6 ms·

How is it possible that Teams is still such a poor product? I really didn't like it when my job switched like 6 years ago, and I don't recall ever feeling that

How is it possible that Teams is still such a poor product? I really didn't like it when my job switched like 6 years ago, and I don't recall ever feeling that it improved in any meaningful way. I switched jobs to one using Slack and it's not perfect but it is a lot better. It's almost a meme at this point. In the presence of other clients that have gotten it "right" (or at least more "right" than teams) like Slack, Discord to an extent, and Zoom for video calling, how has Microsoft allowed this festering wound to languish? Surely they could afford to revamp this product and reap the rewards of people not hating using their tools?

jasonlotito 4y ago
They are still using Slack. This is for video conferencing only. I've heard that with regards to video conferencing, it's competitive with zoom.
- kimbernator 4y ago
  I've been in a "mixed" slack/teams environment and it seems there was always a push to be a little more teams-y every month or so - given that Github is owned by MSFT, I wouldn't be surprised if that happened there, too.
- sofixa 4y ago
  > I've heard that with regards to video conferencing, it's competitive with zoom. Did you hear that from a Microsoft salesperson? Only a person who hasn't used both regularly can say that. UX and features on Zoom are better. The mere fact that to this day Teams has wildly different features depending on how you join the call is a joke - for instance, joining from a browser on macOS results in no chat (the button simply isn't there).
  - rhaway84773 4y ago
    If you asked someone who’s new to Zoom if they’re on mute or not, I bet they will have a 50% hit rate. Heck, I bet even someone who regularly uses Zoom would have the same success rate. The Zoom UI is atrocious.
  - ChickenNugger 4y ago
    >(the button simply isn't there). What?! This has to be a glitch or something. How can something so basic be simply missing this long? Teams is not a new product. I just checked. It's 5 years old.
- aaron_m04 4y ago
  That makes a huge difference. It's worth editing the title to add "for video conferencing".
- markmark 4y ago
  My current company had the same thing happen on acquisition, we had to ditch Zoom for Teams for video, but could stay on Slack. I find Teams video absolutely fine. It just works and I never think about it.
mhardcastle 4y ago
I don't disagree with the limitations of Teams, but Microsoft improved their video call/conferencing software substantially when they moved from Skype for Business to Teams. At least things haven't been entirely stagnant.
- drewda 4y ago
  Yes, I will give Microsoft that -- MS Teams is so much better than Skype for Business/Lync, which was a horrible piece of video conferencing software.
- kypro 4y ago
  The 3 companies I've worked for over the past 5 years have used Slack for chat and teams for meetings. and to be honest that's my preferred way to work too. Huddles are okay for internal 1-on-1 meetings, but Teams works well when you need to organise a large meeting (potentially with people outside your org). On the other hand Teams is awful for chat. Slack has put so much care and thought into messaging that their UX is close to perfect imo.
- AtNightWeCode 4y ago
  But also, the volume is too low in Teams and has been since forever. Slack, Zoom, Meet and so on has this working. Most fun thing about Teams is that it works so poorly with different accounts that everybody waits for just that guy that logs in with a non-guest account and let the herd in.
guluarte 4y ago
we use discord, it's is way better for real time communication than slack, for everything non-urgent we just use email
- rockostrich 4y ago
  Doesn't discord have some pretty serious security flaws and questionable data collection policies for use as a private commercial messaging platform? For small teams that aren't too concerned about that it seems fine. Personally my group of a couple dozen friends and I use it for pretty much all of our communication because we don't care much about privacy in that context. But for any company larger than a couple dozen folks it seems like a pretty risky choice compared to Slack/Microsoft/Google/etc.
  - guluarte 4y ago
    it does, but sensite projects defenitly i wont use discord, neither slack nor zoom.
ajross 4y ago
Is Teams such a poor product? I used it routinely at Intel (using the Linux client, even) and now only occasionally, but... it's just fine. Text and video chat is a pretty solved problem, and it seems like all the major players here are really very tolerable. Surely SeriousUsers with existing workflows are going to be disrupted by any switch, but there are no major holes in Teams.
mullingitover 4y ago
> How is it possible that Teams is still such a poor product? List of products Microsoft makes: - [bajillion item list of everything including the kitchen sink] List of products Slack makes: - Slack Microsoft gives Teams away for free and to them it's worthless. They have no incentive to make it great, just good enough that you'll look at the price of Slack, look at the price of Office 365, and say "ehh, we can save some money, Slack can't be that good." Making Teams not suck doesn't move their revenue dial one iota. (And sure, Slack is owned by Salesforce and they make a bajillion things, but Slack started as its own company that just made one thing, and made it well. They're at least coasting on that laser product focus)
- moonchrome 4y ago
  >Making Teams not suck doesn't move their revenue dial one iota. That's not true, I would switch to Office 365 if it didn't suck. Having an entire suite fully integrated and under one license is a great value proposition - but the thing has to work. I've had to use Teams over the years and every time I get the same shitty experience I've had with it 5 years ago when I first tried it.
  - matwood 4y ago
    > I would switch to Office 365 if it didn't suck. From what? O365 collaboration is terrible. If you do joint document editing, O365 will drive you nuts after using something GSuite. What many do is have GSuite and then O365 for people who need office products for various reasons.
    - moonchrome 4y ago
      That's my point - I would replace GSuite and Slack for O365 if the later wasn't so bad. I have the office 2019 package when I need to use office apps.
    - yanellena 4y ago
      I don't quite know what I'm doing right but half my day is spent in Teams and the other half is in documents with 4-6 other people working in them at the same time and I can't remember the last time we had a real issue. I can understand Teams being a pain in multi-tenancy setups but even that is something which I've noticed is being improved recently.
danudey 4y ago
I did the same. Teams on my brand new (in 2019) laptop with 32 GB of RAM had vastly, vastly worse performance than even the web version of Excel. Slack, when I started using it more than ten years ago, was vastly more usable than Teams is today, or will likely be in five years. > Surely they could afford to revamp this product and reap the rewards of people not hating using their tools? It's not a business priority. Management is sold on Teams by integration with their existing services, as well as security, compartmentalization, and so on. They're not sold on "this is a polished product that people enjoy using". And when you look at the spec sheet, Teams is an awesome piece of software. It can replace Zoom, phone calls, Slack, file sharing and collaboration, and so on. It can even replace e-mail to some extent, though if you're working at a company that's mandating Teams there's a good chance that your company has a strong e-mail culture and people are still going to e-mail you all the time for no good reason. Anyway yeah, Teams is just the worst.
tech_tuna 4y ago
Have you used Outlook or Office 365 recently?
AtNightWeCode 4y ago
Teams is built upon broken dreams, broken design, SharePoint and the MS screwed up user account model. Add to that new poor tech choices, poor security choices and you have a beast that can't be controlled. I think the Discord UX is worse but at least the product kinda works.
rexreed 4y ago
How is it possible SAP is still such a poor product after almost 4 decades? Time does not cure all ills with software. The powers that purchase software are not swayed by arguments about user experience or even efficiency.
- wkat4242 4y ago
  SAP is just a swamp of legacy. Companies have customized and integrated so much during the decades (often in unsupported ways by people that have long gone) that any meaningful improvement will cause millions worth of redevelopment on their enterprise clients' side. And every little problem introduced has the potential to crash entire companies for days. All they can do is put a bit more lipstick on the pig.
wkat4242 4y ago
Teams was introduced less than 6 years ago ;)
- kimbernator 4y ago
  I was estimating - I guess my point was that they started using it right around the time it started replacing Skype for Business.

