7 ms·

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 b

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
      The managers that force this horseshit on they employees never used anything else before the pandemic. Suddenly they also had to use something with that function, already had Teams and now forced everyone to use it as a lowest common denominator. At least, that's my hypothesis. It's the preinstalled browser debacle all over again.
    - InitialLastName 4y ago
      Everybody I know has used Zoom at this point, and has thus seen what dead-simple and "just works" telecom software can be (not to mention FaceTime, which seems to revel in "your never-owned-a-computer grandparent is happy to use this").
      - mijoharas 4y ago
        If you think zoom "just works" I'm guessing you haven't seen the quagmire of poor decisions masquerading as code that is zoom on the Linux desktop. Still better than teams though. (With the caveat that it's only useable on Chrome).
        anakaine 4y ago
        I use Teams in enterprise, and Zoom for college. At this point I pretty firmly believe Zoom is hot garbage. Teams syncs with Outlook, and basically every org I interacts with uses Outlook and has Office365 at this point. Teams hasn't been crashy, is responsive, doesn't eat memory, etc. At this point I personally cannot point to why there is so much hate for Teams. Either that or my organisation is doing something well to make it work well.
        tom_ 4y ago
        It works pretty well for us in these respects too. The chat is fucking useless though. We use Slack for that.
      - matwood 4y ago
        Dead simple is something like Meet. Click a link and you're on a video call with nothing to install. On iOS, FaceTime is also great. Zoom is a dumpster fire.
- encryptluks2 4y ago
  I think it also has to do with how much money Microsoft is kicking back to the right people in those companies to evangelize Microsoft despite knowing that it sucks.
  - Qem 4y ago
    In Africa they even fired a employee that discovered a kickback scheme, when he tried to scale the matter up to Satya Nadella: https://www.engadget.com/whistleblower-says-microsoft-spent-millions-on-bribes-in-africa-and-the-middle-east-002428556.html https://www.engadget.com/whistleblower-says-microsoft-spent-...
    - encryptluks2 4y ago
      I've known about it and seen it happen but rarely do you get enough evidence to do anything about it. It appears when you do then Microsoft will just fire you and put out a public statement pretending that something will change.
- insane_dreamer 4y ago
  It's not only the cost, but it's having to deal with another vendor and maintain another system, interoperability, security, access, etc.
- twobitshifter 4y ago
  right and it’s integrated with Sharepoint, Outlook and OneDrive.
  - oneplane 4y ago
    And those are in the same boat as Teams: it came with the bundle. (well, one could argue that plenty of people enjoy Outlook, but OneDrive is nothing special and SharePoint is just a bad Wiki going the SAP integration hell route)
    - BuckRogers 4y ago
      I use OneDrive as my cloud storage provider. To me cloud storage from the top-tier vendors seem to work well enough at this point. I probably would’ve used Google Drive, but once I learned they take it out of your Gmail storage space I declined. To Microsoft’s credit, your OneDrive storage space does not come out of your app Outlook email storage.
      - oneplane 4y ago
        Yeah, they are all pretty similar. The storage usage is probably due to Google's gigantic user base, or perhaps due to their tenancy model (i.e. you get a 'google account' that also contains 'storage' instead of the other way around). While some features like versioning and sharing and mail integration vary, nearly all of the 'big' ones do the same thing (OneDrive, iCloud, Google Drive, Dropbox, even box.com and MEGA to some extent). Ironically, this sameness might actually be a good thing, as it makes it a bit more interchangeable (well, if we ignore the variety in native integrations), it would be pretty bad if there were significant missing features between them.
        BuckRogers 4y ago
        I do still keep my Dropbox because it has better sharing features. But I only use that with my wife and we haven’t used it to collaborate since she finished her Masters degree. If anyone has the edge with features, it probably is them. Some of the lesser known names I have accounts worth as well, but they’ve had sketchier history with storage issues. OneDrive simply gave me the most space for free, and I usually pimp myself out to the highest bidder.
- SkyPuncher 4y ago
  I think it goes beyond just the licensing fee. It makes compliance/on-boarding significantly easier to have everything bundled. If you're using Exchange/Office, you've already vetted Microsoft for your use case.
- Fomite 4y ago
  This. We asked about non-Teams alternatives, and were told we'd be responsible for hosting and maintaining anything else we chose by our IT department, and that was the end of that conversation.
- cyberge99 4y ago
