11 ms·

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 Mi

by 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.
planede 4y ago
Also "we are paying for O365 already, we get Teams for free*".
- blodkorv 4y ago
  This is the real reason why my company uses teams. Its really hard to motivate the cost of slack when you already are paying for teams.
- Ajunne 4y ago
  This. And the second reason is "We have KPI's with Microsoft about teams: they guarantee that it works in x% of the time, and they guarantee that it complies with our security guidelines". Notably the security is something that can never be beaten by any other application, be it on of off premises. No matter how brilliant it is. It can never beat Teams, because Teams is "good enough" and "free" at the same time.
- vegai_ 4y ago
  Yep, and the logical conclusion would be to stop paying for O365.
  - blodkorv 4y ago
    There are no real alternatives to office-365 for a majority of the companies out there.
    - vegai_ 4y ago
      What does Google Workspace lack for a majority of companies?
      - blodkorv 4y ago
        On the top of my head, excel and all the features it has. There are probarbly lots of other things. But if Googl Workspace works then good for you. I just know there are tonnes of companies out there that just cant live without MS-Office
k_sze 4y ago
This. Can we use anti-trust laws to break it up?
- ekianjo 4y ago
  Do calculator software devs ask for anti trust laws when someone includes a calculator in their software suite?
  - Kye 4y ago
    Considering Microsoft got hit by the DOJ for this kind of bundling, yes. They've had to be very careful about including things in Windows.
- i_am_jl 4y ago
  It'd be hard to argue that MS has a monopoly on real time collaboration software when Slack exists. It'd be similarly difficult to argue they're acting anti-competitively when Slack is thriving.
  - sumedh 4y ago
    > Slack is thriving. Is Slack profitable?
    - i_am_jl 4y ago
      $780m profit in 2021.
  - trelane 4y ago
    I think usually the argument is that they're leveraging an _existing_ foothold to gain advantage in a _new_ market. So the existing foothold is MS Office and MS Office 360, and the new market is messaging. How they gained this foothold in desktop productivity software is left as an exercise to the reader.
    - i_am_jl 4y ago
kylen 4y ago
Yup. It might even be that while the engineering team is aware of the faults, the MS exec team considers Teams to be brilliant. At the senior level the role becomes a sales role - you are continuously selling your output, team, product, vision, etc internally to the other execs, board, etc. It's important therefore to present whatever you are producing as exceptional. So you look for indicators that support your pitch. Sales and forecasts are far more important than product. Product is only as important as far as it directly impacts these numbers. And with channels / vertical integration / brand like MS, a core tool like Teams is almost a guaranteed success on these metrics as long as the product kinda works. And then it's very easy to fall into the trap of buying into your own pitch. When you are continuously repeating how great the product is you begin believe it and ignore criticism, including public opinion. "What matters is the markets opinion not the publics opinion and Teams has huge market share". So MS execs likely believe Teams to be brilliant, which is probably partly why there isn't the internal urgency to fix the issues. Also - its a golden goose! Its good enough, generates tons of revenue and fills a strategic product gap. Why take a big risk and refactor it? This could be a disaster. Takes a very brave, product focused leader to push on despite the above.
- apecat 4y ago
  Was looking for a good place to post this in the thread but I'll just drop it here. Microsoft Teams still lacks multi-account support on desktop. As in, you can't sign on to several business organizations like you can in Slack. It's so dumb and disqualifying. Utter nightmare if you work with several organizations. https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/idea/c9995dc8-811a-ed11-b83e-000d3a4d9c20 https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/idea/c9995dc8-... I've bookmarked that page and I check in on it regularly, as Microsoft claims multi-account support is due for late 2022.
  - motherfscker 4y ago
    The fun part is that this functionality already has been added to teams (for over a year now), it’s just disabled and hidden by default. Might be worth enabling it if you use multiple orgs. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams/tracking-down-the-blueberry-in-microsoft-teams/td-p/1935568 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams/track...
treeman79 4y ago
I recall decades ago picking up a book on J++ as a teenager. I quickly realized the entire point of the language was to sabotage Java. Not to be useful. Refused to use windows for rest of career after that.
- pc86 4y ago
  Ok
mfer 4y ago
If the software works well but isn’t compliant with laws a lot of companies will have issues with it. There are a bunch of regulations these days. GDPR is just one of them. A lot of tools are just not compliant. IT departments have to take those into account. Especially at public companies. Microsoft does a good job at that and tends to make it easy for the IT departments, too