jasonlotito 4y ago

They are still using Slack. This is for video conferencing only. I've heard that with regards to video conferencing, it's competitive with zoom.

kimbernator 4y ago
I've been in a "mixed" slack/teams environment and it seems there was always a push to be a little more teams-y every month or so - given that Github is owned by MSFT, I wouldn't be surprised if that happened there, too.
sofixa 4y ago
> I've heard that with regards to video conferencing, it's competitive with zoom. Did you hear that from a Microsoft salesperson? Only a person who hasn't used both regularly can say that. UX and features on Zoom are better. The mere fact that to this day Teams has wildly different features depending on how you join the call is a joke - for instance, joining from a browser on macOS results in no chat (the button simply isn't there).
- rhaway84773 4y ago
  If you asked someone who’s new to Zoom if they’re on mute or not, I bet they will have a 50% hit rate. Heck, I bet even someone who regularly uses Zoom would have the same success rate. The Zoom UI is atrocious.
- ChickenNugger 4y ago
  >(the button simply isn't there). What?! This has to be a glitch or something. How can something so basic be simply missing this long? Teams is not a new product. I just checked. It's 5 years old.
aaron_m04 4y ago
That makes a huge difference. It's worth editing the title to add "for video conferencing".
markmark 4y ago
My current company had the same thing happen on acquisition, we had to ditch Zoom for Teams for video, but could stay on Slack. I find Teams video absolutely fine. It just works and I never think about it.

mhardcastle 4y ago

I don't disagree with the limitations of Teams, but Microsoft improved their video call/conferencing software substantially when they moved from Skype for Business to Teams. At least things haven't been entirely stagnant.

drewda 4y ago
Yes, I will give Microsoft that -- MS Teams is so much better than Skype for Business/Lync, which was a horrible piece of video conferencing software.
kypro 4y ago
The 3 companies I've worked for over the past 5 years have used Slack for chat and teams for meetings. and to be honest that's my preferred way to work too. Huddles are okay for internal 1-on-1 meetings, but Teams works well when you need to organise a large meeting (potentially with people outside your org). On the other hand Teams is awful for chat. Slack has put so much care and thought into messaging that their UX is close to perfect imo.
AtNightWeCode 4y ago
But also, the volume is too low in Teams and has been since forever. Slack, Zoom, Meet and so on has this working. Most fun thing about Teams is that it works so poorly with different accounts that everybody waits for just that guy that logs in with a non-guest account and let the herd in.