  I think Teams also offers more capabilities to Enterprise users. I’ve been on a few teams calls with people on the call that are not visible in the attendee list.
  - lancebeet 4y ago
    I have also experienced this but I'm quite sure that it was a bug in my cases. Is this actually a service they offer?
- tlrobinson 4y ago
  Good summary of this on the All In Podcast last week (in the context of Adobe buying Figma) https://youtu.be/_UpczzfeAFA?t=1162 https://youtu.be/_UpczzfeAFA?t=1162
- c4ptnjack 4y ago
  I work for an outsourced tech company supporting a large system of hospitals in the NE USA. In my team of 50+ people, the last 2 years since starting this contract have been steady transition to using Teams for all communications. They are now moving to use it for scheduling as well with it being integrated with the rest of the Office suite. Moreover, the entire hospital system uses it as the defacto means of communication. This makes it incredibly easy to connect with any of the thousands of employees we have immediately in a lot ways. I don't like Teams or the office suite whatsoever. However, I think the real secret to their sauce is simple: > Ecosystem integration > Cram every feature possible into each product Those two things alone can makeup for all the deficiencies in Microsoft's products within the marketplace. Their software may be clunky, buggy, and terrible to use but if you have those two factors it will stay dominant imo.
- shafyy 4y ago
  Bingo. That's the simple and real answer. They invest heavily in sales and lock in big corporates into their ecosystem. Now, they don't have any incentive than to go the extra mile for somehting like Teams. I think it will hurt them in the long run, but in the short term, it's quite profitable probably.
Kukumber 4y ago
For this reason the US military said NO to Microsoft [1] The more the deep state (nothing about conspiracy theory, it's just the people at the oval office, and their surroundings, mostly industry lobby) want to trust and push Microsoft, the worse it's going to get in the coming years were AI, software and hardware will be the deciding factor for the civilization war we are currently living > Microsoft insiders worry the Pentagon may walk away from its $22 billion contract for mixed-reality goggles as the device continues to disappoint the military [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-military-hololens-contract-soldiers-test-2022-3?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-military-hololens-...
- encryptluks2 4y ago
  Lol.. we all know Microsoft gets these contracts by rubbing shoulders with the right people and they have very little to do with whether the products are actually good.
- ineedasername 4y ago
  We need another less polarized word than deep state to describe the various industrial complexes entrenched in military & government, and the revolving door of employment between government -> lobbyists -> industry etc.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    Or we need to stop banning words because people we don't like start using them (correctly, I might add.) It's annoying that once some people started saying that the country was run by a deep state populated by communist lizard child molesters, the reaction was to start insisting that there wasn't a deep state at all. Maybe we can say military-industrial complex? Nice, venerable, well-established phrase, notably popularized by a president during his final words as a president.
    - troutwine 4y ago
      > Or we need to stop banning words because people we don't like start using them (correctly, I might add.) Who is banning words? At least in the US you have every right to say 'deep state' all you want but it probably doesn't mean in other people's minds what you might want anymore. I mean, it's the way of language evolution that when a phrase picks up a much different and negative connotation from what it had previously people stop using it.
ineedasername 4y ago
The “just good enough” doesn’t always work out for MS. We Teams as part of whatever bundle MS pushes for OS, Office etc, but no one uses Teams, we use zoom. A few people use slack, but it’s not pervasive. If it wasn’t so buggy and non-performant, does it offer any other advantages or “killer features” by virtue of tighter integration to the MS ecosystem?
drewpayment 4y ago
I agree for the most part except the lack of stability and resiliency. I joined a company using Teams 3 months ago and there has been at least one global outage once a month… that’s 3 more outages than I experienced with Slack for the last 2 years or more maybe?
crystaln 4y ago
For the record, have you actually eaten at Olive Garden recently? Their food is actually pretty fantastic. Some of the best Chicken Parm. Definitely better than Teams. Please don’t insult Olive Garden like this.
- prepend 4y ago
  No. No, this is not true. I think Olive Garden’s food is about parity with Stouffer’s chicken parm. Any bad Italian restaurant microwaving stuff is better than Olive Garden. I like their breadsticks but everything else should not be eaten by humans.

