 months.
• hangonhn 4y ago
  Because it doesn't need to improve. It just needs to check some checkboxes. It's "free" as part of Microsoft Office 365. It allows the IT department to check a checkbox and de-incentivize them from looking at Slack. With Slack you have to pay for and is yet another app to administer. Many IT departments who are already Microsoft customers will have an easier time rolling that out than a new app. No new purchase order nor legal review. Microsoft just needs to suck the air out of Slack to "win". Any additional investment by Microsoft is wasted.
  • colinmhayes 4y ago
    Right, every Fortune 500 company already has a msft office contract. Getting everyone on teams is as easy as an IT guy clicking a box and everyone has it on their computer. Doesn’t have to be a great product when it’s that easy to start using. Really Microsoft’s entire company revolves around this “lock them in and utilize our relationship to grow new products” strategy.
    • ghiculescu 4y ago
      Hmm, but many of those companies probably have a Salesforce contract too. What do you think will happen if/when SF bundles Slack?
      • fomine3 4y ago
        I think Salesforce isn't used/needed so much like MS Office. MS Office is needed for interoperability but Salesforce is for internal.
        • bombcar 4y ago
          SF is also thousands of dollars a license, office365 is maybe a hundred. So everyone gets o365 but only people who need access have SF.
  • mBVth4DiupvBPY4 4y ago
    It's actually not free as part of all Office 365 plans, sadly. We discovered recently that we'd either have to downgrade(!!!) to the version with only web apps, or upgrade to the version with Exchange, to get teams. (Or, better yet, pay for a Teams-specific license since it's $0.25 cheaper than getting Exchange...) Of course, the whole reason that we were looking at it is that one vendor who says they prefer Teams for some reason, even though we already pay for both Google Meet and Zoom.
• alliao 4y ago
  by now I just pray it doesn't crash. but it just started crashing for me, in some channel where a lot of integration posting emails from alerts. works ok on desktop, crashes in ios constantly
• RachelF 4y ago
  One reason may be that Teams is an Electron app. There's a huge stack of APIs between you and your headphones.
• userbinator 4y ago
  It seems to be mainly the work of barely-passing programmers on a platform (the web-app-everything) that strongly popularises form over function, quantity over quality, and from a company that increasingly prioritises (controversial opinion) DEI over competence. That said, MS has not always been like this; those who remember MSN Messenger, and perhaps even Skype for Business, may realise that despite all the various problems they had, they still seem much better than what Teams is today. Hence it's definitely a degradation. If I had the time and strong need, I'd try to write a native client for it, but apaprently it's very close to Skype (the MS version, not the original one) for which several 3rd-party clients exist, so the effort there might not be so much. They've even documented at least some of the APIs, e.g.: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/chatmessage-post https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/chatmessage-post
  • ineedasername 4y ago
    I remember messenger being mediocre at best and Skype not much better by the time MS got a hold of it. Teams doesn’t strike me as being significantly better or worse. After a few decades the pattern doesn’t seem any different than before: some products get worse, sometimes they do something interesting, some products that got worse are then improved, over and over. Any appearance of a recent declining trend, much less due to sociocultural issues like DEI, are simply due to looking at too-short a time period or only subsets of their ecosystem.
• giantg2 4y ago
  Works fine for me.
• Maarten88 4y ago
  Long ago Microsoft had MSN Messenger, which was one of the leading messaging apps. It worked well, and many 'normal' users were using it. Then Microsoft dissolved the team behind it and screwed up the product so bad with bloatware and ads that everyone moved to WhatsApp (except in the US where people went back to texting). Then Microsoft came out with Communicator, renamed it to Lync, which was a corporate messenger/meeting software. It used its own server, that could federate outside. It worked very well. They added LiveMeeting as a separate app for meetings, built on the same protocols. Our company used it with the "roundtable" camera from 2008, and it all worked amazingly well. We had meetings with people joining in from home and other offices over the internet using inexpensive webcams, 15 years ago. Then they bought Skype and it went downhill from there. I don't know what happened, but they took a lot of time integrating technologies from Skype (peer-to-peer) with their own tech (which was more telecom/server based) and tried competing with ever-changing perceived competitors by copying parts of their features and UI, without ever making any feature really good. They integrated everything into a single program, Skype for Business, now renamed Teams, and made it bloated and obnoxious. Just try to get it to not start at login... It's like MSN all over again. I think the Communicator/LiveMeeting software combo they had 15 years ago would still (conceptually) do pretty well as messenger/meeting software now, when modernized. It was much less intrusive and behaved like nice software that you actually wanted to use.
  • twobitshifter 4y ago
    I started a new job and decided to go all in on using o365, including keeping notes in onenote. They’re launching a new version next month and I’m hoping that things go in the right direction and they keep the features i’ve just started to use.
    • vadym909 4y ago
      The innocence is so cute in this one
    • dismalpedigree 4y ago
      I wish you well, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.
• __s 4y ago
  It's almost like Teams would perform better as a bunch of VS Code extensions I wish open sourcing would go beyond dev tooling
• mattgreenrocks 4y ago
  Worst bug IMO is that Teams seems unable to reconnect after my machine goes to sleep. This feels like an extremely basic state to detect: after n seconds of no heartbeat, reconnect.
• version_five 4y ago
  I've actually had a pretty good experience with Teams (and I generally have a lot of bad stuff to say about MS). I used it in the browser with Linux and it wasn't great. But on a mac it is fine and I haven't experienced any real problems.
• lallysingh 4y ago
  It's hot garbage. The question is, why are you using garbage?
• ParetoOptimal 4y ago
  Just give me xmpp so I don't have to deal with your shitty chat client Microsoft.
• daniel_j 4y ago
  I had issues for weeks (form the point we found there was even an issue) with some users not being able to create meetings with breakout rooms. Strangely, I also noticed their UI was different. Speaking with Microsoft support, after being elevated to engineers for a while, we found out the clients were being put into VDI mode which is used in virtualised environments and has features cut like breakout rooms (and a different UI). No solution was offered except delete %appdata%\Microsoft\Teams and HKLM:\\Software\Microsoft\Teams on each client when this comes up. We still have no idea how this is happening, we have Citrix Workspace installed for other purposes, but if it was that I'd expect it to affect all clients. This has been my only real complaint in the ~8 months using the client
• ParetoOptimal 4y ago
  Start asking if they use teams in job interviews and use dealing with it as a justification for higher salary.
• patentatt 4y ago
  Try this: select all the text in a text box input in teams with your mouse, click and drag the cursor to select the text. Start typing. It will type the correct characters, right to left. So instead on "hello world" it will display "dlrow olleh". No joke. Selecting by triple clicking doesn't trigger the right-to-left typing. Using shift and arrows doesn't. Just by dragging the cursor. I can't imagine what could possibly cause this, even as a bug. Truly impressively bad software.
  • skc 4y ago
    Can't repro this on my end to be fair.
• pessimizer 4y ago
  Because they can't figure out how to do something in this space that catches fire and everyone loves. So instead, they bundle Teams in with their other stuff in order to cut the legs out from the competition i.e. lower the prices other companies can charge (because there's a mediocre free alternative), and hopefully slow down their growth until Microsoft can come up with (or acquire) something cool.
• rayiner 4y ago
  +1. How is it so bad on so many levels? Like just browsing and searching for files in the files tab. It’s impossible even with numbers of files Explorer could easily handle in Windows 2000.
• paxys 4y ago
  Because it doesn't need to be better. What are companies going to do, stop paying for Office 365? Who will give them Word and Excel then?
• joeyguerra 4y ago
  Because it's built according to how Microsoft is organized and how they work.
• happytoexplain 4y ago
  Still? It started good and became bad, like most software. And, as is also the norm, there is no amount of money that can fix shitty software unless you Ship-of-Theseus it, which is fundamentally at odds with the ideologies of most project managers, whose rankings of how much they enjoy doing things are, from highest to lowest: - Showing off optics bullshit like burndown charts - Adding features - Fixing extremely severe and well-documented bugs - Committing some token time to pretending to fix tech debt - Cleaning toilets with a toothbrush - Actually fixing tech debt - Fixing bugs - Hammering nails through each of their own toes - Making good software
  • winrid 4y ago
    It did not start good. You couldn't use keyboard to switch chats in the first year, or customize keyboard shortcuts...
    • happytoexplain 4y ago
      I disagree. I didn't miss those features, and don't consider them to be must-haves in early builds. Yes, they took too long to implement them, but that's why I said it had a good start. As far as major features go, it was, in my opinion, the only app to get some of them correct (e.g. forced threading and the balance between customizability and overcomplexity in notification settings).
• Thaxll 4y ago
  The backend tech for Teams is so bad that you receive notifications of something even before it appears on screen which is terrible UX wise, the UI tells you something is happening but it's actually happenning 2sec later.
• Daub 4y ago
  I teach visual effects and digital art. I am used to the madly compLex interfaces (Maya, Blender, Nuke etc). I have no fear of such software. But I am completely defeated by Teams. - Why two windows when you are in a meeting? The second window is sometimes hard to find intuitively. - Why, when opening an attachment, is the user locked out of chat? Again, with many windows open, the preview can look and function like whatever app is native to the previewed file. - is there a way to disable camera previews when sharing screen? The two together take up way too much interface. If there is a way, I should not have to search for it. - Upload a file to chat and sending that file are two separate actions. Why? I can’t count the number of times I have to remind students to press the send button after upload.
  • jeffrallen 4y ago
    Also is function X under the three dot menu, the inexplicable and sometimes not there "other three dot menu", the gear, or the sidebar? It's like $PATH, but for UI elements.