guluarte 4y ago

we use discord, it's is way better for real time communication than slack, for everything non-urgent we just use email

rockostrich 4y ago
Doesn't discord have some pretty serious security flaws and questionable data collection policies for use as a private commercial messaging platform? For small teams that aren't too concerned about that it seems fine. Personally my group of a couple dozen friends and I use it for pretty much all of our communication because we don't care much about privacy in that context. But for any company larger than a couple dozen folks it seems like a pretty risky choice compared to Slack/Microsoft/Google/etc.
- guluarte 4y ago
  it does, but sensite projects defenitly i wont use discord, neither slack nor zoom.

ajross 4y ago

Is Teams such a poor product? I used it routinely at Intel (using the Linux client, even) and now only occasionally, but... it's just fine. Text and video chat is a pretty solved problem, and it seems like all the major players here are really very tolerable. Surely SeriousUsers with existing workflows are going to be disrupted by any switch, but there are no major holes in Teams.

mullingitover 4y ago

> How is it possible that Teams is still such a poor product? List of products Microsoft makes: - [bajillion item list of everything including the kitchen sink] List of products Slack makes: - Slack Microsoft gives Teams away for free and to them it's worthless. They have no incentive to make it great, just good enough that you'll look at the price of Slack, look at the price of Office 365, and say "ehh, we can save some money, Slack can't be that good." Making Teams not suck doesn't move their revenue dial one iota. (And sure, Slack is owned by Salesforce and they make a bajillion things, but Slack started as its own company that just made one thing, and made it well. They're at least coasting on that laser product focus)

moonchrome 4y ago
>Making Teams not suck doesn't move their revenue dial one iota. That's not true, I would switch to Office 365 if it didn't suck. Having an entire suite fully integrated and under one license is a great value proposition - but the thing has to work. I've had to use Teams over the years and every time I get the same shitty experience I've had with it 5 years ago when I first tried it.
- matwood 4y ago
  > I would switch to Office 365 if it didn't suck. From what? O365 collaboration is terrible. If you do joint document editing, O365 will drive you nuts after using something GSuite. What many do is have GSuite and then O365 for people who need office products for various reasons.
  - moonchrome 4y ago
    That's my point - I would replace GSuite and Slack for O365 if the later wasn't so bad. I have the office 2019 package when I need to use office apps.
  - yanellena 4y ago
    I don't quite know what I'm doing right but half my day is spent in Teams and the other half is in documents with 4-6 other people working in them at the same time and I can't remember the last time we had a real issue. I can understand Teams being a pain in multi-tenancy setups but even that is something which I've noticed is being improved recently.

danudey 4y ago

I did the same. Teams on my brand new (in 2019) laptop with 32 GB of RAM had vastly, vastly worse performance than even the web version of Excel. Slack, when I started using it more than ten years ago, was vastly more usable than Teams is today, or will likely be in five years. > Surely they could afford to revamp this product and reap the rewards of people not hating using their tools? It's not a business priority. Management is sold on Teams by integration with their existing services, as well as security, compartmentalization, and so on. They're not sold on "this is a polished product that people enjoy using". And when you look at the spec sheet, Teams is an awesome piece of software. It can replace Zoom, phone calls, Slack, file sharing and collaboration, and so on. It can even replace e-mail to some extent, though if you're working at a company that's mandating Teams there's a good chance that your company has a strong e-mail culture and people are still going to e-mail you all the time for no good reason. Anyway yeah, Teams is just the worst.

tech_tuna 4y ago

Have you used Outlook or Office 365 recently?

AtNightWeCode 4y ago

Teams is built upon broken dreams, broken design, SharePoint and the MS screwed up user account model. Add to that new poor tech choices, poor security choices and you have a beast that can't be controlled. I think the Discord UX is worse but at least the product kinda works.

rexreed 4y ago

How is it possible SAP is still such a poor product after almost 4 decades? Time does not cure all ills with software. The powers that purchase software are not swayed by arguments about user experience or even efficiency.

wkat4242 4y ago
SAP is just a swamp of legacy. Companies have customized and integrated so much during the decades (often in unsupported ways by people that have long gone) that any meaningful improvement will cause millions worth of redevelopment on their enterprise clients' side. And every little problem introduced has the potential to crash entire companies for days. All they can do is put a bit more lipstick on the pig.

wkat4242 4y ago

Teams was introduced less than 6 years ago ;)

kimbernator 4y ago
I was estimating - I guess my point was that they started using it right around the time it started replacing Skype for Business.