- jupp0r 4y ago
  There are plenty of large public companies not using Teams. I always found this to be a strange argument.
- f1refly 4y ago
  It's illegal to transfer PII to microsoft under GDPR though, so wouldn't it be like setting up a minefield for your employees to consciously choose ms teams for daily communications?
  - dachryn 4y ago
    no its not illegal, it just needs a lot of lawyers to workout the details. GDPR does not block a lot of things, it only requires you to work out the proper procedures and paperwork. And that is where Microsoft is good at, the compliance support.
    - f1refly 4y ago
      How is is not illegal? The details are basically "PII EU resident data cannot be given to companies falling under legislation of governments not following due process regarding access of PII belonging to those residents" + "The US government regards itself above anything else and does not follow due process when accessing PII of EU citicens stored on premise of companies falling under its legislation" => "EU law does not allow transfer of EU residents PII to US companies". There's no "proper procedures" when it comes to protecting data stored by US companies from the US government.
      - 4y ago
dustedcodes 4y ago
Someone should make job board where people can filter out companies that use Teams instead of Slack or Discord.
- jupp0r 4y ago
  Throw JIRA into the mix while you're on it.
  - b0afc375b5 4y ago
    Wait, what's wrong with JIRA?
    - muzani 4y ago
      Jira doesn't really work well out of the box. It needs a lot of work to configure. I love Jira now, but it's been hell in the other startups. It's probably why stuff like Trello and Asana took off.
    - gsich 4y ago
      Atlassian is an asshole company for their stance against selfhosting it.
      - alrlroipsp 4y ago
        What stance? You simply purchase a license and selfhost it. See https://www.atlassian.com/migration/assess/compare-cloud-data-center https://www.atlassian.com/migration/assess/compare-cloud-dat...
        gsich 4y ago
        Maybe for insane prices. But that too will go away.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        4y ago
sokoloff 4y ago
That sounds a lot like Sharepoint’s story as well.
bko 4y ago
This is a bad answer. It's actually a non-answer. You can apply this to a lot of questions. Why does X ... Y (because X can get away with it). There are real resources behind Microsoft Teams and a lot of people want it to be good. They may not get much of a signal about how well their product is doing compared to competitors because lock-in effects, but I can guarantee you the product managers and executives at Microsoft want the product to work well.
- sumedh 4y ago
  > but I can guarantee you the product managers and executives at Microsoft want the product to work well. MS cannot even work out there messenger strategy properly. We have/had MSN messenger, Skype, Skype for business, Lync and now Teams. What makes you think the execs in MS really care about messaging?
  - another2another 4y ago
    That they have so many products ? :)
- apecat 4y ago
  I understand why this sounds like a bad answer, but it's not half-bad in context. Microsoft 365 absolutely is something of a buffet for companies/orgs with IT budget constraints and compliance-heavy objectives. Just more stuff that sort of works and ticks boxes, starting with hosting almost everything in the EU for European customers. Compare that to Google, who flat-out refuses to guarantee EU-only hosting for Workspace customer. All the bundled extra tools outside e-mail and the absolute core M365 Office apps just sit there, ready to use, easy to package and deploy to clients. All generated user data is stored in the MS environment every stakeholder has signed on to. From OneNote, MS Todo to Teams, everything's integrated without as much as configuring SSO externally. A lot of what's included, Teams specifically, is shockingly bad. But these elements tick very important boxes. And very few people seem to care about the rest. UX isn't a compliance-mandated requirement. I sort of know this, as I work at a company that has to punch above its weight in compliance, due to industry specific requirements. If you need good single-sign-on for Slack, you end up paying the now Salesforce-owned company over USD 10/month, just for Slack. If you want decent data retention controls for Slack, you need their Enterprise Grid plan, the price of which is unlisted, but I've heard it's like USD 25/month/user(!). Just for Slack. Same with Atlassian. The decent handful of dollars you pay per user only applies if you're ok with shockingly limited controls. With Microsoft, you get a lot for just buying M365. You can get started building a soundly logged and controlled environment if you put everyone on M365 Business Premium (including desktop apps) and/or F3 licenses (web/mobile apps only) for about 20 and 10 dollars respectively. Sure, you do pay through the nose for the really good logging capabilities with M365 E5 licensing, something close to USD50 per user/month, which is a lot, but it also includes everything from Defender antivirus, InTune device management, Teams telephony call-in support to a Windows Enterprise client license. There's so much included with M365 in terms of compliance and bundle value that Microsoft absolutely can leave it absolutely terrible UX condition, so they do.