  • hardware2win 4y ago
    >Why two windows when you are in a meeting? The second window is sometimes hard to find intuitively. What do you mean? Aint the icon stacked on task bar? >Upload a file to chat and sending that file are two separate actions. Why? I can’t count the number of times I have to remind students to press the send button after upload. I think it could be sane in such a way that you dont send something by accident
    • Daub 4y ago
      > I think it could be sane in such a way that you dont send something by accident I understand that. However, the way they implemented it was clumsy. See my comments below. For this, this is a serios time-waster. Every day I have to remind people use this feature incorrectly.
  • DocTomoe 4y ago
    > - Why two windows when you are in a meeting? The second window is sometimes hard to find intuitively. Seriously, that is a godsend if you are presenting a lot and have a two+ monitor setup - have the presentation up on one, still see your participants on the other one. > - Upload a file to chat and sending that file are two separate actions. Why? I can’t count the number of times I have to remind students to press the send button after upload. That's a safeguard. Too easy to send the wrong file. Making it a two-step process gives the user a chance to recognise a mistake and correct it.
• acedTrex 4y ago
  I dont mind teams for calls, i despise it for text chat
• smoyer 4y ago
  Because the people making enterprise deals are doing it face-to-face (probably at a nice dinner sponsored by MS.) They don't use tools like this and they're more interested in "checking the box" than analyzing what would improve people's work life (missing that it would probably improve efficiency.) If you're still having your administrative assistant print out all your emails - and dictating your responses back to them - then it's time to retire and let a digital native fix things in ways you can't even imagine!
• irjustin 4y ago
  I remember when teams dropped - I was so excited for a Slack alternative. Slack is still the best thing for work and man I hate that fact. I'm so ready to jump ship - someone please! [Follow up] At the end of the day I want something as snappy and reliable as Whatsapp for work. I have my gripes about it, but it absolutely excels at one thing - getting my message to the other end.
• at_a_remove 4y ago
  I can only throw out a series of ideas: 1) It's built on top of Sharepoint ... somehow. 2) It is a "Me, too" product without any kind of compelling vision, which usually leads to a mentality of "survey existing competitors in that 'space' and nab their features." 3) Because it is free, they feel the need to push it everywhere, even if isn't appropriate for most people. Go to your File Explorer and stare at that "3D Objects" Folder, marvel at the concept that so many people would have 3D printers that of COURSE you are going to need a 3D objects folder, the same way you have one for Music. Wait...
  • fomine3 4y ago
    MS Paint is useful without a printer, so maybe 3D Paint will be become too...
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• _8j50 4y ago
  I have been using teams for 3+ years on mac and windows and I have never had any issues. Perhaps you are a linux user? If so, they recommend the PWA app. I have used zoom and plenty others but nothing comes close to Teams for me. Perhaps, having used Teams' predecessor "skype for business" I am just grateful the torment is over.
• locusofself 4y ago
  It works OK for me. Not my favorite app, but it gets the job done for the most part. The search is frustrating (find a result but can't jump back to the full context?) and the UI is laggy on my laptop. The call/video features work as good as anything else I've used in the past.
• Forge36 4y ago
  I've been told it's better running inside chrome (I've yet to test this). I suspect the complicated features mixed with weird memory/performance management techniques and automated testing don't align well with user use cases (try copy pasting large conversations and notice I'll start deselecting text as you scroll).
• jreed91 4y ago
  Does teams still use emails on the backend for every message?
  • FastEatSlow 4y ago
    I hope not, though that may explain why they keep any message content as oddly formatted HTML and CSS.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• _jezell_ 4y ago
  Because it is a GUI mashup built on top of a dozen dated, crappy, products that don't work well alone or together, and strung together with fishing wire and duck tape. The fact that it even runs at all is an accomplishment.
  • akira2501 4y ago
    "Is that a Teams Channel or a Exchange Distribution list?" "Yes!"
• twstdzppr 4y ago
  I don't really encounter any issues with it on MacOS.
• sogen 4y ago
  Or fund one hundred Donnie Darko movies.
• mBVth4DiupvBPY4 4y ago
  1) Bundling 2) Network effects and 3) Who else is doing something different? No one cares about the quality of the product they make anymore. The only thing that's important is pushing new features. Fixing old features is useless because by the time someone finds out the feature they chose you for doesn't work, they've already paid you for a year long contract. And most of the time, by the time the year rolls around, they're used to dealing with the problem and don't want to take the disruption of moving to something else again.
• voganmother42 4y ago
  It is fine if it crashes, almost better even, otherwise I have to deal with trying to format my messages
• TYPE_FASTER 4y ago
  Pop is good: https://pop.com https://pop.com The IntelliJ Code With Me feature is worth trying: https://www.jetbrains.com/code-with-me/ https://www.jetbrains.com/code-with-me/
  • nikau 4y ago
    I love the realistic perfectly lit nice bokeh stock art portrait photos in their sales page 9 quadrant chat demo. Can imagine the disappointment in real world use with grainy, poorly lit, blurry webcam images of normal people.
• hestefisk 4y ago
  Like Dick Jones says in the Robocop movie about the failed ED209: “I had a guaranteed military sale with ED209! Renovation program! Spare parts for 25 years! Who cares if it worked or not!”
• BLKNSLVR 4y ago
  This is all I should need to say: "full screen".
• vidanay 4y ago
  Sample size of "me", but I couldn't even tell you the last time Teams crashed for me. I frequently change cameras and microphones in the middle of a call (I change the microphone because I have a USB microphone that is shared to multiple PC's with a USB switcher which means it is essentially being unplugged and plugged. This causes Teams to switch to a different microphone.)
• emurillo510 4y ago
  msft is going away from electron and will now use react native
• poisonta 4y ago
  I think you have not used Webex, Bluejeans and others.
• enlyth 4y ago
  Simple answer: It is a badly coded mess of spaghetti code, written with an ancient framework (AngularJS, currently running version 1.5.15), then ported to different platforms with Electron. Have a look at the source code in your browser, it is not obfuscated in any way. It is a single file of almost 17MB (!) of minified JavaScript, and I'm surprised the browser doesn't outright crash and actually manages to parse this, run and display a web application.
  • odysseus 4y ago
    By contrast, Slack is 6MB of minified JavaScript across 6 requests.
  • winrid 4y ago
    That explains a lot of it. AngularJS's dirty checking was neat but pretty inefficient, and since you didn't have to think much about implications of changes of state it was easy to write slow apps in angularjs.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• zeruch 4y ago
  Teams has to be one of the worst products in its class, of all time. It is a catastrophically corpulent and fickle mass of errors, wrapped in a UI that looks like Prince shat it out circa 1998.
• rickstanley 4y ago
  Today I had to use Windows. I installed Teams and called a colleague to pair program. He then left me on hold, and the hold music kicked in; I search everywhere in the app's settings to no avail. I searched how to stop and disable this hold music, and then, to me disbelief, I found out that I had to go to "Teams admin center" and manage policy to disable this, there's even a a dedicated page for this madness [0]! Burn this wretched creature! [0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/music-on-hold https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/music-on-ho...
• n_ary 4y ago
  To be honest, it comes with the general Office365 package and if you are leaned on Azure(popular where I am from), then why not use it as is? Teams is convenient too, as adding a calendar invite means you get am auto generated meeting link. And in most cases business & accounting teams make the choice and implement it company wide as policy. We also use it, but out of frustration, many of our colleagues use Slack as well as some hardcore engineering teams are too reluctant to use Teams and outright use Discord. Many of the teams brought in the issue to upper management about Teams but they redirect us to our IT management company, who tells us it comes with subscription and our business strategists or something has to ask to change this but they want an “ubiquitous” company wide system and so on. Now we are often stuck with messaging people in three different places because someone will never respond in Teams, someone may not be in Slack and someone may not be using discord :)
• Semaphor 4y ago
  It’s funny that it apparently crashes for people. Never had a single crash or lagging, sharing works fine, but it also doesn’t work and is a mess. Sometimes there are no notifications. I’ve had messages by my boss that I’d only see by chance hours later because Teams never notified me. I tried ingesting Seq alerts. But those are only possible in the groups tab, which has literally no notifications at all if one is in the chats tab. The search feature has to be an elaborate joke. No one can think you can build a search feature that shows no context at all. Their pseudo-markdown. What's going on there? If I press the wrong symbols or forget to paste with Ctrl+Shift+V I’ll be in some weird layout state that I can’t get out of, usually I just give up and send the broken looking messages.
• PhaedrusV 4y ago
  My biggest gripe isn't teams-specific, it's that MS office products still won't support multiple logins. With Google I can be logged into my 4 different work, personal and business accounts simultaneously and switching between the active one is a single button click. MS won't even support two accounts, so 3 out of 4 times I get invited to a teams meeting I'm in the wrong account, and it's a huge pain to sign out and sign back in; there's no single sign-in (even in Windows!) that works for Outlook, Onedrive, Teams, etc. all at once. Ridiculous.
• pmarreck 4y ago
  Because Microsoft the company is and always has been a POS that was only ever good for writing proprietary locked-in software for big corporations
• RyanShook 4y ago
  I actually think Teams is pretty good and gets the job done. It could be better at video calling but for chat and most other collaboration it does what it's supposed to do.
• oxff 4y ago
  One of the worst programs I've ever used. I would LOVE to meet the guys in charge of it and ask them so many questions about it. It is like Peugeots, you can't make something so bad without it being intentional at this point
• iancmceachern 4y ago
  Because it's a hodge podge of stuff, not a single thing made at a single time by a single team with a single vision.
• phendrenad2 4y ago
  Layers of abstraction. Too many cooks. Too much modularity. No testing. No user feedback. No telemetry. Low price point.
