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My Teams works fine on my Mac without issues. Have been using it for over a year now. Fwiw - I don’t understand why it’s hated. It’s a collaboration tool - mai

My Teams works fine on my Mac without issues. Have been using it for over a year now. Fwiw - I don’t understand why it’s hated. It’s a collaboration tool - mainly messaging and conferencing. It’s been decent at that for me.

jrochkind1 4y ago
Teams works relatively fine for me now that I upgraded to an M1 macbook pro. (Still occasionally crashes for no reason, but no apparent performance problems). A year ago I was still on a 2015 Macbook, and it was still doing just fine for me on everything but Teams, Teams was a disaster, it would freeze and drop video all the time, or have perceptible delay between click and effect.
sofixa 4y ago
Because it's by far the worst UX-wise. If you know better tools, it's just shit. To add insult to injury, it kind of sort of works, sometimes, but there are tons of small problems here and there all the time in many cases. I had to use it only for video calls for 3 years, and probably weekly there was something wrong like restart needed because it screwed up my audio.
- eganist 4y ago
  > Because it's by far the worst laughs in WebEx
  - avmich 4y ago
    I for some time had way worse experience with GMeet.
    - uncanneyvalley 4y ago
      Me too. My outbound video always looks like crap, even with hardware acceleration on and nothing else open.
  - dagmx 4y ago
    I will take a meeting in WebEx any day over a meeting in Teams. Teams has the worst layouts for the videos, moves UI elements to inconvenient places, often has more stuttering… WebEx is clunky but far superior at what it’s meant to do.
    - rjzzleep 4y ago
      Moreover WebEx actually works ok for external consultants or service providers. Yes it's ugly, but it actually works. I've never had as many people involved as long with WebEx to finally allow joining a call after Enterprise IT just decided to implement a half baked DLP solution. Welcome to Microsoft, where data loss prevention somehow means that your service provider isn't allowed to share his services with you in Teams.
vel0city 4y ago
I've been using it on Windows for well over a year. I can't speak to how well it works on Mac or Linux, could be a terrible experience, I dunno. In my opinion, its not the most ergonomic tool out there but its by far the most fully realized tool out there. There's lots of tools that are good for this or good for that, but mixing them in together gets to be a bit kludgy. Having calendars, live editing of documents, meetings, chat, and other tools all integrated into a single tool is extremely handy when done right, and Teams to me gets like 85% of the way there. There's some things it just doesn't do well (like the threaded messaging, kind of a mess, maybe we just don't do it right), there's things where its inconsistent (different features for meeting chats versus individual versus group chats), and overall it could stand to be a lot faster and responsive. But in the end, when someone shares a document in a call I've got it in chat history and in my OneDrive and can recall it straight from Excel or Word or whatever. When someone emails me a calendar invite, its in my Teams automatically. The first-party integrations are hard to beat. Do I prefer things like Mattermost for pure chat? Sure, but then its separated from the tools I use for document management and separated from what we'd use for video calls and separated from my calendar for meetings and separated from our actual org structure integrated into it and all kinds of stuff. In the end, I personally like all these things being well integrated, and can deal with not having all the custom emojis and a slightly more responsive chat client.
- shagie 4y ago
  > like the threaded messaging, kind of a mess, maybe we just don't do it right I haven't found any chat style application that does threaded messaging "right" with how I think it should work (I want real time USNET with thread level ACLs). That said, they're all ok IF (and that's a big if) everyone working with the accepts the "this is how they work" and use it as such with the appropriate level of technical literacy (and that's a big part of the big if). Slack is ok. Its one deep and for active channels it can solve the "get a thread you two" so that a conversation doesn't spill over into the main channel. However, that hurts discoverability of messages... and for less active channels is likely overkill. Zulip's is better than Slack with its topics... but is way overkill for a bunch of friends. Teams has two styles with the team "here's a post, followups go on that" and "here's a group chat" which has no threading at all and tend to have new group chats forked for each new topic. Discord has threads which allow for the slack style "get a thread" and a bit more ACL on the thread (different permissioning model for the base application). All that said, I believe that the real thing that is lacking isn't threaded conversations but a strong chained reply-to feature. The best example of this I can find is Stack Overflow chat. For