hackeraccount 4y ago
Do you think that helps Teams or not? I mean, if you can make a shitty product and know that it will sell, why make a good one? If you know you have to make a good product to get sales then that's what you'll do. Shouldn't there be a level where some people will find the pain of the shittiness so great that they'll step outside of the Microsoft ecosystem whereas other people will accept the shit in exchange for the ease of staying inside the Microsoft ecosystem. If that's true - and I don't know if it is - it seems like the leg up that Teams gets for being part of Microsoft doesn't help nearly so much as it should. Though truthfully in order to compete with Microsoft's entrenchment you don't just need "not shitty" you need a product that's got something going for it that's weirdly compelling. See Linux on servers or Google Chrome on the desktop.
- pydry 4y ago
  >Shouldn't there be a level where some people will find the pain of the shittiness so great that they'll step outside of the Microsoft ecosystem whereas other people will accept the shit in exchange for the ease of staying inside the Microsoft ecosystem. This happened at a company I worked at. There was practically a war between IT support trying desperately to force people to use Teams and the people who had picked up Zoom and quite liked it trying to stay using it. After a grace period where IT pleaded, whinged and begged, the Windows laptops were ultimately locked down such that zoom couldn't be installed or run at all and everybody was finally shifted on to Teams. This was all done in the name of security, citing such high profile transgressions "Zoom's end to end encryption isn't working as advertised!" and "omg zoombombing sometimes happens if you don't password protect your room!" were cited. Stories like this were circling the news at that time. Later on when Teams was bludgeoned by several zero days that were orders of magnitude worse, nobody batted an eye of course, and that story didn't get much airtime. Microsoft had its claws deep into that company. I suspect they have a pretty good PR team as well.
brightball 4y ago
Along the same lines, Googles Chat and Spaces are really close to becoming “good enough” that you don’t need Slack. Their threading setup is awful and they desperately need to let admins set sane defaults for notification sounds, do not disturb hours, etc. But aside from that it’s really close to being a good enough chat option that Slack doesn’t feel necessary. Google Meet is already good. Gmail is excellent and the calendaring system is best in class. They fix the chat UX issues and it’s going to be interesting.
- choko 4y ago
  I don't trust Google to not kill features and products on which I would come to depend.
- whatarethembits 4y ago
  No matter how good Google chat gets, it’s inevitable that Google will kill it sooner or later. It’s a non starter.
w0m 4y ago
While this is true - you have to look at the competitive space also (not just Slack). My previous employer forced us on a hosted HipChat. Absolute garbage. laggy; crashed often (sometime taking down my host) and worst of all randomly deleted chat history - so if someone sent you something (important) you may or may not be able to reference it later. Absolute garbage. Left that company (a fortune 50) ~roughly when Teams began rolling out, and my coworkers complained to no end (Slack -> Teams migration happened roughly when i joined). I still complain about Teams - but outside of raw IRC Teams is by far the best messaging App I've used at work. (I do also run slack/discord for personal groups/projects, though nothing at crazy scale).
thereddaikon 4y ago
I think its unfair to say the real customers of IT are regulators and auditors. But meeting their requirements is legally mandated. You have to meet that standard. In an imperfect world with deadlines, overhead, and limited resources that's sometimes all you can hope for. As for Teams being awful. It has problems. But all non native desktop apps do and that includes Slack and Discord. I use both Teams and Discord daily and they are about equal in frustration.
belter 4y ago
The most basic of features, like freezing the screen while switching context in a presentation, is not available. A request for years by all users and available like for ever, in GotoMeeting or Webex. https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msteams/forum/all/freeze-screen-in-ms-teams/2e03bc59-0e45-4cfd-a398-cd90ab0593cc https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msteams/forum/all/freeze... https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msteams/forum/all/pausing-screenshare-in-teams-meeting/7bd13939-cf24-4b06-918b-4ea2e0b03764 https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msteams/forum/all/pausin... https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/tech-community-ideas/freeze-option-in-teams-while-presenting-screen/idi-p/2141573 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/tech-community-ideas/... Thinking about it, what offers from Microsoft are not used just because somebody must use it...Or their company got it for free?