• krauses 4y ago
  I’ve used Teams every day all day for the past 4+ years and I have had minor issues with it ~5 times. Hundreds of my fellow co-workers use it and I’ve not heard anyone run into the consistent issues you’ve described. We use it for 100% of our conference calls, sales calls, 1:1 working sessions, all-hands (hundreds of attendees), virtual trainings, new-hire onboarding, etc… I’d say it’s the most useful software we use in my company outside of email. Admittedly, I’m yet to experience the pure bliss that comes from collaborating on an NFT project with fellow Slack team members from my Mac Book Pro while riding in my auto-pilot enabled Tesla. Until then, I’m pretty content with what I’ve been able to do with Microsoft Teams over the years.
  • vunuxodo 4y ago
    I'm forced to use it on a Mac. Every. Single. Time. I try to navigate to the window through command-tab, it fails to actually put the window in focus. So I end up having to hunt through my XCode windows, IntelliJ windows, whatever other nonsense I have open - to find a message ping that I probably would rather not have received anyway.
    • jhickok 4y ago
      When I share an application on my mac, Teams overlays directly on top of that application window every time and I have to move it out of the way. It is so annoying.
  • nikau 4y ago
    Maybe its regional, but for the last 4 weeks me and every coworker has a 50% call connect failure rate. Join a meeting or call, it sits there for about 15 seconds then throws an error. Second connect works OK.
  • imron 4y ago
    Ever tried searching for a conversation you had with someone, and you search for something you remember saying, and click ‘go to message’ and rather than take you to the conversation with all the important context you were actually looking for, it just shows that single message on the center of the screen all by itself with no way to see the rest of the conversation? That’s the best.
• probolsky 4y ago
  I’ve known people who work at Microsoft. Their attitude is we are the biggest so we don’t need to be good. This may seem too simple, but it’s their corporate culture.
• NexusGS 4y ago
  I had to use Teams a lot in the past years as I worked for companies that they went all-in for O365. While O365 is not bad (and even some of components of O365 are quite good) Teams is the epitome of terrible software. Terrible UI, unreliable delivering notifications, terrible at handling external devices (headphones, webcams). It's very untrustworthy when it gets to automatically updating status based on activity (happens more often than you think). The concept of "Teams" (group chats) in MS Teams is the worst I have ever seen. It clearly promotes isolation between groups! I can go on for hours about how bad it is but I will stop here. I will say though that when I interview with a company, if they don't use MS Teams, they get extra points! :-) Edit: also this came up recently: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/microsoft-teams-stores-auth-tokens-as-cleartext-in-windows-linux-macs/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/microsoft-tea... Good ol' MS!
  • interpol_p 4y ago
    Yes! I just started at a company all-in on Microsoft where my previous place used Slack On Slack, we were encouraged to keep communication out in the open, it was far easier to jump into discussions Everyone is in a silo on Teams. Every time something needs to be discussed a new group chat is created, and the public channels see little use due to the "formality" of posting to them It's also just a terrible piece of software. It doesn't handle media in any common formats (heif images, and most video is not transcoded). It tells you that you have already posted a piece of media just because the file name matches (likely, as I just paste everything from my clipboard). You can't draw on someone's screen during a call. Trying to type code into the message window is annoying and broken. Typing with any form of indentation is immediately lost. The custom notifications (why not use macOS notifications!?) are gross I asked my business why we use it. I was told it was free for them. I told them it's probably costing us a lot more in lost collaboration and downtime due to technical issues.
• qq66 4y ago
  I'm of the opinion that Microsoft Teams' badness is actually a feature, and makes people not waste time and gossip in it. I'm quoted in this article about this specifically: https://www.protocol.com/workplace/founders-sick-of-slack https://www.protocol.com/workplace/founders-sick-of-slack
• squishysquid 4y ago
  I just don't get why they won't give me push to talk.
• OrderlyTiamat 4y ago
  On linux, Microsoft teams will change your system sound settings to match its preference. This includes Bluetooth headphones no longer being available to the system. Then, it decides the system settings are beneath it and will only use its own device settings. And it will decide now that your fancy Bluetooth headset is gone, there is also no need for that crappy internal microphone either, so enjoy not having any microphone. Once you get all this working through however many steps it requires of you, teams will happily forget your settings and will require you to do it all over again. Teams binds to the previous account, so if you want to login to another account (say, if you're both a student and have a job) you have to log back in to the last account, totp and all, before you can logout and log back in to the account you want. There are no back buttons. Teams is shit. I use it because I have to, but its ridiculous how bad the UX is and its a shame, because I think microsoft can do better. I've heard the interoperability with teams and office365 is phenomenal though. Multiple people editing the same document, while in a call presenting that document, security of the files all settled in the cloud with easy to use interfaces. It sounds great, I don't really use any of that. To me, teams will always be a crappy voip tool.
  • airtonix 4y ago
    google does all that "edit documents while on a call" too, and it's not shit.
  • kristopolous 4y ago
    Install Microsoft Edge for Linux and use the web version through that. Really, it's a great solution. I've done it for a while. I don't use edge for anything else but it runs teams.microsoft.com great
    • merb 4y ago
      it does not display calls notification tough.
    • OrderlyTiamat 4y ago
      I do this too now (except I use the chromium skin instead of the edge skin). I think this is about the same experience minus the device and settings issues. Also, don't try to do this with firefox: various features (such as sharing your screen) are not available in firefox.
• perryizgr8 4y ago
  It's all incentives. By bundling it with their Office offering, they've removed any incentive for themselves to put too much effort into one app. Their customers are locked in for life. They won't leave. They tolerated Skype (Lync) for years, Teams is way better than that. It's the same story with Google Chat and Meet. They can simply ignore it and what are you gonna do? Move your entire company off Gmail/Outlook? Even if you get irritated and start paying Slack or Zoom, you are still paying full price for Teams/Meet.
• pipeline_peak 4y ago
  > God forbid you try to change the audio device from speakers to headphones in the middle of a call. And then if you try to just call back on your phone, and they want to share their screen, and you go back to your PC and try to join the call from your PC so you can see the screenshare (it's not going to work). What voice/video client handles this much fiddling? When my friend and I get steam voice chat running, it’s a good day. We don’t touch anything after because these services notoriously suck. Teams cloud based file sharing and overall UI/UX are nice. I don’t like how you can’t copy messages without a time stamp, or that black bar appearing on top when you screen share that obstructs any tabs or the rdp bar. But overall it’s a nice client in Windows as long as you don’t hop around too much which I don’t because I do my work on one machine idk what OP is doing lol. Maybe Zoom and Slack are better, as a Windows developer, the integration is nice.
  • nikau 4y ago
    I ended up making a script to set custom audio devices back to what I want. Its peak elegance, have to kill teams, modify a json file with some cryptic uuid reference to the speaker and mic device, then restart teams.
• s1mon 4y ago
  I hate how Teams really can’t handle full-duplex conversations, at least with transpacific calls. You pretty much need to speak, pause, and then hope that only one person speaks next, or there’s a series of “sorry, you go ahead…” until someone manages to get started again. Background noise removal and feedback removal is poor compared to the competition. I much prefer Zoom for video/voice conferencing and Slack for text chats. However, what Teams has done well is dethrone WebEx and other legacy stuff from really big companies during the pandemic/WFH era. As has been mentioned, many big companies already had huge Microsoft accounts (likely O365) so turning on Teams was easy. When WebEx fell over under load, users moved to Teams. One feature that’s pretty cool is the real time closed captions and the ability to do text based searches for recorded meetings. But that’s not enough to make up for some of the most basic audio quality issues.
  • pragmatick 4y ago
    That also means that you cannot mute other members. When I'm in a meeting in my office and a colleague sitting next to me is in the same meeting, I can hear them twice, once in real life and once in teams, a couple of hundred seconds later.
  • FridgeSeal 4y ago
    > I hate how Teams really can’t handle full-duplex conversations, at least with transpacific calls. Half my teammates live in the same city and duplex conversations basically don't work. It's not just "my internet is bad", I can jump on discord with my friends, and watch 3 people stream stuff (in higher quality) simultaneously, and have multiple people talking simultaneously and be able to clearly hear all of them.
• solardev 4y ago
  Microsoft's entire business model is holding corporate IT hostage. All their apps suck, except maybe VS Code. There's no reason to choose the Microsoft stack over Google Workplace or Zoho except, well, inertia. And there's a lot of that...
  • kimi 4y ago
    BUT... it's so easy for corporate IT dept to buy into. Each different vendor is a different nightmare - but with MS you have only one. And they have it all. And it's maybe not best in class, but good enough. You can see why they are so successful.
    • solardev 4y ago
      The thing I don't get about Microsoft is that with just a LITTLE more effort -- slightly better UX, slightly better implementation, slightly better design, slightly better iterations, whatever -- they could easily be best-in-class. Like all their desktop and consumer web products get 70% there, I don't know why they never just go the remaining 30%. It's like they aim for mediocrity, get there, and then just sustain it for ten years because... why? Nobody's looking that hard? Maybe it's cuz they're one of those companies that sell to management instead of users. Maybe the pitch isn't "your users will love us" but "we simplify IT fleet management for you, and your users... well, they don't have a choice, so don't worry about them." Could they really not have bothered just going that extra mile to do both...? None of their products HAVE to be terrible... they just need love and focus :(
  • mixxit 4y ago
    i absolutely hate vscode but visual studio is incredible and one of the main reasons i use windows
    • solardev 4y ago
      Oh yeah! Agree there about the full-blown IDE. I don't do desktop dev anymore but even back in the day VS was amazing. As an aside, though, why do you hate VSCode? I use IntelliJ myself but most of my colleagues use VSCode and love it... yours is the first bad review I've heard in a while. What's terrible about it?
