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Their tools are legitimately good, IME - esp. Teams is mainly just heavy, not bad. Ben Thompson of Stratechery puts it well: This is where Teams thrives: if y
by soundnote 4y ago
Their tools are legitimately good, IME - esp. Teams is mainly just heavy, not bad.
Ben Thompson of Stratechery puts it well:
This is where Teams thrives: if you fully commit to the Microsoft ecosystem, one app combines your contacts, conversations, phone calls, access to files, 3rd-party applications, in a way that “just works”; I explained my personal experience with Teams in a December 2018 Daily Update:
"Here’s the thing, though: Dropbox absolutely is better than One Drive. Google Apps are better at collaboration than Microsoft’s Office apps. Asana is better than Planner. And, to be very clear, Slack is massively better than Teams at chat. Using all of them together, though, well, it sucks: the user experience that matters for me is not any one app but all of them at once, and for the way I want to work, having everything organized in one single place is simply better (and that’s even with the normal spate of maddening Microsoft UI oddities!). In this Teams is less a chat app than it is a file explorer for the cloud generally, and Stratechery LLC specifically."
This is what Slack — and Silicon Valley, generally — failed to understand about Microsoft’s competitive advantage: the company doesn’t win just because it bundles, or because it has a superior ground game. By virtue of doing everything, even if mediocrely, the company is providing a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, particularly for the non-tech workers that are in fact most of the market. Slack may have infused its chat client with love, but chatting is a means to an end, and Microsoft often seems like the only enterprise company that understands that.
It's been my experience, too. M365 really actually just works and Teams and Outlook (for the web) are a pleasure to use.
- bobolino123 4y agoThe chat is really bad (compared to Discord) and the indicators don't refresh sometimes.
- mablopoule 4y agoAre you using it on linux ? Because I too experience the indicator that won't refresh, but only through ArchLinux/Firefox. No problem whatsoever on Windows 10.
- soundnote 4y agoIt's not great for direct chat, no. But it's good enough, and the "company file browser effect" really does carry a lot of weight. The actual chat module is easily among the weakest parts of Teams. The threaded chat in Teams workspaces functions well, but the UI design looks too much like normal chat (they're thankfully redesigning it) for something that isn't meant to be used the same way. It's more team workspaces + calls where the value is, IME.
- Nextgrid 4y ago> particularly for the non-tech workers that are in fact most of the market I would say the real reason it "works" for non-tech workers is because they don't have enough bargaining power to reject crap such as Teams and similar Microsoft software, and/or haven't had the chance to try out anything else and don't know what an actually good experience is, while tech workers generally do and reject it as a result (that's why this garbage is non-existent in startups and tech-centric companies). Spinning it as a tool for non-tech workers is a nice cop-out from the truth which is that non-tech workers merely lack the political power needed to reject this shit (and similar - Windows, etc) just like the vast majority of tech workers do. If those non-tech workers were given a choice, Microsoft's marketshare would significantly shrink overnight.
- sfifs 4y agoI actually have tried and unfortunately nothing beats Excel - PowerPoint. OneDrive added a killer feature a few years ago in auto Documents and Desktop backup which makes transitioning computers or using temp laptops painless - no more "re-imaging" and massive workload reduction for Tech suppprt. I assume you could now do this in DropBox as well but it wasn't so before OneDrive made this the default. Outlook client is also the only polished desktop mail client (ie. some mail is actally stored offline on laptop and you can pull up old emails on a flight or when you have poor connectivity) and I understand the server makes compliance easier. Enterprises don't go Microsoft Suite because they are primarily good enough. In some categories, there is virtually no competiton and in others, the good enough is tolerable.
- znpy 4y ago> I would say the real reason it "works" for non-tech workers is because they don't have enough bargaining power to reject crap such as Teams and similar Microsoft software Do you really think that if non-tech workers had enough bargaining power they would really waste their time with Slack vs Teams instead of, say, better wages ? > If those non-tech workers were given a choice, Microsoft's marketshare would significantly shrink overnight. X doubt. Most people (rightfully so) use their work computer just to work.
- 4y ago
- johnwalkr 4y agoThat’s from 2018. At that time Office 365 was really janky for collaboration. It works well now though.
- soundnote 4y agoYep, but it just makes the point stronger.