by zmmmmm 4y ago

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.

planede 4y ago

Also "we are paying for O365 already, we get Teams for free*".

blodkorv 4y ago
This is the real reason why my company uses teams. Its really hard to motivate the cost of slack when you already are paying for teams.
Ajunne 4y ago
This. And the second reason is "We have KPI's with Microsoft about teams: they guarantee that it works in x% of the time, and they guarantee that it complies with our security guidelines". Notably the security is something that can never be beaten by any other application, be it on of off premises. No matter how brilliant it is. It can never beat Teams, because Teams is "good enough" and "free" at the same time.
vegai_ 4y ago
Yep, and the logical conclusion would be to stop paying for O365.
- blodkorv 4y ago
  There are no real alternatives to office-365 for a majority of the companies out there.
  - vegai_ 4y ago
    What does Google Workspace lack for a majority of companies?
    - blodkorv 4y ago
      On the top of my head, excel and all the features it has. There are probarbly lots of other things. But if Googl Workspace works then good for you. I just know there are tonnes of companies out there that just cant live without MS-Office

k_sze 4y ago

This. Can we use anti-trust laws to break it up?

ekianjo 4y ago
Do calculator software devs ask for anti trust laws when someone includes a calculator in their software suite?
- Kye 4y ago
  Considering Microsoft got hit by the DOJ for this kind of bundling, yes. They've had to be very careful about including things in Windows.
i_am_jl 4y ago
It'd be hard to argue that MS has a monopoly on real time collaboration software when Slack exists. It'd be similarly difficult to argue they're acting anti-competitively when Slack is thriving.
- sumedh 4y ago
  > Slack is thriving. Is Slack profitable?
  - i_am_jl 4y ago
    $780m profit in 2021.
- trelane 4y ago
  I think usually the argument is that they're leveraging an _existing_ foothold to gain advantage in a _new_ market. So the existing foothold is MS Office and MS Office 360, and the new market is messaging. How they gained this foothold in desktop productivity software is left as an exercise to the reader.
  - i_am_jl 4y ago

kylen 4y ago

Yup. It might even be that while the engineering team is aware of the faults, the MS exec team considers Teams to be brilliant. At the senior level the role becomes a sales role - you are continuously selling your output, team, product, vision, etc internally to the other execs, board, etc. It's important therefore to present whatever you are producing as exceptional. So you look for indicators that support your pitch. Sales and forecasts are far more important than product. Product is only as important as far as it directly impacts these numbers. And with channels / vertical integration / brand like MS, a core tool like Teams is almost a guaranteed success on these metrics as long as the product kinda works. And then it's very easy to fall into the trap of buying into your own pitch. When you are continuously repeating how great the product is you begin believe it and ignore criticism, including public opinion. "What matters is the markets opinion not the publics opinion and Teams has huge market share". So MS execs likely believe Teams to be brilliant, which is probably partly why there isn't the internal urgency to fix the issues. Also - its a golden goose! Its good enough, generates tons of revenue and fills a strategic product gap. Why take a big risk and refactor it? This could be a disaster. Takes a very brave, product focused leader to push on despite the above.

apecat 4y ago
Was looking for a good place to post this in the thread but I'll just drop it here. Microsoft Teams still lacks multi-account support on desktop. As in, you can't sign on to several business organizations like you can in Slack. It's so dumb and disqualifying. Utter nightmare if you work with several organizations. https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/idea/c9995dc8-811a-ed11-b83e-000d3a4d9c20 https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/idea/c9995dc8-... I've bookmarked that page and I check in on it regularly, as Microsoft claims multi-account support is due for late 2022.
- motherfscker 4y ago
  The fun part is that this functionality already has been added to teams (for over a year now), it’s just disabled and hidden by default. Might be worth enabling it if you use multiple orgs. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams/tracking-down-the-blueberry-in-microsoft-teams/td-p/1935568 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams/track...

treeman79 4y ago

I recall decades ago picking up a book on J++ as a teenager. I quickly realized the entire point of the language was to sabotage Java. Not to be useful. Refused to use windows for rest of career after that.