• baxtr 4y ago
  Teams on my laptop crashes in the middle of calls. The only way to fix this is to reinstall. And then hope it will stay stable for a while. Teams on my smartphone crashes in the middle of calls. The only way to fix this is to reinstall from the App Store. And then hope it will stay stable for a while. Also I’m paying a monthly subscription for this experience.
• p1necone 4y ago
  I don't think I've ever had Teams crash on me, or even hang noticeably in a few years of using it. I am always on fairly beefy devices though.
• marsven_422 4y ago
• coolandsmartrr 4y ago
  I was applying for a job at a wealthy gaming corp. However, they wouldn't invest in a smoother video-calling software like Zoom, as they just used Teams bundled in their existing Office license. I got late to a meeting because Teams would crash. When I opened Teams a few minutes before the call, my laptop froze. I thought my laptop performance would improve once enough memory has been allocated to Teams, but it never recovered from the freeze. I had to reboot and start Teams. It finally connected a few minutes after the proposed start time. The HR staff were in a bitter tone by then. I couldn't get the job. I wish Microsoft would compensate me for a loss caused by their product. They shouldn't be allowed to ship sloppy software under their massive userbase and Microsoft brand (a supposed promise of quality).
• jeffrallen 4y ago
  Leonard's law: Software will be as bad as it's users can tolerate.
• dragonelite 4y ago
  Im more wondering why core functionality keeps degrading.
• brundolf 4y ago
  Kind of amazing to see the contrast in quality between VSCode and Teams (both Microsoft productivity apps that are relatively new/greenfield and also Electron-based)
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• a0-prw 4y ago
  I am also forced to use it for work, and agree that MS Teams is annoying. However, it sucks less than some of the other stuff I have to use, which appears to have been designed by people intent on sabotaging our work
• beebmam 4y ago
  I've never had the application crash, not even once. The only problem I've had with it being slow is when it opens Office apps inside of it. It's been flawless otherwise, leaps and bounds ahead of Zoom and Slack.
• birger 4y ago
  I have a different experience. 5-10 calls/day on Windows or iPhone. Seamless transition if I want to switch the conversation to another device. Use multiple webcams and headsets. Screen-share a lot. Both Teams App and browser version. Never had any problems with it. I really like Teams and what it brings to my team. But reading the comments here I'm the minority.
  • hnbad 4y ago
    It feels like a bit of hyperfixation going on. Teams is terrible but so are Slack, Zoom, Google Meet, Discord, etc. They're all also amazing, including Teams. Turns out different people have different experiences and different usage patterns (and hardware) that work differently well with different applications. Personally I prefer Teams over Slack but I haven't used Teams in a large company. Formatting is nicer in Slack but I can't imagine why anyone would claim Slack is good for sharing code beyond basic one-liners. Teams allows me to carry over a video call from one device to another while Slack doesn't even allow me to queue a message when I'm on spotty WiFi. Threading on Teams is a bit unusual but Slack's multiple ways of viewing threads (only one of which shows new replies in real time) can also be annoying. But I'm not representative of most of the people commenting here. I run stock Windows 11 with an Azure AD domain account on a Surface Studio Laptop, I do my development in WSL and my browsing in Edge. And for the most part, everything just works.
• faangiq 4y ago
  Corporate America is the problem.
• _nalply 4y ago
  A peeve: Last week I got invited to an online meeting. I am using Firefox on Arch Linux on a Framework laptop. One hour before I opened the invitation link and was just told to wait till the meeting starts. OK. But when the time was up, Teams suddenly told me to install something in a hurry. I fished out my wife's Chromebook instead but we missed two minutes of the meeting. That's clearly a failure: I didn't get a chance to check my setup before the meeting started.
• thefz 4y ago
  Opposite experience: I use it daily and never had it crash on me. Everything works as expected and I see some slowing down only on very large meetings, but I am on a mobile CPU. I would even say it's getting better and better.
• wwfzyn 4y ago
  The desktop version is buggy. The browser version works better. Don't even bother installing it. Just use the browser version.
• benjamincburns 4y ago
  Relevant: https://slack.com/blog/news/dear-microsoft https://slack.com/blog/news/dear-microsoft
• dexterlagan 4y ago
  And there's one thing that really bugs me: in the new Win11 build 22H2 - supposed to let you regulate how much power each process is allowed to use through the 'economy' feature of Task Manager - Teams seems to be amongst few apps on which that functionality is not allowed. It's only possible to limit individual processes within Teams, but not the entire app. Basically making the feature useless, since Teams uses at least 20 processes on my system. I can limit all of Edge. I can limit any of my own apps. Teams is the single most inefficient app I have installed. And it's the only one I can't easily limit. Why Microsoft, why? (edited for clarity)
• kimi 4y ago
  It's interesting how the back-end part is "funny" as well. If you a Teams to Teams call, your internal call flow ends up being exposed to the calling party [1] - and that's not what you expect out of an office PBX. This happens only if both parties are on a Teams client, though. [1] https://twitter.com/lenz/status/1571921532783587329 https://twitter.com/lenz/status/1571921532783587329
  • FastEatSlow 4y ago
    I have a write-up about how their API is funny. https://blog.opercom.co.uk/posts/odd-microsoft-teams-api/ https://blog.opercom.co.uk/posts/odd-microsoft-teams-api/
• tyiz 4y ago
  Hey, its Microsoft. Expect quality?
• HyperSane 4y ago
  Teams works fine for me, it has never crashed on me.
• hooby 4y ago
  - MSN Messenger - Windows Live Messenger - Microsoft Office Communications - Microsoft V-Chat - Microsoft Lync - Skype - Skype for Business (completely different piece of software than skype) - Microsoft Classroom - Microsoft Teams (no guarantee of completeness) Some of these did better than others, but in the end they all went down the drain. That makes me suspect that it's not the software itself, but some corporate requirements that Microsoft imposes on their chat programs, that's the root cause of the problems.
  • baby 4y ago
    Oh gosh, had to use Lync for work (on a Mac). The absolute horror.
  • adwww 4y ago
    In fairness the Google list looks similar. - Hangouts - Wave - Plus - Duo - Meet - Chat
    • hooby 4y ago
      Maybe they had similar requirements. Like integration of and into other products of theirs, or idk.
  • prmoustache 4y ago
    Wasn't Skype for Business just a rebranding Lync after the Skype purchase ? This one was painful with your smartphone and computer not necessarily receiving the same messages. Also I never understood how and why my status was changing/not changing automatically. I think Teams still suffers from similar issues. It happens that sometimes I open a second teams in a separate browser to have a full chat window while videoconferencing and both chats are not always in sync, sometimes I see a message has been sent from the notification window but if I try to see the full message it never appears on that window while it does on another one.
    • justsomehnguy 4y ago
      > just a rebranding Lync OCS, Lync and Skype for Business are all the same (quite shitty) product. Like in 2014 you couldn't send a message with more than 800 chars. Now imagine troubleshooting something which requires sending logs? AND this is not confirable AND the client actively bitch at you AND you can't even the know the char limit from the client. [0] https://techslaves.org/2015/06/03/lyncskype-for-business-message-limit/ https://techslaves.org/2015/06/03/lyncskype-for-business-mes...
• skc 4y ago
  I work for a very large insurance company. Pretty much the whole company is on Teams. If Teams was as bad as this thread suggests we would have heard about it (I know this because company-wide we complain bitterly about the anti-malware cruft that gums up our machines daily) So it seems to me that we either got very lucky with our rollout or this thread represents a very vocal minority of people that are experiencing issues
  • fuzzy2 4y ago
    Teams truly is that bad. But perhaps it takes power users to see that. A regular user might just give up instead of ranting about it on the net. It’s not that it doesn’t work. It’s that it’s not reliable and performance is bad.
    • skc 4y ago
      What does a Teams power user look like?
      • fuzzy2 4y ago
        I’m not referring to Teams power users, but PC power users in general. You know, people that actually care about snappy performance, consistent behavior and whatnot. Working with the PC instead of against it. Knowing why. My experience is that even many of my developer colleagues are not power users. They happily rebuild thrice in Visual Studio without even questioning the need for that. They perform strange rituals to make things happen. They resigned to the fact that everything is dog slow. I cannot settle for that, so I rant.
        • skc 4y ago
          Ok that's fair. My biggest annoyances with Teams are slow startup and a bizarre implementation of copy and paste. But in general it pretty much stays out of the way, and has enabled us to fairly seamlessly transition the org to WFH.
  • jhickok 4y ago
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• jimnotgym 4y ago
  This is a regular comment on hn. It doesn't chime with my experience. I have used Teams every day for 3 years. It is a memory hog, it sometimes takes a moment from connection to hearing people...but I never once had it 'crash'. I swap from phone to screen fairly regularly with no problem. I wonder, do people who pay for Teams as an organisation get better service? We pay and I have no problems with it.
  • powerapple 4y ago
    Same here. Never had a problem with Teams with the organization. I am using mac though.
  • tapland 4y ago
    We pay and I've encountered most of the mentioned issues. Most aggravating one being when audio just wouldn't work (test call worked fine) for one meeting (forced to listen in through the phone app) and then did work for the one right after. The most regular annoyance is me getting marked as idle while actively working. When it did yesterday I was typing away a ton in vscode but it took a good long while for it to update.
  • prmoustache 4y ago
    On the last 2 companies I have been hired we have been paying for teams and still the experience is crappy. I have not seen crashes but however I have seen teams window being totally unresponsive, people complaining about having to reboot their computer because their teams window was unresponsive/laggy during videocall. I mean not just sound and video stuttering like it would with a bad internet connection but the complete window being unreactive. This on all OSes: windows, Mac and Linux. Also the struggle is real when pairing / connecting different headsets/speakers, especially bluetooth ones after the app/browser is started. The device might not appear as selectable, sometimes the sound is coming from one audio device although it is another one that is selected (same with microphone), this is a total shit show. On a personnal note it is much better for me since I stopped using the app on Linux. I installed microsoft-edge that is now dedicated to it and other Office365 stuff. I still experienced bugs, issues with messages synchronisation between teams running on more than one device or more than one browser. And the mobile app is a complete resource and battery hog, I refuse to install it on my new smartphone.