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
    The managers that force this horseshit on they employees never used anything else before the pandemic. Suddenly they also had to use something with that function, already had Teams and now forced everyone to use it as a lowest common denominator. At least, that's my hypothesis. It's the preinstalled browser debacle all over again.
  - InitialLastName 4y ago
    Everybody I know has used Zoom at this point, and has thus seen what dead-simple and "just works" telecom software can be (not to mention FaceTime, which seems to revel in "your never-owned-a-computer grandparent is happy to use this").
    - mijoharas 4y ago
      If you think zoom "just works" I'm guessing you haven't seen the quagmire of poor decisions masquerading as code that is zoom on the Linux desktop. Still better than teams though. (With the caveat that it's only useable on Chrome).
      - anakaine 4y ago
        I use Teams in enterprise, and Zoom for college. At this point I pretty firmly believe Zoom is hot garbage. Teams syncs with Outlook, and basically every org I interacts with uses Outlook and has Office365 at this point. Teams hasn't been crashy, is responsive, doesn't eat memory, etc. At this point I personally cannot point to why there is so much hate for Teams. Either that or my organisation is doing something well to make it work well.
        tom_ 4y ago
        It works pretty well for us in these respects too. The chat is fucking useless though. We use Slack for that.
    - matwood 4y ago
      Dead simple is something like Meet. Click a link and you're on a video call with nothing to install. On iOS, FaceTime is also great. Zoom is a dumpster fire.
encryptluks2 4y ago
I think it also has to do with how much money Microsoft is kicking back to the right people in those companies to evangelize Microsoft despite knowing that it sucks.
- Qem 4y ago
  In Africa they even fired a employee that discovered a kickback scheme, when he tried to scale the matter up to Satya Nadella: https://www.engadget.com/whistleblower-says-microsoft-spent-millions-on-bribes-in-africa-and-the-middle-east-002428556.html https://www.engadget.com/whistleblower-says-microsoft-spent-...
  - encryptluks2 4y ago
    I've known about it and seen it happen but rarely do you get enough evidence to do anything about it. It appears when you do then Microsoft will just fire you and put out a public statement pretending that something will change.
insane_dreamer 4y ago
It's not only the cost, but it's having to deal with another vendor and maintain another system, interoperability, security, access, etc.
twobitshifter 4y ago
right and it’s integrated with Sharepoint, Outlook and OneDrive.
- oneplane 4y ago
  And those are in the same boat as Teams: it came with the bundle. (well, one could argue that plenty of people enjoy Outlook, but OneDrive is nothing special and SharePoint is just a bad Wiki going the SAP integration hell route)
  - BuckRogers 4y ago
    I use OneDrive as my cloud storage provider. To me cloud storage from the top-tier vendors seem to work well enough at this point. I probably would’ve used Google Drive, but once I learned they take it out of your Gmail storage space I declined. To Microsoft’s credit, your OneDrive storage space does not come out of your app Outlook email storage.
    - oneplane 4y ago
      Yeah, they are all pretty similar. The storage usage is probably due to Google's gigantic user base, or perhaps due to their tenancy model (i.e. you get a 'google account' that also contains 'storage' instead of the other way around). While some features like versioning and sharing and mail integration vary, nearly all of the 'big' ones do the same thing (OneDrive, iCloud, Google Drive, Dropbox, even box.com and MEGA to some extent). Ironically, this sameness might actually be a good thing, as it makes it a bit more interchangeable (well, if we ignore the variety in native integrations), it would be pretty bad if there were significant missing features between them.
      - BuckRogers 4y ago
        I do still keep my Dropbox because it has better sharing features. But I only use that with my wife and we haven’t used it to collaborate since she finished her Masters degree. If anyone has the edge with features, it probably is them. Some of the lesser known names I have accounts worth as well, but they’ve had sketchier history with storage issues. OneDrive simply gave me the most space for free, and I usually pimp myself out to the highest bidder.
SkyPuncher 4y ago
I think it goes beyond just the licensing fee. It makes compliance/on-boarding significantly easier to have everything bundled. If you're using Exchange/Office, you've already vetted Microsoft for your use case.
Fomite 4y ago
This. We asked about non-Teams alternatives, and were told we'd be responsible for hosting and maintaining anything else we chose by our IT department, and that was the end of that conversation.
cyberge99 4y ago
I think Teams also offers more capabilities to Enterprise users. I’ve been on a few teams calls with people on the call that are not visible in the attendee list.
- lancebeet 4y ago
  I have also experienced this but I'm quite sure that it was a bug in my cases. Is this actually a service they offer?
tlrobinson 4y ago
Good summary of this on the All In Podcast last week (in the context of Adobe buying Figma) https://youtu.be/_UpczzfeAFA?t=1162 https://youtu.be/_UpczzfeAFA?t=1162
c4ptnjack 4y ago
I work for an outsourced tech company supporting a large system of hospitals in the NE USA. In my team of 50+ people, the last 2 years since starting this contract have been steady transition to using Teams for all communications. They are now moving to use it for scheduling as well with it being integrated with the rest of the Office suite. Moreover, the entire hospital system uses it as the defacto means of communication. This makes it incredibly easy to connect with any of the thousands of employees we have immediately in a lot ways. I don't like Teams or the office suite whatsoever. However, I think the real secret to their sauce is simple: > Ecosystem integration > Cram every feature possible into each product Those two things alone can makeup for all the deficiencies in Microsoft's products within the marketplace. Their software may be clunky, buggy, and terrible to use but if you have those two factors it will stay dominant imo.
shafyy 4y ago
Bingo. That's the simple and real answer. They invest heavily in sales and lock in big corporates into their ecosystem. Now, they don't have any incentive than to go the extra mile for somehting like Teams. I think it will hurt them in the long run, but in the short term, it's quite profitable probably.

