4 ms·

I think MS Teams gets a bad rap that is doesn't deserve. I don't know if the experience has improved or something - maybe Teams used to be worse and people are

I think MS Teams gets a bad rap that is doesn't deserve. I don't know if the experience has improved or something - maybe Teams used to be worse and people are reacting to how it used to be? I've also been using MS Loop a lot and it's pretty great actually. It's clearly still under development and missing a lot of features but leaving that aside, I don't think it's fair to dismiss it as a Notion clone. It's far simpler than Notion and for writing things like company handbooks that's a good thing, actually. Sometimes simpler is better. If you need all the tables as database stuff, then use Notion. If you need a simple and clean documentation source, well I've tried a lot of these kinds of apps over the years and Loop is shaping up to be one of the better ones IMO. I say this grudgingly, BTW. I strongly resisted choosing MS for our business. But as a small company in Vietnam we get an amazing value proposition from MS 365 that isn't even close to matched by anything else. We pay about $3.50 per user and we get Teams, video conferencing, office apps, Loop, Visio, Whiteboard, SharePoint (ok that one is genuinely quite bad), and also a load of business automation stuff in the form of Workflows that I'm still exploring. Oh and Shift scheduling. OneNote. About a hundred other things that I forget right now. Even still I resisted but the final straw was that automatic translation is included in Teams for free. As a bilingual team that's vital for us. By contrast, just Notion would be $8 per user. I think Slack is $6 per user. Not a lot for a western tech company, but we genuinely can't afford that. MS 365 wins by being "just good enough" at _loads_ of things, and way cheaper than the competition.