• miked85 4y ago
  Teams is probably the worst IT mandated software I've used in my career (which is saying a lot). I don't think Microsoft really cares about it.
• archi42 4y ago
  I never experienced any crashes, and neither can I recall a team mate complaining about that. Bugs I encountered: 1. Opening the link to a scheduled meeting opens the browser (good), but then clicking the "open in teams" and confirming the external URL handler in the browser does... Nothing. Restarting teams fixes that. (Happens for my team mates as well). 2. I have a dedicated USB mic that's always on, while my speakers are on a different USB device that's not always on. I have to reconfigure the audio settings very often, which is especially annoying since I can't do that before answering a call. But changing the audio device works without error (unlike Discord on my private PC, which lets me select the newly connected USB device as output, but needs to be restarted to actually output audio to it). That's about it. Of course memory and CPU usage are rather impressive. And afaik we don't use the phone (as in landline, not as in app) feature; at least I don't, so I can't comment on that. I've to add: I tend to bash MS first and ask questions later. I'm unhappy I can't use Linux on both my work PCs. But if I'm honest, teams works pretty well for us.
  • Pooge 4y ago
    > I have to reconfigure the audio settings very often, which is especially annoying since I can't do that before answering a call. A similar issue occurs on Skype for Enterprise. You cannot plug your headphones in after someone starts calling. You have to decline the call, go in the settings and call back.
    • archi42 4y ago
      I always tell them something like "can't hear you, give me 5s".
  • ranguna 4y ago
    Have you never sent a message with images just to later find out that the message wasn't sent and it wouldn't even show up on the chat so you could retry? Have you never tried to join a meeting where teams made you just sit there for a minute until you decide to restart it? Have you ever called someone at the same time as they call you, ending you with teams saying that they are calling you at the same time as you are calling them? Have you ever tried to click on an old message from a search result, just to end up nowhere near the message? Have you never join late to a meeting because teams didn't notify you that the meeting had started? If you have an external calendar account linked to outlook, have you never noticed that the linked calendar events don't show up on teams calendar? Have you ever clicked on a message notification, scrolled a bit up or down to a different message and have teams snap you back to the notification message for no good reason? Have you ever thought to yourself that it would be nice to use custom background images on video calls, just to realise that Microsoft loves Linux so much that you can't do that on their Linux client? Have you never noticed your teams status showing that you are in a meeting when you are not, even without any schedules meeting in the calendar? If not... Well... Lucky you, I guess.
• AndrewVos 4y ago
  Most things made by Microsoft are horrific. Just look at Azure. It's because they have a bad culture and developers who could never care about their capitalist hell products. Once your company is stuck into a contract with them it's almost impossible to change, so why do they care about fixing anything.
  • thefz 4y ago
    What's bad about Azure?
    • AndrewVos 4y ago
      So many things. One that is irritating me a lot right now is how complex it is to deploy to an "App Service" and how nothing seems to work. Also it's incredibly slow. https://github.com/Azure/webapps-deploy/issues/60 https://github.com/Azure/webapps-deploy/issues/60 And the fact that we're locked into using it means I have to take my 50 second netlify deploy and migrate it to a 15 minute ADO deploy, losing out on loads of features and gaining none.
      • jiggawatts 4y ago
        Just put your web app in a container and call it a day? App Service can run containerised workloads just fine.
        • AndrewVos 4y ago
          I would love to get this done quick. Do you have a link to something usable?
          • jiggawatts 4y ago
            This depends almost entirely on what exactly you are hosting. Is it a Node.js app? ASP.NET? Windows? Linux? In Visual Studio it is more-or-less as simple as right-clicking a project and selecting "Add -> Docker support": https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/architecture/containerized-lifecycle/design-develop-containerized-apps/visual-studio-tools-for-docker https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/architecture/contai... In Azure DevOps pipelines or GitHub Actions, it's also quite simple to add a container build step: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/ecosystems/containers/build-image https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/eco... In the actual Azure subscription you just need to create an Azure Container Registry resource to host the image. I believe you can also use Docker Hub, if you prefer. Then in App Service just host the container image instead of the raw code: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/app-service/tutorial-custom-container https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/app-service/tutorial... That should be about it. The effect of this is to "zip up" your loose 'js' files (or whatever), making deployments much faster. The build happens before this step, so the container image is "final" and will run directly without needing any npm steps or whatever at deployment time. If you need something like hot-reload or similar very fast deployment times, then App Service is probably not the right environment for you. However, with containers its often possible to have a fast local deployment edit-build-test loop and then have the same environment running in production. This is the main benefit of containers!
• trasz 4y ago
  Because people who make decisions to use it are not the people using it. It’s a systemic problem with all enterprise software - it’s crap, because nobody who's opinion matter cares or knows it’s crap.
• wseqyrku 4y ago
  Microsoft tried to buy Discord for a reason. I think it would have led to better integrations + a for business version which surprisingly enough people are asking Discord to do for a long time now..
• DocTomoe 4y ago
  It may just be good enough. I work as a consultant, and that also means I adapt to the videoconferencing solutions my clients use. In the last week, I used Teams, Zoom, Slack, Cisco Webex and Google Meet. Each of these come with different advantages and disadvantages. None works perfectly, but interestingly, Teams is the one I experience the fewest problems with (closely followed by Google Meet) - and if my company was a Microsoft centered shop where lots of office documents are shared around, Teams would probably be what I choose. Worst is Cisco Webex, which imho needs to die quickly.
• r_hoods_ghost 4y ago
  Alternatively - in the past 2 1/2 years of using it intensively every day I don't think I've had it crash once and have no trouble switching between headphones, speakers and my hearing aids. Slack on the other hand shudder.I do wonder if a lot of this is due to addons, poorly managed windows installations by corporate IT, or conflicts with other processes.
• obert 4y ago
  As long as companies keep paying for it, the signal given is “keep going like this”. CIOs’ fault.
  • jillesvangurp 4y ago
    CIOs don't care about user happiness but about cost, compliance, security, and general ass-coverage. MS is really good at ticking those boxes for companies. MS Live is included with a lot of other stuff they also need. So, they sign for a site license and then they get to use outlook, office 365, and all the rest of the stuff that companies need (or think they need). It's a package deal, alternative solutions would be redundant relative to that package. Kudos to Zoom for convincing lots of companies that they need it in addition to that stuff when arguably they really don't. MS has narrowed the feature gap enough that you could do without it. But still, it's fashionable enough that lots of companies pay to use that in addition to MS Live. For most responsible CIOs that's an obvious way to cut cost waiting to happen of course. I am CTO/CIO/CPO at a small startup. We have so far kept MS, Adobe, and Atlassian out of our door. We use Google Docs, Meets, Github, Figma, Asana, and a few other things instead. So our SAAS bills are lowish and we get a lot of value. Perfectly happy with that setup. And Meets is pretty nice to use as it just runs in a browser without insisting on installing an app that contains a browser that runs a webapp.
    • obert 4y ago
      > CIOs don't care about user happiness but about cost, compliance, security, and general ass-coverage. exactly what I meant. And users should complain about their CIOs rationale, when they choose a product ignoring usability, openness, etc
• shapefrog 4y ago
  Why is <INSERT SOFTWARE NAME> still so bad? It's buggy, and it crashes more often than any other app I use. God forbid you try to <INSERT BASIC FUNCTIONALITY FAIL> Seriously, with all the money and resources thrown at this company and this app, you'd think it'd be a little more stable, faster, and reliable. I am literally forced to use this app at work... Response: Mine doesnt crash and havent seen any bugs and I use it for 28 hours a day - unlike <INSERT COMPETITOR NAME> which is buggy, and it crashes more often than any other app I use. God forbid you try to <INSERT BASIC FUNCTIONALITY FAIL>.
• coffeedoughnuts 4y ago
  We use Teams for group calls at work, but Slack for all other messaging. This is because Slack's video calling feature has always been a pain, particularly for our Linux team members. It could have improved, but we moved to Teams for calls so I wouldn't know. Because I only open teams when we have a meeting and then immediately close it, my experience is generally positive. I _wish_ I could just use the browser based version to save opening the slow-slow-slow-to-open desktop app but: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/safari-browser-support-1aac0a7c-35a8-42c1-a7df-f674afe234df?ui=en-us&rs=en-gb&ad=gb https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/safari-browser-su... says I need to disable cross-site tracking which is, frankly, an insane ask. I think that sort of poor engineering is a sign that the team behind teams must have very limited resources. It's hard to prioritise a desktop browser with such small market share, especially when a work around of 'just use the app' is there - but this is hardly a lean startup here.
  • uselpa 4y ago
    Teams works fine in Edge on a Mac. It’s the only reason I installed Edge.
    • coffeedoughnuts 4y ago
      If I’m going to need to install and open specific software just to use Teams, then it’s probably going to be the Teams app itself. The purpose of having it browser based is that I can have it quickly open in a tab in the window I’m already in and then close it again. Other MS products work in my browser (Outlook for example) so why not Teams? I suspect because the Teams team is pretty understaffed.
• thefz 4y ago
  I never had it miss a beat, let alone crash, and I use it everyday for work. It can be slow when joining very large meetings, though, but I use it mainly on a mobile CPU. No issue with devices either and I can switch on the fly even when they are in use.
