5 ms·

That hero image makes it looks like a carbon copy of notion. Seems that Microsoft's "business productivity strategy" is to create a walled garden of apps that d

That hero image makes it looks like a carbon copy of notion. Seems that Microsoft's "business productivity strategy" is to create a walled garden of apps that do what mainstream apps do. You don't need to sign up for Slack because we have Teams, you don't need to signup for Notion because we have Loop. If I had to predict, Loop will turn out to be an inferior app to Notion just like Teams turned out to be inferior to Slack, though it will still have wide adoption because it's bundled in.

rejectfinite 4y ago
>You don't need to sign up for Slack because we have Teams, you don't need to signup for Notion because we have Loop Yes? Why should a company pay for Slack, Office 365 and Notion? When you can just pay for one Office 365 licence per user? This also makes sure data is in your tenant and not spread all the fuck over. Say Susie quits. Now all her stuff is in Slack, Notion, Office 365 and a Google account. VS it being all in one Office 365 account under one admin panel.
- ProAm 4y ago
  The only benefit is its a little cheaper and less contracts to maintain but Teams so significantly inferior to Slack/Zoom. The only reason we continue to use it is because of cost savings.
  - AraceliHarker 4y ago
    Exactly this. GitHub staff are required to use Teams by Sep 1, 2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34773860 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34773860
  - dash2 4y ago
    Cost is one of the attributes of a product.
  - ramesh31 4y ago
    >The only benefit is its a little cheaper and less contracts to maintain but Teams so significantly inferior to Slack/Zoom. It's a lot cheaper. Slack contracts can easily run into the millions per year for a large org, versus... free.
    - kyawzazaw 4y ago
      Companies are ending lots of vendor licenses these days to cut costs. So it makes sense. I am not sure what people uses Slack for. But Teams is perfectly adequate in my opinion. Not a good idea to have lots of Knowledge and process in a chat app anyway.
  - kaba0 4y ago
    All three are just bad as hell.
  - CoolCold 4y ago
    I have seen on some other discussion related to Teams, someone mentioned that he/she has seen how "real"/"normal" users tend to use Teams and it was waaay more different than he/she could imagine as techie. So may be it has some features valuable for other which Slack lacks.
- pwinnski 4y ago
  Right, so instead of competing on quality, the established player can put out a vastly inferior product that ticks enough checkboxes and rely on the cost savings and easy of bundling to gain market share, pushing the superior competitor who actually delivers a quality product out. From a game theory perspective, I get why companies do this. The level of management signing these POs don't rely on Notion or Slack the way the people who work for them do. But this unquestionably makes everything worse. It eliminates real competition on merits and quality, replacing it with market leverage. It's anti-competitive. And Microsoft knows all about being anticompetitive.
  - zokier 4y ago
    Note that this "one stop shop" is very much also key part of AWS playbook, and to a lesser degree also Google. None of the big players do best-of-breed besides rare exceptions
    - pwinnski 4y ago
      Absolutely! I don't know of any company offering bundles in which every product is consider the best in its class, and even bundles that start with credible claims seem to quickly fall behind in quality.
  - eamq 4y ago
    Sometimes we get so focused on the details that we lose sight of the big picture. It's not only easier to manage from an admin standpoint, but also more satisfying for the user. People like to have integration in their products, even if they are not perfect as standalone tools.
madeofpalk 4y ago
Isn't Notion itself also a "walled garden"? It seems appropriate that Microsoft has a copy/competitor to Notion.
- japhib 4y ago
  I think "walled garden" in this sense is meant as an ecosystem of multiple apps that work together. IIUC Notion is just a single app, right?
- devmunchies 4y ago
  Is a single plant a garden?
- esperent 4y ago
  Not really. There's an export option that dumps everything into a zip file for you. Multiple other apps have import from Notion ability, and it's also easy to read the exported files directly. There's even a semiofficial API that works pretty well - you can read Notion notes in VSCode, for example.
  - daydream 4y ago
    > There's even a semiofficial API that works pretty well Notion has an official API. https://developers.notion.com/ https://developers.notion.com/
coolspot 4y ago
When people say that Teams is worse than Slack or Zoom, I feel like I am taking crazy pills. In my opinion, Teams an order of magnitude better than Zoom and at least somewhat better than Slack.
- riffic 4y ago
  teams is pretty god-awful if you've been a slack veteran. for one, its markdown support is nonexistent
- enlyth 4y ago
  I haven't used teams in a few years, but the old version written in AngularJS was hands down, the worst piece of software I have ever used in my life. It was slow, bloated, clunky, every aspect of it was terrible. You might be hearing opinions from people like me who remember the old Teams experience and have since moved off of it a long time ago.
  - eamq 4y ago
    There is also a new client on the way that ditch electron completely.
- ranguna 4y ago
  Have you never sent a message with images just to later find out that the message wasn't sent and it wouldn't even show up on the chat so you could retry? (and even more recently, messages without images suffer from this, albeit at a much less frequency) Have you never tried to join a meeting where teams made you just sit there for a minute trying to connect until you decide to restart it? Have you ever called someone at the same time as they call you, ending you with teams saying that they are calling you at the same time as you are calling them and no one can accept the call ? Have you ever tried to click on an old message from a search result, just to end up nowhere near the message? Have you never joined late to a meeting because teams didn't notify you that the meeting had started? If you have an external calendar account linked to outlook, have you never noticed that the linked calendar events don't show up in teams calendar? Have you ever clicked on a message notification, scrolled a bit up or down to a different message and have teams snap you back to the notification message for no good reason? Have you never noticed your teams status showing that you are in a meeting when you are not, even without any scheduled meeting in the calendar? Have you never had your teams randomly hanging and your fans spinning to the max for a few seconds, with teams either getting back to normal or crashing afterwords ? In a meeting, have you never had to ask the person that is sharing the screen to re-share it, because you are not seeing their screen? Also in a meeting, have you never had the issue where people's cameras and screen shares are not showing up, forcing you to rejoin the meeting to get a 50% chance of everything working properly? If not... Well... Lucky you, I guess.

rejectfinite 4y ago

>You don't need to sign up for Slack because we have Teams, you don't need to signup for Notion because we have Loop Yes? Why should a company pay for Slack, Office 365 and Notion? When you can just pay for one Office 365 licence per user? This also makes sure data is in your tenant and not spread all the fuck over. Say Susie quits. Now all her stuff is in Slack, Notion, Office 365 and a Google account. VS it being all in one Office 365 account under one admin panel.