example, https://chat.stackoverflow.com/transcript/message/55971002#55971002 https://chat.stackoverflow.com/transcript/message/55971002#5... which is a reply (you can see that arrow thing) that you can click on and then follow to the message that it was a reply of, which itself is a reply to another comment. And so, for me, it's not the thread that is important as that is discoverable - but rather the "what is this replying to?" along with the ability to fork a new room/channel that handles a given topic (because everything in one room is a complete mess). Returning back to teams... it's ok. It serves the simplest interface acceptably. Every chat app would work better if everyone used it to its fullest... but as long as there's someone who doesn't use it "right" I'm going to suggest that Teams or Discord are probably the easiest to not use wrong (or set up to limit the 'how it can be used wrong is difficult').
knewter 4y ago
You haven't used it on Linux perhaps, or perhaps you aren't aware that it was spying on Android users?
vlunkr 4y ago
I haven’t used it much, but as an outsider it’s pretty hard to judge how much the criticism is exaggerated. People also hate Slack with a burning hatred passion, while I’ve used it for many years with very few issues.
ehutch79 4y ago
Ram usage for one, then there's the general slowness. Sometimes it just dies. It took the longest time to get an apple silicon native version. Compared to VSCode which is one of the best electron apps, Teams shows why you might want to go native instead. What it comes down to is that Teams is fine at best... but just that.
rhaway84773 4y ago
Teams is a bit of a resource (but Slack is no better) but there’s nothing really wrong with it as a tool. In fact it works pretty well for group communications and is constantly adding new helpful features.
akira2501 4y ago
It's a "productivity tool" that actively wastes my time. If it _just_ did messaging and conferencing and had reasonable tools and _configuration_ around those options, I might not mind.. it's all the other useless cruft they insist on forcing into the product that never really works properly. Notifications. Someone put a thumbs up on my message. I get notified twice. Once in the cat and once in "Activity." You can hide "Activity" but that doesn't stop the notification. You can't configure this. One day teams decided that the window with the view of myself should be mirrored. There's no option to change this. If you're using your camera to show documents or other items, this is an absolute nightmare. The background video filters work once. If you join a second meeting, they never work again until you restart the browser. You can text chat but you can't video chat with yourself, so there's no good way to test your camera setup until you're going live. For several months my calendar lost the time column on the left side. I had to open each meeting to see what time it was actually set for. That randomly came back in December. Twice I've been trying to present something on a call when a dumb "hey check out this new feature" dialog popped up right into the middle of what I was doing. Once it captured the click, and then promptly crashed when it tried to open whatever thing it was hyping. Even if you're just chatting, the pop ups steal focus and interrupt what you are doing. Once a day teams will start using all the CPU and will stop showing chats or notifications. I have to actively watch the CPU on that machine to see if this is happening and I need a restart. Most often I find out when I get an email that shows me an unread teams message or someone asks why I didn't answer their call. The UI is garbage and there are zero keyboard shortcuts. It constantly asks me if I want to "replace the attachment" simply because I once uploaded a file with the same name to an entirely different chat. You can't forward a chat. You literally just have to copy and paste it to a different user. If you join them to an existing personal chat, it just creates a new specific chat for whatever ad hoc group you tried to create. The whole thing is a poorly thought out also ran set of extensions designed to stave off competition and it's all built on ancient Microsoft Exchange technology. I sincerely hate it.
larryfreeman 4y ago
We use Teams, Slack, and Zoom on Mac. Zoom is much easier to use than Teams for conference calls. When I use Teams for conference calls, I find the default never works for establishing a connection (I have found that connecting through the browser works fine -- but this is not the default way to connect -- it still takes some effort to pick the path that works). I have also found the user interface is non-intuitive. I had little trouble getting up to speed on zoom (from webex). I might have less problems with Team once I get used to its interface. At present, if anyone accidentally schedules a meeting with Team (which sometimes is the default conference call setting in our Outlook), they usually create a zoom conference call link which is used instead (usually, the notification for the zoom link goes out through slack -- for some reason, folks don't even chat over team to let folks know that the meeting has been changed to zoom). As far as the application itself, I find that Slack is much easier to use and has capabilities that have been very helpful. The Slack user interface was intuitive and I quickly got up to speed. For Teams, I use it when I need to (not all times at our company have slack) but everyone I know prefers slack. The slack ui is more intuitive and has features such as slacking to yourself which is useful for notetaking. Again, my opinion of Teams might change as I better learn the user interface.