probably_wrong 3y ago
MS Teams is... bad. Even if they were to solve the bugs and performance issues, and even if they actually implemented any of the features that the community has been asking for (push to talk comes to mind), the entire concept is flawed. Two problems with information are duplication (too many copies around, all of them slightly different) and finding where it is. MS Teams makes it easy to store duplicate data and hard to find it later: did you upload the data as a file in the "development" channel, or as a link in the "updates" wiki? Nobody knows, not even the search function. And with each new project manager creating five channels per project, two of which will actually see any activity... I think MS Teams wants to be everything for everyone and succeeds at neither.
- zokier 3y ago
  > I think MS Teams wants to be everything for everyone and succeeds at neither. Teams wants to be Slack killer and making sure people stay in MS ecosystem, and it is succeeding in it. You can call the concept flawed, but it is a response to strong demand in the market.
  - probably_wrong 3y ago
    Obviously I don't speak for everyone, but the Fortune 500 company I worked for at the time was presented with two options: either migrate your Skype infrastructure to Teams, or... actually, no, you don't get to choose. Migrate or else. I don't doubt that the plan is to keep people in the MS ecosystem and I don't dispute that it's working. But let's not claim that Teams' popularity has anything to do with its technology when it's clear that MS used it's dominant position to push it down everyone's throat.
    - cpill 3y ago
      isn't this what Micro$oft have always done. The big behemoth bully picking off the little guys with there "Too big to fail" approach to business. relying on the fact that large companies think and dream in grey than in color.
  - fulafel 3y ago
    MS knows that their sales effort target and most important customer is the IT department, not the users.
- paleotrope 3y ago
  You are absolutely right about the documentation aspect. We are about four years into Teams and no one can find anything. Massive numbers of dead channels. Files and things all over the place. Notification hell. One particular bad aspect is people started recording meetings. No one has any idea where these things get put. There are links that are shared but where are the actual files. I use a OneNote to keep track of links. It's craziness. Miro has its own management issues as well once you start getting projects and things in the mix. It's like every new app now is designed to work with maybe a handful of objects but beyond that it's a huge mess.
pid-1 3y ago
Teams - Quite sluggish even on high end machines, annoying bugs such as notifications not showing consistently, messages not being sent, pictures not loading... Loop - Super beta product with very few features compared to Notion. In particular, I've enabled it in our tenant and it has a showstopping bug for many users in which none of their work is saved. This bug exists from day 1 and still not fixed. > MS 365 wins by being "just good enough" at _loads_ of things, and way cheaper than the competition. Agreed!
bigDinosaur 3y ago
I find bugs or annoyances with Teams every single day. At minimum it has horrible latency for basic UI actions, but also awful file management experiences and an abysmal search feature (seriously, Discord manages to have a dramatically better search feature and that was never targeted at serious business users). Not to mention countless random bugs. Have they made having multiple organisations actually work properly yet with real time message notifications or does it still silo them and you get an email 8 hours after a message if you're lucky? Does the desktop app still destroy battery doing god knows what?
imron 3y ago
> I think MS Teams gets a bad rap that is doesn't deserve. No, it entirely deserves it.
Lariscus 3y ago
For video conferences I agree, Teams works pretty well for that. I also don't find the client any slower than any other Electron Apps, they are all equally bad. Its the group chats that I find severely lacking compared to Slack. So much wasted whitespace and incredibly inconvenient UX.
regularfry 3y ago
Teams is designed for a world where the problem that Slack solves is viewed as a feature. Looking at them as comparable instant messaging tools is to completely miss the point. The underlying philosophy with Teams is top-down control: the assumption is that the organisation structure can adequately predict what communication patterns between its members should be allowed. The underlying assumption with Slack is that the organisation members should be able to set up productive communication patterns without needing top-down control, and that having to impose that control is a bug. The Slack approach requires discovery and working in the open, to a certain degree, so that what the research calls "weak links" can form between individuals in disconnected parts of the organisation. Teams (at least, wherever I've seen it) is actively hostile to this: you have to invite, to be invited, to already know who to speak to. Slack - when done right - radically changes how the organisation integrates with itself. I have, of course, seen it done very wrong: if you come from a Teams world you'll likely want to lock Slack down so that it can't provide its main benefits; the instance I'm on right now blocks public channel creation, which is bonkers if you understand the problem area. If your org is small enough and has enough of a mixing function outside the digital tooling that it doesn't need a helping hand, then there's not much in it, but past a certain size and it's not even close.
- esperent 3y ago
  > the instance I'm on right now blocks public channel creation, which is bonkers if you understand the problem area. If I was working with a team of tech savvy developers, I'd completely agree with you, and we'd probably be using Slack, or maybe Zulip. I'm not - I work at a bakery and I'm the only technical person at our company. Most people don't even own a laptop. Every day is a surprise to me as I get a tech support call about something so basic like not checking if something is plugged in. If you've ever watched The IT Crowd, and thought the tech support calls were satire - they are not. Everything has to be locked down and simplified to the extreme, otherwise I will be called to fix or explain it over and over again. The thought of allowing everyone to create a channel whenever they want is giving me nightmares, honestly. It's already a daily frustration to get idea of channels across at all. Actually scratch that, even getting people to stop using Zalo (local version of Whatsapp) was a struggle and I'm pretty sure it's still happening behind our backs. Thinking about allowing everyone to create channels ad-hoc. It wouldn't work, it would turn our communications into a mess. We have total of about six channels and already get complaints that it's too confusing.

probably_wrong 3y ago

MS Teams is... bad. Even if they were to solve the bugs and performance issues, and even if they actually implemented any of the features that the community has been asking for (push to talk comes to mind), the entire concept is flawed. Two problems with information are duplication (too many copies around, all of them slightly different) and finding where it is. MS Teams makes it easy to store duplicate data and hard to find it later: did you upload the data as a file in the "development" channel, or as a link in the "updates" wiki? Nobody knows, not even the search function. And with each new project manager creating five channels per project, two of which will actually see any activity... I think MS Teams wants to be everything for everyone and succeeds at neither.