ProAm 4y ago
The only benefit is its a little cheaper and less contracts to maintain but Teams so significantly inferior to Slack/Zoom. The only reason we continue to use it is because of cost savings.
- AraceliHarker 4y ago
  Exactly this. GitHub staff are required to use Teams by Sep 1, 2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34773860 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34773860
- dash2 4y ago
  Cost is one of the attributes of a product.
- ramesh31 4y ago
  >The only benefit is its a little cheaper and less contracts to maintain but Teams so significantly inferior to Slack/Zoom. It's a lot cheaper. Slack contracts can easily run into the millions per year for a large org, versus... free.
  - kyawzazaw 4y ago
    Companies are ending lots of vendor licenses these days to cut costs. So it makes sense. I am not sure what people uses Slack for. But Teams is perfectly adequate in my opinion. Not a good idea to have lots of Knowledge and process in a chat app anyway.
- kaba0 4y ago
  All three are just bad as hell.
- CoolCold 4y ago
  I have seen on some other discussion related to Teams, someone mentioned that he/she has seen how "real"/"normal" users tend to use Teams and it was waaay more different than he/she could imagine as techie. So may be it has some features valuable for other which Slack lacks.
pwinnski 4y ago
Right, so instead of competing on quality, the established player can put out a vastly inferior product that ticks enough checkboxes and rely on the cost savings and easy of bundling to gain market share, pushing the superior competitor who actually delivers a quality product out. From a game theory perspective, I get why companies do this. The level of management signing these POs don't rely on Notion or Slack the way the people who work for them do. But this unquestionably makes everything worse. It eliminates real competition on merits and quality, replacing it with market leverage. It's anti-competitive. And Microsoft knows all about being anticompetitive.
- zokier 4y ago
  Note that this "one stop shop" is very much also key part of AWS playbook, and to a lesser degree also Google. None of the big players do best-of-breed besides rare exceptions
  - pwinnski 4y ago
    Absolutely! I don't know of any company offering bundles in which every product is consider the best in its class, and even bundles that start with credible claims seem to quickly fall behind in quality.
- eamq 4y ago
  Sometimes we get so focused on the details that we lose sight of the big picture. It's not only easier to manage from an admin standpoint, but also more satisfying for the user. People like to have integration in their products, even if they are not perfect as standalone tools.

madeofpalk 4y ago

Isn't Notion itself also a "walled garden"? It seems appropriate that Microsoft has a copy/competitor to Notion.

japhib 4y ago
I think "walled garden" in this sense is meant as an ecosystem of multiple apps that work together. IIUC Notion is just a single app, right?
devmunchies 4y ago
Is a single plant a garden?
esperent 4y ago
Not really. There's an export option that dumps everything into a zip file for you. Multiple other apps have import from Notion ability, and it's also easy to read the exported files directly. There's even a semiofficial API that works pretty well - you can read Notion notes in VSCode, for example.
- daydream 4y ago
  > There's even a semiofficial API that works pretty well Notion has an official API. https://developers.notion.com/ https://developers.notion.com/

coolspot 4y ago

When people say that Teams is worse than Slack or Zoom, I feel like I am taking crazy pills. In my opinion, Teams an order of magnitude better than Zoom and at least somewhat better than Slack.

riffic 4y ago
teams is pretty god-awful if you've been a slack veteran. for one, its markdown support is nonexistent
enlyth 4y ago
I haven't used teams in a few years, but the old version written in AngularJS was hands down, the worst piece of software I have ever used in my life. It was slow, bloated, clunky, every aspect of it was terrible. You might be hearing opinions from people like me who remember the old Teams experience and have since moved off of it a long time ago.
- eamq 4y ago
  There is also a new client on the way that ditch electron completely.
ranguna 4y ago
Have you never sent a message with images just to later find out that the message wasn't sent and it wouldn't even show up on the chat so you could retry? (and even more recently, messages without images suffer from this, albeit at a much less frequency) Have you never tried to join a meeting where teams made you just sit there for a minute trying to connect until you decide to restart it? Have you ever called someone at the same time as they call you, ending you with teams saying that they are calling you at the same time as you are calling them and no one can accept the call ? Have you ever tried to click on an old message from a search result, just to end up nowhere near the message? Have you never joined late to a meeting because teams didn't notify you that the meeting had started? If you have an external calendar account linked to outlook, have you never noticed that the linked calendar events don't show up in teams calendar? Have you ever clicked on a message notification, scrolled a bit up or down to a different message and have teams snap you back to the notification message for no good reason? Have you never noticed your teams status showing that you are in a meeting when you are not, even without any scheduled meeting in the calendar? Have you never had your teams randomly hanging and your fans spinning to the max for a few seconds, with teams either getting back to normal or crashing afterwords ? In a meeting, have you never had to ask the person that is sharing the screen to re-share it, because you are not seeing their screen? Also in a meeting, have you never had the issue where people's cameras and screen shares are not showing up, forcing you to rejoin the meeting to get a 50% chance of everything working properly? If not... Well... Lucky you, I guess.