• roydivision 4y ago
  My 2 cents of venting on this sorry excuse of software - Backtick formatting in a chat post only works after typing the closing backtick, deleting it, re-typing it - Text copied from a conversation is polluted with names and time stamps. "I really want this feature" said nobody ever - The mute/unmute button is hard to find, I don't think I've ever attended a Teams meeting without someone struggling with this. Teams should change its name to "You're on mute" - Multiple windows, I never know which is the 'main' window, which is the meeting window, where are they, which has focus - Too hard to know which chat you're replying to, who is in it - Updates in chats are not consistently acknowledged, you have to change focus, and back again. Even then the "Activity" tab still shows unread items that I have read - Random crashing - Random communication freezes, everyone else is chatting, I don't see any updates nor notification of any problems until I restart the app - "Reply" is sometimes in the chat context menu, sometimes not. - Media handling is inconsistent, sometimes I can't paste photos, sometimes I can - The size of the text chat column in a meeting cannot be changed and is very narrow, forcing you to find the same chat in the 'main' window
  • jdhzzz 4y ago
    To make the TEAMs experience even worse, our IT department, okay at the behest of the legal team, put a policy in place that removes chat history older than 24 hours thus removing the last shred of utility from the product.
  • jdhzzz 4y ago
    Things I like (What?): Ctrl-Shift-V pastes into TEAMs with no formatting. Should be part of the OS. Contrary to WebEx (what we came from for meetings), joining a TEAMs meeting from both PC and phone joins you as one participant, not 2.
    • roydivision 4y ago
      Probably not intentional.
    • executesorder66 4y ago
      > Ctrl-Shift-V pastes into TEAMs with no formatting. Should be part of the OS. Pasting without formatting should be the default behaviour. Ctrl-Shift-V should be for people who want the shitty version.
• frank_bb 4y ago
• happymellon 4y ago
  One thing that has been referenced but not really talked about is that Teams doesn't want to be a tool, but the complete solution. With the built in SharePoint, and Office editors you can see that it is designed for a very particular use case. The problem is that most people on Hacker News are not just document sharing and editing. Most people are not doing this, and especially not in the half baked Office online tooling. As a chat tool isn't not great. It isn't supposed to be a chat tool though, which is why it will never be good.
  • prmoustache 4y ago
    It could still be much more efficient and less buggy. A sort of Zulip + Office 365 and external apps integration.
    • happymellon 4y ago
      It could be a lot more efficient by dumping the Teams tab. I don't understand these cards that have chat threads against them as they are large enough that the information contained in them is useless.
• dmje 4y ago
  I'm working with a client right now, trying to onboard them to O365 - I tried to push them the GSuite way (I prefer it, they prefer it, but their IT company is fixed on O365 and...other reasons) - so have been spending lots of time working with O365 from a top-down perspective. Individually, things like MS Word / Excel work really brilliantly in the browser and as a cloud suite. But put them together and it's an absolutely clusterf*k. The list of "apps" is absolutely enormous - and there is no coherent route between them, or consistency in operation. It looks like exactly what it is - a huge, overarching and insanely rich company just simply bought All The Things, slapped a bit of branding and a font on everything and then popped all the icons onto the same page. There's zero consistency, zero sense of how these things should be used together, zero explanation as to why you'd choose (say) Yammer over Teams, "Bookings" over Outlook calendars, or "Viva" over Sharepoint. The documentation is awful - again, not individually - sometimes this is ok - but the overall "this is the suite you're buying into, and here's how to use it" strategic overview. In fact it isn't awful, it's just simply non-existent. This is before you even get to the absolute horribleness of the logging in / logging out / multiple windows opening / redirection hell user experience. And then - layer on Teams on top of this - it is absolutely opaque about whether Teams is trying to be a sort of "glue" for all of the above (it fails) or a replacement (it fails) or a standalone thing (it mostly fails). There's a sort of half-assed attempt to make bits of Teams sort of work with bits of Sharepoint, but no, actually it turns out it doesn't, quite... It's just such a weird thing. As I say, the individual experiences are sometimes quite good - Word is really excellent in-browser for example - but the overall piece is just absolutely insane. I'm slightly at a loss as to how to onboard and train organisations with few IT skills when a veteran like me (20+ years in the business) is absolutely baffled by it.
• amir734jj 4y ago
  As a Microsoft employee I can say I hate teams. It's just terrible. The search is bad. Formatting code in the message is bad. It bloated. I just need a messaging app. Like lite version of teams.
• mixxit 4y ago
  Electron, heavy disk IO, many failed http requests to skype domains, no suitable historical search tool
• navane 4y ago
  Because microsoft got to big, which distorts the market. We learned this in economy 101 on high school: a monopoly is bad for the consumer. This here is technically not a monopoly but it is close. The producer of good A is using its momentum in market A to push a product in market B. This way, any big conglomeration can use its big fat ass to push innovation out of market B. All it has to do is offer product B for free, with a purchase of A. This promotes lazy consumerism, nothing good ever comes from it. This is why coupled sales should be banned. This is why the EU tried to uncouple browsers from OSs, why you now have to explicitly choose a browser.
• zmmmmm 4y ago
  Teams doesn't have to be good to succeed. It just has to exist. It's not even very important how good it is. Given it exists, IT will make everyone use it on Microsoft's behalf regardless of how bad it is. Or another way to look at it is that the real customers for Teams are IT departments. It makes their lives easier because they don't have to do anything and it meets all the compliance requirements they are supposed to enforce. Which in turn reflects that the real customers of IT are regulators and auditors. Nobody with decision making power actually cares whether any of the software in use in enterprises works well or not.
  • costcofries 4y ago
    Nobody with decision making power actually cares whether any of the software in use in enterprises works well or not. ^this just isn't true. There's three camps of people. 1) The people who use Teams today and think it works just fine, they even enjoy it and find it simple to use (these people exist). 2) The people who use teams but are annoyed by many small issues that together cumulate to a poor UX. 3) People who will never like Teams for many reasons but make a point about being as vocal as possible about their hate. Decision makers and leaders care about 1 and 2, which imho is good. I do agree that Teams isn't perfect and I also agree that it plays best, for now, with IT ecosystems. That said, end user love is critical and I think fixing that for group 2 will only help to secure Teams' undeniable comp advantage.
  • curiousgal 4y ago
    My company is migrating to DaaS and there is a plethora of Teams issues. IT teams got what they deserve.
  • damiante 4y ago
    It's also upsold as part of existing MS sales agreements which is why execs will buy it. Easier and cheaper than negotiating a new enterprise contract with an unrelated company eg Slack
  • junofan 4y ago
    “Can I speak with your compliance department?” Enterprise sales calls these days. Lots of rules.
• Ligma123 4y ago
  >God forbid you try to change the audio device from speakers to headphones in the middle of a call I can not do this either in Cisco Webex.
• tetek 4y ago
  it's a strategic move against Slack etc. Quick dirty copy of Slack, bundle it ("for free") with the Office which people already pay for. Adjust the bundle price few months later...
• dssagar93 4y ago
  Status changes to "Away" when you've gone for few minutes is the most shitty feature. Another set of issues I have found are, - Crashes randomly - Updates are not synced, sometimes it takes couple of mins to see the messages that were sent from the mobile phone.
• yrro 4y ago
  2022 and Microsoft still can't write a program that correctly uses the clipboard. When I select "some text" and press Ctrl-C I want "some text" in the clipboard. Not this monstrosity: [09:57] John Smith: some text I can't believe anyone inside MS uses Teams for serious communication. It must surely drive them mad!
  • Karsteski 4y ago
    This is one of the egregious sins of Teams that I've noticed. Who would ever want copy & paste to work this way..? Fine if you want to have that option, but call it "Copy entire message". Everyone at my company universally agrees Teams is shit.
  • vel0city 4y ago
    I agree its dumb that its so difficult to just copy a single message without the header. But select more than just that one message and paste it, and it makes sense why its there. It should be easier to just get the body of text from one message while still giving those timestamp headers for multi-message selection. No reason why they can't figure out a better way to have both.
• freedom2099 4y ago
  Is it though? I use on in Mac and it never crashes… I routinely change mic and headset midcall with no issues whatsoever! Or seamlessly transfer calls from Mac to iPhone and back. My entire company uses it (and we are thousand employees) and we are pretty satisfied!
• rawoke083600 4y ago
  No love for Jitsi in the comments ? I'm running on Linux, Teams in the browser is 'okish' but always feels crappy/slow/buggy Jitsi is always nice to use :)
• Foivos 4y ago
  The only way it works for me under Mac OS, is through a private window at Microsoft Edge. If I try to connect any other way, I either fail to connect or connect to the wrong workspace.
• baud147258 4y ago
  Maybe many people in the thread are using Teams on Mac/Linux, because for me I haven't had a crash in like, ever. I don't have any issue with the UI, but then I don't know any better and I've used Teams enough these last 3 years that I know its idiosyncrasies. Search is still beyond retarded, though.
• Duber 4y ago
  And don't forget about multi-tenant support. If you have multiple accounts or your account has access to multiple tenants, you can only really work in one of them at a time. You have to log out and log in to each of them. Totally unusable. Slack got this well from day zero. I can't understand how 6 years later MS Teams still doesn't support well this simple and common scenario.
  • Jaruzel 4y ago
    Inline external teams (from other tenants) has been in beta for a while now - last time I heard, they kept having issues with the security model. At the very least, MS should let us run multiple copies of Teams, one for each tenant. The only way around it right now, is to have the desktop client open and then the web client for a different tenant.