mgkimsal 4y ago
For people who are not solely at one company - contractors/freelancers who perhaps need to support connectivity with multiple organizations - MS Teams is a huge hostile pita. I had 2 clients each using Teams, and I was working with each. But... I can't just be 'logged in' to two different Teams organizations. If I was in company A, I couldn't see anything from company B. Apparently you can do this in the phone app, but not the desktop version. I could keep one company on desktop, and another on phone, and just monitor two, but... you can't scale that. With slack, I'm just connected to 3-4-5 client orgs at a time, and can react/respond as needed within the same tool without needing to log in/out constantly. The last time I had to deal with this was last autumn - perhaps it's "fixed" now? Except... I don't think it's seen as a "bug" in the first place, so may never be "fixed". Also... just connecting to Teams would often just hang... wait... no indication anything is happening. If I got impatient, I'd have folks saying "oh... just calm down..." but then also wonder why I was "not in the meeting"... well... because... Teams can never tell me if it's going to take 90 seconds to join, or 39 seconds or... if it just will never resolve. Opening a secondary link in a web browser became my default, though I'd have to read a banner every time saying "you won't get the best experience - some features may not work!" except... it at least loaded.
- cauthon 4y ago
  also the way it collapses long unread threads so you can only see the last couple messages, then marks the whole thread as read when you view those I missed messages and conversations all the time when I had to use it
- mrweasel 4y ago
  > For people who are not solely at one company - contractors/freelancers who perhaps need to support connectivity with multiple organizations - MS Teams is a huge hostile pita. Bingo, that right there. Need to work with one team, but also quickly jump onto a meeting with another client... So bad. If you need to be available to two clients at the same time? No, that's not going to work. The UI is horrible, finding people is difficult at best. Chatting with someone and want to jump on a video call... well, that will take a few minutes to locate the right button. At least Google Chat just put a big old button right in your face so you can do a quick meeting. Google suite of product (Meet, Calendar and Chat) have their own issues, but it's so easy to do meetings, and it just works every time. For six months a number of us at the office were unable to make audio work on the desktop Mac app, and Firefox wasn't supported, so you needed Chrome to join a Teams meeting. You can't really complain about the audio or video quality in Teams, they got that mostly figured out. It's just that the desktop app has a horrible UI. I mean so does Slack, given the option I'd use neither.
Moissanite 4y ago
If you use it for a single company (ie one login) it is OK, but IMO a worse experience than Slack; MS get away with it because it is free. Where the true nightmare begins is when you need to login to multiple tenants/workspaces. You simply can't use multiple at the same time, and switching from one to the other is super slow and unreliable. I tried to do so today and Teams crashed 4 times, at which point I uninstalled it and decided to just use the web app instead.
btilly 4y ago
It has not been decent for me. Here is a specific complaint about messaging. If you want a tool for programmers to collaborate, don't have it automatically insert smart quotes when trying to quote code in messages. You have to search to figure out how to turn it off. And if you do, it will still turn that back on sometimes for no particularly good reason. And my being able to send them correctly doesn't help when someone else posts code and it gets converted on THEIR end. Yes, yes. You can just attach a file. But it is a collaboration speed bump telling people that they have to save snippets to a file, then share the file, rather than simply using cut and paste in the obvious way. Doubly so if you're interacting asynchronously and you're reading their message some time after they mangled it.
Consultant32452 4y ago
I find Teams to be just fine for instant messaging and conference calls. It's everything else that is awful. I hate the way it has files stored in a "Team" almost as much as SharePoint. I can never find what I'm looking for and ultimately have to ask and then create a browser favorite to every doc for $current_project.
- ssharp 4y ago
  When I first started using teams, I saw the Files capability and thought it would be a pretty useful feature. In practice, the UX completely ruins any benefit of having files integrated into it.