zokier 3y ago
> I think MS Teams wants to be everything for everyone and succeeds at neither. Teams wants to be Slack killer and making sure people stay in MS ecosystem, and it is succeeding in it. You can call the concept flawed, but it is a response to strong demand in the market.
- probably_wrong 3y ago
  Obviously I don't speak for everyone, but the Fortune 500 company I worked for at the time was presented with two options: either migrate your Skype infrastructure to Teams, or... actually, no, you don't get to choose. Migrate or else. I don't doubt that the plan is to keep people in the MS ecosystem and I don't dispute that it's working. But let's not claim that Teams' popularity has anything to do with its technology when it's clear that MS used it's dominant position to push it down everyone's throat.
  - cpill 3y ago
    isn't this what Micro$oft have always done. The big behemoth bully picking off the little guys with there "Too big to fail" approach to business. relying on the fact that large companies think and dream in grey than in color.
- fulafel 3y ago
  MS knows that their sales effort target and most important customer is the IT department, not the users.
paleotrope 3y ago
You are absolutely right about the documentation aspect. We are about four years into Teams and no one can find anything. Massive numbers of dead channels. Files and things all over the place. Notification hell. One particular bad aspect is people started recording meetings. No one has any idea where these things get put. There are links that are shared but where are the actual files. I use a OneNote to keep track of links. It's craziness. Miro has its own management issues as well once you start getting projects and things in the mix. It's like every new app now is designed to work with maybe a handful of objects but beyond that it's a huge mess.

pid-1 3y ago

Teams - Quite sluggish even on high end machines, annoying bugs such as notifications not showing consistently, messages not being sent, pictures not loading... Loop - Super beta product with very few features compared to Notion. In particular, I've enabled it in our tenant and it has a showstopping bug for many users in which none of their work is saved. This bug exists from day 1 and still not fixed. > MS 365 wins by being "just good enough" at _loads_ of things, and way cheaper than the competition. Agreed!

bigDinosaur 3y ago

I find bugs or annoyances with Teams every single day. At minimum it has horrible latency for basic UI actions, but also awful file management experiences and an abysmal search feature (seriously, Discord manages to have a dramatically better search feature and that was never targeted at serious business users). Not to mention countless random bugs. Have they made having multiple organisations actually work properly yet with real time message notifications or does it still silo them and you get an email 8 hours after a message if you're lucky? Does the desktop app still destroy battery doing god knows what?

imron 3y ago

> I think MS Teams gets a bad rap that is doesn't deserve. No, it entirely deserves it.

Lariscus 3y ago

For video conferences I agree, Teams works pretty well for that. I also don't find the client any slower than any other Electron Apps, they are all equally bad. Its the group chats that I find severely lacking compared to Slack. So much wasted whitespace and incredibly inconvenient UX.

regularfry 3y ago

Teams is designed for a world where the problem that Slack solves is viewed as a feature. Looking at them as comparable instant messaging tools is to completely miss the point. The underlying philosophy with Teams is top-down control: the assumption is that the organisation structure can adequately predict what communication patterns between its members should be allowed. The underlying assumption with Slack is that the organisation members should be able to set up productive communication patterns without needing top-down control, and that having to impose that control is a bug. The Slack approach requires discovery and working in the open, to a certain degree, so that what the research calls "weak links" can form between individuals in disconnected parts of the organisation. Teams (at least, wherever I've seen it) is actively hostile to this: you have to invite, to be invited, to already know who to speak to. Slack - when done right - radically changes how the organisation integrates with itself. I have, of course, seen it done very wrong: if you come from a Teams world you'll likely want to lock Slack down so that it can't provide its main benefits; the instance I'm on right now blocks public channel creation, which is bonkers if you understand the problem area. If your org is small enough and has enough of a mixing function outside the digital tooling that it doesn't need a helping hand, then there's not much in it, but past a certain size and it's not even close.

esperent 3y ago
> the instance I'm on right now blocks public channel creation, which is bonkers if you understand the problem area. If I was working with a team of tech savvy developers, I'd completely agree with you, and we'd probably be using Slack, or maybe Zulip. I'm not - I work at a bakery and I'm the only technical person at our company. Most people don't even own a laptop. Every day is a surprise to me as I get a tech support call about something so basic like not checking if something is plugged in. If you've ever watched The IT Crowd, and thought the tech support calls were satire - they are not. Everything has to be locked down and simplified to the extreme, otherwise I will be called to fix or explain it over and over again. The thought of allowing everyone to create a channel whenever they want is giving me nightmares, honestly. It's already a daily frustration to get idea of channels across at all. Actually scratch that, even getting people to stop using Zalo (local version of Whatsapp) was a struggle and I'm pretty sure it's still happening behind our backs. Thinking about allowing everyone to create channels ad-hoc. It wouldn't work, it would turn our communications into a mess. We have total of about six channels and already get complaints that it's too confusing.