    • hnbad 4y ago
      You can switch tenants on the fly without having to "log in" again but it essentially restarts most of the app from scratch every time you switch compared to Slack which essentially treats different workspaces like different tabs. I think philosophically the cause is that MS 365 and Azure AD are very much built on the idea of having isolated tenants with cross-tenant guests being local copies (the documentation for implementing Azure auth for apps explicitly recommends against mixing tenants) and tenant switching was clearly an afterthought. But there's really no reason not to allow having entirely separate copies of Teams for the different tenants just like you can have multiple copies of Edge signed into different accounts. On the other I would be wholly unsurprised to learn that there are some obscure data sharing violations happening in the Slack client when you are connected to multiple Slack workspaces and Teams avoids them through rigorous isolation.
• jhoelzel 4y ago
  My personal take is, that teams is bloated, so you end up buying a higher spec pc. My guesstimate falls on the surface line (as i have a surfacebook myself) and suddenly, with 16gb of ram everything is not -so bad- again :D
• TedShiller 4y ago
  Microsoft
• mcv 4y ago
  At my previous job, MS Teams worked perfectly. It was used for everything, and it was great on my work laptop. Yesterday I had a Teams meeting with a teacher from my son's school, and Teams outright refused to work on my private laptop, with no indication why. The app when opened just hung on a white screen (even after reinstalling), and in the browser everything worked, except the camera. (The camera works fine in Discord or Google Meet.) I have no idea what the problem is here. It works perfectly fine in one situation, and not at all in the other. Both Windows machines.
• ForHackernews 4y ago
  It only has to compete with Slack, and Slack is also garbage.
• stunt 4y ago
  UX is garbage on Teams. Specially for chat compared to something like Slack. Video calls, I can live with it even though I prefer Zoom and Google Meet over Teams. If a company uses Teams for anything more than video call, to me it's a sign that they don't care about productivity of their employees.
• jesprenj 4y ago
  Our gymnasium extensively uses Microsoft products - Outlook, Windows, Office, ASP.NET. We've had some proprietary software before for writing on digital touchscreen displays in classrooms, but it was ditched in favour of OneNote. Now some professors prefer to use the classic whiteboard with the regular marker due to very usual malfunctioning of the software, sudden crashes, freezes, VERY SLOW undoing times, etc. It's the same with other Microsoft products. Like someone else said, it doesn't matter how bad they are, money streams are basically guaranteed. It's weird how their software almost feels like shareware or debian packages lurking in the repos unchanged for 10 years, just with ads and unresponsive UI. Students and teachers really have no interest in being informed on the bottom of the screen that it's currently raining (we have actual windows for that), nor do we care that Ethereum's Ether fell by 10% in value this day. Such things make no sense in an educational setting. Moreover even browsing the web when the teacher wants to show us some JS animation on a website (you know, such website that doesn't get updated, yet works, it's path starts with a tilde, and is only served via plaintext http) is uncomfortable, as Edge browser starts up with a screen filled with ads and random news articles about the war in Ukraine or political situation in the US. I went quite off course, but Teams is no different. As soon as the teacher logs in to the computer, Teams is starting to launch. Why? It would be somewhat okay if it just launched in the background, but no, after 20 seconds a Teams window opens, wastes 5 seconds of lecture time, because it doesn't immediately have the Close button drawn. Maybe theese are all just issues our IT team could solve, but given the immense amount of money siphoned into MS both by the school and the country's educational ministry, some reasonable defaults could be expected.
  • m4lvin 4y ago
    This! Another example: In Germany (or maybe whenever the system language is German) Microsoft decided that everyone should have a ferris wheel and a brezel in their task bar because now it is Oktoberfest in Munich. Seriously? I think we have reached spam-as-an-operating-system.
• AndyPa32 4y ago
  It's comically bad. You can't indent text! As if text chat wasn't invented and being used for 40 years now. The text size limit drives me crazy. But hey, emojis!
• whoami_nr 4y ago
  This entire comment thread is a goldmine for any PM working on the Teams product!
• joaogfarias 4y ago
  Since only a few people are allowed to fix problems, problems tend to continue to exist. The Cathedral and the Bazaar.
• dagaci 4y ago
  This thread is incredibly negative, this is a suprise because our entire company relies on teams for remote working and it works pretty damned well. Interestingly teams usage seems to be still rising post-pandemic, something competitors are not seeing (and competitors include its own Skype product), teams even managed to surpass Slack in third part plugin support. So i'm not really buying this thread as repsentative, but it more function of the extremly high usage whcih is suprising on a forum which is heavily Mac/Linux oriented.
  • telcal 4y ago
    I guess it's like any product review, those with poor experiences are more likely to voice their opinion. Our org uses Teams and sure, there are some negatives (search, I'm looking at you) I've never had any of the issues the parent has and I've been using it daily since it first came out. I also use Slack (less frequently) and prefer Teams, but Slack's search is much better.
  • brailsafe 4y ago
    Teams usage is rising because it's free and bundled with other corporate MS office offerings like SharePoint. That's my hunch anyway, I really don't think anyone who's used Slack and Teams equally (yes, on a mac in this case) would pick Teams on its merit.
  • what-the-grump 4y ago
    A lot of this thread are people with poor overall implementations complaining about Teams, I bet most of the issues are caused what’s deployed in front of teams, firewalls, etc. Windows not configured for enterprise. IT departments not keeping up. I use all major chat applications. From Webex to Logmein, to various telephony bs like Jive, daily. Is Teams perfect? No, but it’s nowhere near as bad as this thread paints it. Would I use anything else? Slack for chat & image heavy workloads, like dev team, or IT support queue.
  • dqh 4y ago
    We use both Slack and Teams on Mac - and I find that Teams is more reliable lately.
  • 4y ago
• thorin 4y ago
  Teams isn't great ( from a feature and memory perspective ), but anyone who hates it should be forced to use Webex, on a bad network connection to India with 50+ people on a call!
• John23832 4y ago
  David Saks talked about this on the last All In podcast. Teams just had to be good enough to be included into Microsoft’s “Bundle”. Once it’s free and available, it gets adopted by prior bundle purchasers.
• ColonelBlimp 4y ago
  After much frustration using Teams, I realised that the majority of my colleagues didn't care or even noticed all the small and not so small things that don't work. So, I accepted the sad reality that in a typical office environment, disinterest is the best ally of software companies. Having said that, in the last year or so I noticed Teams is more stable and provides a better user experience. Or, perhaps, it's just me being succesful at lowering my original expectations.
• jyriand 4y ago
  The wors part is that it sets you automatically "Away" when using Teams mobile app. You are only "Available" when the app is opened.
• dustedcodes 4y ago
  That’s why they integrate it directly into Windows 11 and force everyone to have/use Trams whether they like it or not. They are already rubbing their hands when they can report their DAU to make it look like people actually like Teams.
• nullcontext 4y ago
  Clearly because they've done a poor job of integrating and then forcing adoption of the stickers and gif inputs. They should've threatened to call forth a Skypening if the users failed to enthusiastically and relentlessly toss questionable stickers and gifs onto every other line in a work IM. From every colleague. From LoB to shining LoB. Cross-silos and spanning every Org... until the market is fully forcefully penetrated. One day we'll all make the switch to sticker based conversating, but until they push it feverishly and madly like the world is ending that evolution will be just out of our grasp. They simply halfassedly work to make it actively bad and don't really have the drive to make it truly sinister like they should. Somehow it would drive gains in the share price quarter over quarter like any sufficiently evil dark pattern spec software always does automagically. Frustratingly Microsoft is just not laser-focused enough on driving the adoption of a campaign to hit those KPI's it seems. /s (I weep for the death of Lync daily)
• jupp0r 4y ago
  Time to look for a new employer who values your time and productivity.
• mathattack 4y ago
  Amazingly I experienced a large MS shop choose Zoom over teams purely because they caught the MS salesperson lying about the Teams price.
• nullcontext 4y ago
  Once upon a time we had Lotus Sametime in office for IM communication and we liked it. It was good. It worked and didn't have dealbeaking quirks or fails. I miss Sametime, always have. Lync was not perfect, and Skype for Business even less so, but they at least had a UI that wasn't a chainsaw massacre to use or to stare at. Every time I have to use Teams because it's the de-facto standard I always come away from the conference call feeling dirty - like I just used a nasty shopping cart at a disgusting filthy walmart to get groceries - and makes me pine for SfB or Sametime. Better days.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• al_be_back 4y ago
  considering how massive & varied the MS ecosystem is, kinda surprised it works as well as it does tbh. for most biz/big orgs (MS bread-n-butter), good-enough pays the bills; non-functional requirements (speed, cool-factor etc) aren't much of a priority. It's easier for IT deps at mid-to-big corps already invested in MS, wins on price, and connects well with MS infra (office, security/auditing etc). With MS moving to Edge browser, their strategy looks interesting, and I think they will be solving much of their tech headaches (Teams, office etc) by shifting to mainly Web Technologies (even web3).
• glintik 4y ago
  Because it’s Microsoft, look at Skype, full of pain..
• EastSmith 4y ago
  Aren't all companies test for employee happiness (quarterly thing for us)? If we had teams thrown at us, we would for sure complain a lot.
• osigurdson 4y ago
  Honestly, I don't find it bad at all. It hardly ever crashes or drops connections and we use it a lot. My only beef is voice communication latency. It is definitely several hundred milliseconds - far worse than using a phone. This leads to very unnatural CB-radio type conversations (you almost need to say "over" when you are finished talking).
  • 4whaitsworth99 4y ago
    For what it's worth... I use teams all day for communication across all of the teams I work with in 3 different countries and have no latency issues. I agree with your assessment that it isn't bad though. I don't have any of the issues that everyone here is reporting. Everything just works, I can call any of the 1000s of people at our org and they can join effortlessly. I'd happily switch to whatever else to be less reliant on MS, but teams being bad isn't a valid argument in my mind.
    • osigurdson 4y ago
      I might be exaggerating a little. However, that is one thing that we noticed when back in the office post covid. Small group (5-8 people) conversations flowed better. In small groups, low latency is very important. It matters less with one on one conversations and is unimportant for large meetings. I want sub 50ms.