pc86 4y ago
Ok

mfer 4y ago

If the software works well but isn’t compliant with laws a lot of companies will have issues with it. There are a bunch of regulations these days. GDPR is just one of them. A lot of tools are just not compliant. IT departments have to take those into account. Especially at public companies. Microsoft does a good job at that and tends to make it easy for the IT departments, too

jupp0r 4y ago
There are plenty of large public companies not using Teams. I always found this to be a strange argument.
f1refly 4y ago
It's illegal to transfer PII to microsoft under GDPR though, so wouldn't it be like setting up a minefield for your employees to consciously choose ms teams for daily communications?
- dachryn 4y ago
  no its not illegal, it just needs a lot of lawyers to workout the details. GDPR does not block a lot of things, it only requires you to work out the proper procedures and paperwork. And that is where Microsoft is good at, the compliance support.
  - f1refly 4y ago
    How is is not illegal? The details are basically "PII EU resident data cannot be given to companies falling under legislation of governments not following due process regarding access of PII belonging to those residents" + "The US government regards itself above anything else and does not follow due process when accessing PII of EU citicens stored on premise of companies falling under its legislation" => "EU law does not allow transfer of EU residents PII to US companies". There's no "proper procedures" when it comes to protecting data stored by US companies from the US government.
    - 4y ago

dustedcodes 4y ago

Someone should make job board where people can filter out companies that use Teams instead of Slack or Discord.

jupp0r 4y ago
Throw JIRA into the mix while you're on it.
- b0afc375b5 4y ago
  Wait, what's wrong with JIRA?
  - muzani 4y ago
    Jira doesn't really work well out of the box. It needs a lot of work to configure. I love Jira now, but it's been hell in the other startups. It's probably why stuff like Trello and Asana took off.
  - gsich 4y ago
    Atlassian is an asshole company for their stance against selfhosting it.
    - alrlroipsp 4y ago
      What stance? You simply purchase a license and selfhost it. See https://www.atlassian.com/migration/assess/compare-cloud-data-center https://www.atlassian.com/migration/assess/compare-cloud-dat...
      - gsich 4y ago
        Maybe for insane prices. But that too will go away.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - 4y ago

sokoloff 4y ago

That sounds a lot like Sharepoint’s story as well.

bko 4y ago

This is a bad answer. It's actually a non-answer. You can apply this to a lot of questions. Why does X ... Y (because X can get away with it). There are real resources behind Microsoft Teams and a lot of people want it to be good. They may not get much of a signal about how well their product is doing compared to competitors because lock-in effects, but I can guarantee you the product managers and executives at Microsoft want the product to work well.

sumedh 4y ago
> but I can guarantee you the product managers and executives at Microsoft want the product to work well. MS cannot even work out there messenger strategy properly. We have/had MSN messenger, Skype, Skype for business, Lync and now Teams. What makes you think the execs in MS really care about messaging?
- another2another 4y ago
  That they have so many products ? :)
apecat 4y ago
I understand why this sounds like a bad answer, but it's not half-bad in context. Microsoft 365 absolutely is something of a buffet for companies/orgs with IT budget constraints and compliance-heavy objectives. Just more stuff that sort of works and ticks boxes, starting with hosting almost everything in the EU for European customers. Compare that to Google, who flat-out refuses to guarantee EU-only hosting for Workspace customer. All the bundled extra tools outside e-mail and the absolute core M365 Office apps just sit there, ready to use, easy to package and deploy to clients. All generated user data is stored in the MS environment every stakeholder has signed on to. From OneNote, MS Todo to Teams, everything's integrated without as much as configuring SSO externally. A lot of what's included, Teams specifically, is shockingly bad. But these elements tick very important boxes. And very few people seem to care about the rest. UX isn't a compliance-mandated requirement. I sort of know this, as I work at a company that has to punch above its weight in compliance, due to industry specific requirements. If you need good single-sign-on for Slack, you end up paying the now Salesforce-owned company over USD 10/month, just for Slack. If you want decent data retention controls for Slack, you need their Enterprise Grid plan, the price of which is unlisted, but I've heard it's like USD 25/month/user(!). Just for Slack. Same with Atlassian. The decent handful of dollars you pay per user only applies if you're ok with shockingly limited controls. With Microsoft, you get a lot for just buying M365. You can get started building a soundly logged and controlled environment if you put everyone on M365 Business Premium (including desktop apps) and/or F3 licenses (web/mobile apps only) for about 20 and 10 dollars respectively. Sure, you do pay through the nose for the really good logging capabilities with M365 E5 licensing, something close to USD50 per user/month, which is a lot, but it also includes everything from Defender antivirus, InTune device management, Teams telephony call-in support to a Windows Enterprise client license. There's so much included with M365 in terms of compliance and bundle value that Microsoft absolutely can leave it absolutely terrible UX condition, so they do.