jrochkind1 4y ago

Teams works relatively fine for me now that I upgraded to an M1 macbook pro. (Still occasionally crashes for no reason, but no apparent performance problems). A year ago I was still on a 2015 Macbook, and it was still doing just fine for me on everything but Teams, Teams was a disaster, it would freeze and drop video all the time, or have perceptible delay between click and effect.

sofixa 4y ago

Because it's by far the worst UX-wise. If you know better tools, it's just shit. To add insult to injury, it kind of sort of works, sometimes, but there are tons of small problems here and there all the time in many cases. I had to use it only for video calls for 3 years, and probably weekly there was something wrong like restart needed because it screwed up my audio.

eganist 4y ago
> Because it's by far the worst laughs in WebEx
- avmich 4y ago
  I for some time had way worse experience with GMeet.
  - uncanneyvalley 4y ago
    Me too. My outbound video always looks like crap, even with hardware acceleration on and nothing else open.
- dagmx 4y ago
  I will take a meeting in WebEx any day over a meeting in Teams. Teams has the worst layouts for the videos, moves UI elements to inconvenient places, often has more stuttering… WebEx is clunky but far superior at what it’s meant to do.
  - rjzzleep 4y ago
    Moreover WebEx actually works ok for external consultants or service providers. Yes it's ugly, but it actually works. I've never had as many people involved as long with WebEx to finally allow joining a call after Enterprise IT just decided to implement a half baked DLP solution. Welcome to Microsoft, where data loss prevention somehow means that your service provider isn't allowed to share his services with you in Teams.

vel0city 4y ago

I've been using it on Windows for well over a year. I can't speak to how well it works on Mac or Linux, could be a terrible experience, I dunno. In my opinion, its not the most ergonomic tool out there but its by far the most fully realized tool out there. There's lots of tools that are good for this or good for that, but mixing them in together gets to be a bit kludgy. Having calendars, live editing of documents, meetings, chat, and other tools all integrated into a single tool is extremely handy when done right, and Teams to me gets like 85% of the way there. There's some things it just doesn't do well (like the threaded messaging, kind of a mess, maybe we just don't do it right), there's things where its inconsistent (different features for meeting chats versus individual versus group chats), and overall it could stand to be a lot faster and responsive. But in the end, when someone shares a document in a call I've got it in chat history and in my OneDrive and can recall it straight from Excel or Word or whatever. When someone emails me a calendar invite, its in my Teams automatically. The first-party integrations are hard to beat. Do I prefer things like Mattermost for pure chat? Sure, but then its separated from the tools I use for document management and separated from what we'd use for video calls and separated from my calendar for meetings and separated from our actual org structure integrated into it and all kinds of stuff. In the end, I personally like all these things being well integrated, and can deal with not having all the custom emojis and a slightly more responsive chat client.

shagie 4y ago
> like the threaded messaging, kind of a mess, maybe we just don't do it right I haven't found any chat style application that does threaded messaging "right" with how I think it should work (I want real time USNET with thread level ACLs). That said, they're all ok IF (and that's a big if) everyone working with the accepts the "this is how they work" and use it as such with the appropriate level of technical literacy (and that's a big part of the big if). Slack is ok. Its one deep and for active channels it can solve the "get a thread you two" so that a conversation doesn't spill over into the main channel. However, that hurts discoverability of messages... and for less active channels is likely overkill. Zulip's is better than Slack with its topics... but is way overkill for a bunch of friends. Teams has two styles with the team "here's a post, followups go on that" and "here's a group chat" which has no threading at all and tend to have new group chats forked for each new topic. Discord has threads which allow for the slack style "get a thread" and a bit more ACL on the thread (different permissioning model for the base application). All that said, I believe that the real thing that is lacking isn't threaded conversations but a strong chained reply-to feature. The best example of this I can find is Stack Overflow chat. For example, https://chat.stackoverflow.com/transcript/message/55971002#55971002 https://chat.stackoverflow.com/transcript/message/55971002#5... which is a reply (you can see that arrow thing) that you can click on and then follow to the message that it was a reply of, which itself is a reply to another comment. And so, for me, it's not the thread that is important as that is discoverable - but rather the "what is this replying to?" along with the ability to fork a new room/channel that handles a given topic (because everything in one room is a complete mess). Returning back to teams... it's ok. It serves the simplest interface acceptably. Every chat app would work better if everyone used it to its fullest... but as long as there's someone who doesn't use it "right" I'm going to suggest that Teams or Discord are probably the easiest to not use wrong (or set up to limit the 'how it can be used wrong is difficult').