• jaimex2 4y ago
  You didnt need the word Teams in the title.
• osigurdson 4y ago
  I wonder if part of the problem is the team's OKRs always need to include some new feature since the existence (or lack thereof) is very concrete and measurable. Of course outside of Microsoft, no one notices these features and would rather have the software simply get faster and more reliable.
• joejag 4y ago
  I had the joy of helping with a Teams to replace Slack rollout at the start of the Pandemic. During which I had multiple meetings with Engineers and Product folks at MS. Two reasons struck out as significant problems. The first was that Teams is Skype and Sharepoint mashed together with duct tape. When you'd ask for improved UX, it would all fall to "Ah yes, the Sharepoint team would have to do X so the other team can do Y. They aren't built like that, though, so you cannot have it". Teams is not one product and will never feel that way. The second was scarier. I was trying to encourage communities of practice and having open communication by default, with some private rooms when needed. Like in Slack, you have multiple channels rather than disappearing into your own Team. Promoting openness was anathema to their Product people "Why would you want people to see what you say? Privacy is the default". I got the impression MS internally is not a safe space to speak, and Teams has that same cultural baggage.
  • jiggawatts 4y ago
    Another piece of cultural baggage is hiding the organisation of people in meetings. Large enterprises do this because they have subcontractors that they like to pretend aren't subcontractors. I'm a consultant invited to meetings in a customer's tenant with people from various subcontractors and vendors present. John: "So, what is your honest opinion about Andrew's statement?" Me: "I have no idea who you are or which org Andrew works for... so no opinion that I'd be willing to state."
  • nullwarp 4y ago
    The complete lack of being able to have offtopic/misc conversations has really sucked. When we had slack we had a channel specific to just chitchat and it was always active but very loose and fun. We now have a "Chit Chat" channel/team but it's so difficult to use in a natural way that now nobody uses it and now we have zero of it. As a purely remote worker it kinda sucks
  • prepend 4y ago
    > Promoting openness was anathema to their Product people "Why would you want people to see what you say? Privacy is the default". I got the impression MS internally is not a safe space to speak, and Teams has that same cultural baggage. This is really weird to me too and makes collaborating within an org difficult. One of the big advantages of teams should be that we’re all in the same org and get paid and background checked. So there’s a base level of identity. I can’t tag someone unless they are in a team. So yesterday I was in a thread in an R user group and couldn’t tag someone not in the group even though they had a relevant project. This was stupid. So I would have to ask him to join the team just to talk on this one thread. And that didn’t happen so the thread was worse off. That and the notifications are horrible and I have so many from the 30 teams I’m in (partly because of the above problem) I just ignore them. If someone IMs me, I don’t know it unless I manually go to the pain that shows notifications that is usually behind other meetings. I suspect no one at Microsoft uses Teams realistically. So it’s just full of met requirements on paper and not in reality.
• ricardobayes 4y ago
  It's actually getting worse and worse even on windows sadly. Meeting notifications are not working, and suddenly I have issues with audio which I never had before in two years. I need to unplug and plug my headphones for the mic to work.
• greggeter 4y ago
• darthrupert 4y ago
  This provides a neat datapoint when looking for a new job. If they chose Exchange365 as their office toolset, I can immediately ignore them.
• Havoc 4y ago
  I'm convinced Redmond is using Slack on macbooks internally. We're Microsoft hardware (surface line), Microsoft OS, and Microsoft software. You'd think things would work with that combo? Sleep is utterly broken, Excel crashes, snip works sometimes, audio levels are all over the place with teams doing its own thing separate from system, BT connections are unstable, teams is dog slow, Onenote search gives up with even smallish amounts of data saved I'm just not buying that MS is dogfooding this
  • typon 4y ago
    When I was working in Redmond I never used IE once.
    • jiggawatts 4y ago
      Famously the entire team working on the Windows 11 GUI uplift are Mac users. Explains a lot.
• brodouevencode 4y ago
  No one was ever fired for buying <strike>IBM</strike> <strike>Sun</strike> Microsoft
• therufa 4y ago
  it doesn't have to be good. it just has to be better than hipchat and webex
• neillyons 4y ago
  They talked about this on All-In Podcast this week [0]. Essentially Microsoft teams doesn't need to be "good" to compete with Slack or others. It just needs to exist and part of the Microsoft bundle to be a viable option to the decision makers in a company. [0]: https://youtu.be/_UpczzfeAFA?t=1099 https://youtu.be/_UpczzfeAFA?t=1099
• jiggawatts 4y ago
  If we're listing pet peeves, there's an infuriating one that Microsoft steadfastly refuses to fix: MFA re-authentication prompts that often occur in a middle of a meeting. Recently I was presenting to 30+ senior staff, and in the middle of my sentence Microsoft Teams decided to shove its virtual hand in my face and prompt me to AUTHENTICATE RIGHT NOW. Not after the meeting, not in idle time, no sir! Right now. This instant. Or your presentation to the CxOs is over, you hear me? Got it? Press the button on the phone, now. Press it. PRESS IT.
• helloworld97 4y ago
• petkeviciuz 4y ago
  I'm using teams on macbook (teams have been a default communication channel of client i'm working with). It's truly terrible. Thing I hate about it the most is that it is absolutely not working well with other OS features. In example, when I do development I like to put on a 'focus' mode. Every other notification would go to the notifications bar without bothering me, but NOT TEAMS, it would stick itself out and bang my ears with a notification sound just like it would with a hammer. Once you try something great (slack) you don't want to go back.
• LennyHenrysNuts 4y ago
  Disclaimer: I'm a long time Linux user, libre software evangelist and all round sandal wearer. When Teams first arrived, I was startled at how good it was. Great UI, good telephony and just did what it was meant to do. It worked well, and did what it said on the tin. I've watched it turn to shit over the last two years. Every update made it slower, buggier and more annoying. Surreptitious updates made me miss meetings as the background service on Android was stopped and never restarted after the update. What was once a pleasant surprise is now a horrific buggy PoS. Kill it with fire.
• thrownaway561 4y ago
  With all the problems with Teams, I would rather use it then Google Meet. At least with Teams you can request control of the presenters PC which make it great for doing support calls. Google Meet is sooooooo resource intensive that my entire machine goes to a crawl when I am on a call with more than 3 people (which is often). Not to mention that Teams is so integrated with Office 365. I love that whatever chat you have in a Teams meeting, you have in the Teams app unlike Meet which anything you place in chat is lost after the meeting. Teams might not be perfect by far, but it is light years better than anything in the enterprise right now.
• balefrost 4y ago
  > God forbid you try to change the audio device from speakers to headphones in the middle of a call. I've been using it for a couple of years, and I have never had this issue. I can switch between my built-in soundcard and my USB headset without any problems. On Windows FWIW.
• lbriner 4y ago
  I'm not sure I share the view that Teams is terrible although I do occasionally have problems but I think it does share a lot of traits with modern software that I will call "spongeware" because it feels spongy. Back in the day with pure desktop apps, you had crisp quick feedback when you clicked things, a window would open or be dismissed. It was hard to cause serious timing bugs because 1) Most things were written in code compiled to platform sdks and 2) Not much was network based 3) THe app worked more quickly than your clicking What happens when you add not only network, but app frameworks that feel more like browsers than desktop apps, you click things and it takes a second to spring back, you think you clicked a button but nothing happens so you click it again, maybe the app is sending telemtry back to base or maybe it is needlessly loading a dataset from the network instead of just a local dll. What does it add up to? 1,000,000 unrepeatable bugs based on random timings and lockups, based on people doing things they didn't realise like double-clicking at the same time that anti-virus is scanning the network or your internet provider is having a blip! There are still apps from the old-school like Notepad++ on Windows which feels solid and which auto-updates really easily instead of dynamically updating when you are trying to work but somehow they are not cool or don't tick the promise of "cross-platform development" which mostly means it's a bit crap on all platforms instead of great on one.
• irusensei 4y ago
  Teams is corpocrapware. Employer was using Skype for Business. I hated it. Had to install pipeline jobs to detect non-ascii crap that developers copy pasted from message chats. The text processor on Skype loves to convert quotes to curly quotes add some weird character that looks like a space but its some rich text aberration. When company announced it was moving to Teams I was very happy. We could finally ```exchange some code``` right? I'm not happy right now. Its slow, it hangs all the time, it makes a mess with audio devices and behaves erratically when copy-pasting text. Sometimes it copies what you select but most of the time it copies the whole message along with the metadata.Some people can still use Skype. When you send messages to those people it flattens out everything into a single paragraph. I suspect some of those issues might be caused by security crapware that the company implements on the locally installed Teams software. Doesn't change the fact that I kinda miss Skype now. I'd blame Electrum but vscode is kinda ok. Not my choice for editor but still not as terrible as Teams. Come on Microsoft. Discord which is a tool for gaming teenagers is miles ahead in usability and features. Slack lacks features but its a breeze to use. Even Element which is a company that probably has less than 5% of MS resources can output a decent product.
• sandos 4y ago
  I find it works extremely well. I can't remember a single crash, even though I started using it pretty early on in the pandemic, along with tens of thousands of other employees. It was clearly worse in 2020 though. Edit: I do hate one thing, no way to share part of the screen! When using an ultrawide I always have to resort to lowering my resolution to a lowest common denominator 1080p to avoid people not being able to read what I share. Sharing one app doesn't work since I switch applications too much and want to share them all.
• hiidrew 4y ago
  Teams is alright imo. But working on collaborative documents in other apps is brutal, especially compared to GDrive and Figma's experience. I guess there are little incentives for them to improve when they already have 100s of fortune 500 companies under contract.
• heraldlee 4y ago