Kukumber 4y ago

For this reason the US military said NO to Microsoft [1] The more the deep state (nothing about conspiracy theory, it's just the people at the oval office, and their surroundings, mostly industry lobby) want to trust and push Microsoft, the worse it's going to get in the coming years were AI, software and hardware will be the deciding factor for the civilization war we are currently living > Microsoft insiders worry the Pentagon may walk away from its $22 billion contract for mixed-reality goggles as the device continues to disappoint the military [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-military-hololens-contract-soldiers-test-2022-3?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-military-hololens-...

encryptluks2 4y ago
Lol.. we all know Microsoft gets these contracts by rubbing shoulders with the right people and they have very little to do with whether the products are actually good.
ineedasername 4y ago
We need another less polarized word than deep state to describe the various industrial complexes entrenched in military & government, and the revolving door of employment between government -> lobbyists -> industry etc.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  Or we need to stop banning words because people we don't like start using them (correctly, I might add.) It's annoying that once some people started saying that the country was run by a deep state populated by communist lizard child molesters, the reaction was to start insisting that there wasn't a deep state at all. Maybe we can say military-industrial complex? Nice, venerable, well-established phrase, notably popularized by a president during his final words as a president.
  - troutwine 4y ago
    > Or we need to stop banning words because people we don't like start using them (correctly, I might add.) Who is banning words? At least in the US you have every right to say 'deep state' all you want but it probably doesn't mean in other people's minds what you might want anymore. I mean, it's the way of language evolution that when a phrase picks up a much different and negative connotation from what it had previously people stop using it.

ineedasername 4y ago

The “just good enough” doesn’t always work out for MS. We Teams as part of whatever bundle MS pushes for OS, Office etc, but no one uses Teams, we use zoom. A few people use slack, but it’s not pervasive. If it wasn’t so buggy and non-performant, does it offer any other advantages or “killer features” by virtue of tighter integration to the MS ecosystem?

drewpayment 4y ago

I agree for the most part except the lack of stability and resiliency. I joined a company using Teams 3 months ago and there has been at least one global outage once a month… that’s 3 more outages than I experienced with Slack for the last 2 years or more maybe?

crystaln 4y ago

For the record, have you actually eaten at Olive Garden recently? Their food is actually pretty fantastic. Some of the best Chicken Parm. Definitely better than Teams. Please don’t insult Olive Garden like this.

prepend 4y ago
No. No, this is not true. I think Olive Garden’s food is about parity with Stouffer’s chicken parm. Any bad Italian restaurant microwaving stuff is better than Olive Garden. I like their breadsticks but everything else should not be eaten by humans.