knewter 4y ago

You haven't used it on Linux perhaps, or perhaps you aren't aware that it was spying on Android users?

vlunkr 4y ago

I haven’t used it much, but as an outsider it’s pretty hard to judge how much the criticism is exaggerated. People also hate Slack with a burning hatred passion, while I’ve used it for many years with very few issues.

ehutch79 4y ago

Ram usage for one, then there's the general slowness. Sometimes it just dies. It took the longest time to get an apple silicon native version. Compared to VSCode which is one of the best electron apps, Teams shows why you might want to go native instead. What it comes down to is that Teams is fine at best... but just that.

rhaway84773 4y ago

Teams is a bit of a resource (but Slack is no better) but there’s nothing really wrong with it as a tool. In fact it works pretty well for group communications and is constantly adding new helpful features.

akira2501 4y ago

It's a "productivity tool" that actively wastes my time. If it _just_ did messaging and conferencing and had reasonable tools and _configuration_ around those options, I might not mind.. it's all the other useless cruft they insist on forcing into the product that never really works properly. Notifications. Someone put a thumbs up on my message. I get notified twice. Once in the cat and once in "Activity." You can hide "Activity" but that doesn't stop the notification. You can't configure this. One day teams decided that the window with the view of myself should be mirrored. There's no option to change this. If you're using your camera to show documents or other items, this is an absolute nightmare. The background video filters work once. If you join a second meeting, they never work again until you restart the browser. You can text chat but you can't video chat with yourself, so there's no good way to test your camera setup until you're going live. For several months my calendar lost the time column on the left side. I had to open each meeting to see what time it was actually set for. That randomly came back in December. Twice I've been trying to present something on a call when a dumb "hey check out this new feature" dialog popped up right into the middle of what I was doing. Once it captured the click, and then promptly crashed when it tried to open whatever thing it was hyping. Even if you're just chatting, the pop ups steal focus and interrupt what you are doing. Once a day teams will start using all the CPU and will stop showing chats or notifications. I have to actively watch the CPU on that machine to see if this is happening and I need a restart. Most often I find out when I get an email that shows me an unread teams message or someone asks why I didn't answer their call. The UI is garbage and there are zero keyboard shortcuts. It constantly asks me if I want to "replace the attachment" simply because I once uploaded a file with the same name to an entirely different chat. You can't forward a chat. You literally just have to copy and paste it to a different user. If you join them to an existing personal chat, it just creates a new specific chat for whatever ad hoc group you tried to create. The whole thing is a poorly thought out also ran set of extensions designed to stave off competition and it's all built on ancient Microsoft Exchange technology. I sincerely hate it.

larryfreeman 4y ago

We use Teams, Slack, and Zoom on Mac. Zoom is much easier to use than Teams for conference calls. When I use Teams for conference calls, I find the default never works for establishing a connection (I have found that connecting through the browser works fine -- but this is not the default way to connect -- it still takes some effort to pick the path that works). I have also found the user interface is non-intuitive. I had little trouble getting up to speed on zoom (from webex). I might have less problems with Team once I get used to its interface. At present, if anyone accidentally schedules a meeting with Team (which sometimes is the default conference call setting in our Outlook), they usually create a zoom conference call link which is used instead (usually, the notification for the zoom link goes out through slack -- for some reason, folks don't even chat over team to let folks know that the meeting has been changed to zoom). As far as the application itself, I find that Slack is much easier to use and has capabilities that have been very helpful. The Slack user interface was intuitive and I quickly got up to speed. For Teams, I use it when I need to (not all times at our company have slack) but everyone I know prefers slack. The slack ui is more intuitive and has features such as slacking to yourself which is useful for notetaking. Again, my opinion of Teams might change as I better learn the user interface.