hackeraccount 4y ago

Do you think that helps Teams or not? I mean, if you can make a shitty product and know that it will sell, why make a good one? If you know you have to make a good product to get sales then that's what you'll do. Shouldn't there be a level where some people will find the pain of the shittiness so great that they'll step outside of the Microsoft ecosystem whereas other people will accept the shit in exchange for the ease of staying inside the Microsoft ecosystem. If that's true - and I don't know if it is - it seems like the leg up that Teams gets for being part of Microsoft doesn't help nearly so much as it should. Though truthfully in order to compete with Microsoft's entrenchment you don't just need "not shitty" you need a product that's got something going for it that's weirdly compelling. See Linux on servers or Google Chrome on the desktop.

pydry 4y ago
>Shouldn't there be a level where some people will find the pain of the shittiness so great that they'll step outside of the Microsoft ecosystem whereas other people will accept the shit in exchange for the ease of staying inside the Microsoft ecosystem. This happened at a company I worked at. There was practically a war between IT support trying desperately to force people to use Teams and the people who had picked up Zoom and quite liked it trying to stay using it. After a grace period where IT pleaded, whinged and begged, the Windows laptops were ultimately locked down such that zoom couldn't be installed or run at all and everybody was finally shifted on to Teams. This was all done in the name of security, citing such high profile transgressions "Zoom's end to end encryption isn't working as advertised!" and "omg zoombombing sometimes happens if you don't password protect your room!" were cited. Stories like this were circling the news at that time. Later on when Teams was bludgeoned by several zero days that were orders of magnitude worse, nobody batted an eye of course, and that story didn't get much airtime. Microsoft had its claws deep into that company. I suspect they have a pretty good PR team as well.

brightball 4y ago

Along the same lines, Googles Chat and Spaces are really close to becoming “good enough” that you don’t need Slack. Their threading setup is awful and they desperately need to let admins set sane defaults for notification sounds, do not disturb hours, etc. But aside from that it’s really close to being a good enough chat option that Slack doesn’t feel necessary. Google Meet is already good. Gmail is excellent and the calendaring system is best in class. They fix the chat UX issues and it’s going to be interesting.

choko 4y ago
I don't trust Google to not kill features and products on which I would come to depend.
whatarethembits 4y ago
No matter how good Google chat gets, it’s inevitable that Google will kill it sooner or later. It’s a non starter.

w0m 4y ago

While this is true - you have to look at the competitive space also (not just Slack). My previous employer forced us on a hosted HipChat. Absolute garbage. laggy; crashed often (sometime taking down my host) and worst of all randomly deleted chat history - so if someone sent you something (important) you may or may not be able to reference it later. Absolute garbage. Left that company (a fortune 50) ~roughly when Teams began rolling out, and my coworkers complained to no end (Slack -> Teams migration happened roughly when i joined). I still complain about Teams - but outside of raw IRC Teams is by far the best messaging App I've used at work. (I do also run slack/discord for personal groups/projects, though nothing at crazy scale).

thereddaikon 4y ago

I think its unfair to say the real customers of IT are regulators and auditors. But meeting their requirements is legally mandated. You have to meet that standard. In an imperfect world with deadlines, overhead, and limited resources that's sometimes all you can hope for. As for Teams being awful. It has problems. But all non native desktop apps do and that includes Slack and Discord. I use both Teams and Discord daily and they are about equal in frustration.

belter 4y ago

The most basic of features, like freezing the screen while switching context in a presentation, is not available. A request for years by all users and available like for ever, in GotoMeeting or Webex. https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msteams/forum/all/freeze-screen-in-ms-teams/2e03bc59-0e45-4cfd-a398-cd90ab0593cc https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msteams/forum/all/freeze... https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msteams/forum/all/pausing-screenshare-in-teams-meeting/7bd13939-cf24-4b06-918b-4ea2e0b03764 https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msteams/forum/all/pausin... https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/tech-community-ideas/freeze-option-in-teams-while-presenting-screen/idi-p/2141573 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/tech-community-ideas/... Thinking about it, what offers from Microsoft are not used just because somebody must use it...Or their company got it for free?