mgkimsal 4y ago

For people who are not solely at one company - contractors/freelancers who perhaps need to support connectivity with multiple organizations - MS Teams is a huge hostile pita. I had 2 clients each using Teams, and I was working with each. But... I can't just be 'logged in' to two different Teams organizations. If I was in company A, I couldn't see anything from company B. Apparently you can do this in the phone app, but not the desktop version. I could keep one company on desktop, and another on phone, and just monitor two, but... you can't scale that. With slack, I'm just connected to 3-4-5 client orgs at a time, and can react/respond as needed within the same tool without needing to log in/out constantly. The last time I had to deal with this was last autumn - perhaps it's "fixed" now? Except... I don't think it's seen as a "bug" in the first place, so may never be "fixed". Also... just connecting to Teams would often just hang... wait... no indication anything is happening. If I got impatient, I'd have folks saying "oh... just calm down..." but then also wonder why I was "not in the meeting"... well... because... Teams can never tell me if it's going to take 90 seconds to join, or 39 seconds or... if it just will never resolve. Opening a secondary link in a web browser became my default, though I'd have to read a banner every time saying "you won't get the best experience - some features may not work!" except... it at least loaded.

cauthon 4y ago
also the way it collapses long unread threads so you can only see the last couple messages, then marks the whole thread as read when you view those I missed messages and conversations all the time when I had to use it
mrweasel 4y ago
> For people who are not solely at one company - contractors/freelancers who perhaps need to support connectivity with multiple organizations - MS Teams is a huge hostile pita. Bingo, that right there. Need to work with one team, but also quickly jump onto a meeting with another client... So bad. If you need to be available to two clients at the same time? No, that's not going to work. The UI is horrible, finding people is difficult at best. Chatting with someone and want to jump on a video call... well, that will take a few minutes to locate the right button. At least Google Chat just put a big old button right in your face so you can do a quick meeting. Google suite of product (Meet, Calendar and Chat) have their own issues, but it's so easy to do meetings, and it just works every time. For six months a number of us at the office were unable to make audio work on the desktop Mac app, and Firefox wasn't supported, so you needed Chrome to join a Teams meeting. You can't really complain about the audio or video quality in Teams, they got that mostly figured out. It's just that the desktop app has a horrible UI. I mean so does Slack, given the option I'd use neither.

Moissanite 4y ago

If you use it for a single company (ie one login) it is OK, but IMO a worse experience than Slack; MS get away with it because it is free. Where the true nightmare begins is when you need to login to multiple tenants/workspaces. You simply can't use multiple at the same time, and switching from one to the other is super slow and unreliable. I tried to do so today and Teams crashed 4 times, at which point I uninstalled it and decided to just use the web app instead.

btilly 4y ago

It has not been decent for me. Here is a specific complaint about messaging. If you want a tool for programmers to collaborate, don't have it automatically insert smart quotes when trying to quote code in messages. You have to search to figure out how to turn it off. And if you do, it will still turn that back on sometimes for no particularly good reason. And my being able to send them correctly doesn't help when someone else posts code and it gets converted on THEIR end. Yes, yes. You can just attach a file. But it is a collaboration speed bump telling people that they have to save snippets to a file, then share the file, rather than simply using cut and paste in the obvious way. Doubly so if you're interacting asynchronously and you're reading their message some time after they mangled it.

Consultant32452 4y ago

I find Teams to be just fine for instant messaging and conference calls. It's everything else that is awful. I hate the way it has files stored in a "Team" almost as much as SharePoint. I can never find what I'm looking for and ultimately have to ask and then create a browser favorite to every doc for $current_project.

ssharp 4y ago
When I first started using teams, I saw the Files capability and thought it would be a pretty useful feature. In practice, the UX completely ruins any benefit of having files integrated into it.