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My employer is a prime example for this case: We use Microsoft 365 because we need Microsoft Office and use their email hosting. And then we use Teams simply b

My employer is a prime example for this case: We use Microsoft 365 because we need Microsoft Office and use their email hosting. And then we use Teams simply because it's already included in the package anyway, even though many employees hate it, but it's hard to argue for another solution because why pay for Slack when we already have Teams "for free"? And since Teams doesn't really need to compete on functionality it's extremely slow and with a borderline unusable group chat.

_cenw 3y ago
Saw the same pattern with 3 employers over the past 5 years. One killed Slack and all institutional knowledge in its search engine within a month. One replaced all remaining Intel Macs (not an insignificant amount) because Teams would being them to a standstill. The last one is currently happening and I'm wondering what unexpected cost will come to haunt this decision this time. Though one thing that always suffers in Teams is the ability to self-organize. Slack makes it very easy to let everyone write an automation or open a channel. Teams feels like it is imposing a culture that seems antithetical to most of the organisations that I saw adopt Teams, at least until they did.
- loehnsberg 3y ago
  To be fair, video calls on Slack were below par at the time when Teams came out, and little effort was made by Slack to improve the call feature in the months that followed.
- Shrezzing 3y ago
  I think Slack really dropped the ball in 2020, and that's ultimately why the inferior Teams and Zoom platforms have been able to solidify their market shares, and Discord was able to bastardise some of Slack's old market share. It took Slack nearly 2 years after the pandemic started to introduce features like Huddles - by which point, everyone who needed video conferencing software (which was basically every white-collar worker in the world) had adopted one of its competitors. Now, even at companies where Slack is used, they'll also have a Teams account where video calls happen. This is the case, even though Slack had a video call feature hidden in their UI all the way back in 2019. Although it's bad now, in Feb 2020 Teams was genuinely unusable hot garbage, chats didn't work, calls dropped often, files wouldn't attach to messages etc. Microsoft, for all their sins, recognised the imminent need for mass work-from-home tools relatively early, and made huge improvements to the platform before the end of March. By mid-April was in a usable state. Slack's better software, but better software's not going to be adopted if it's missing or hiding huge key features.
  - 666satanhimself 3y ago
    [dead]
  - leokennis 3y ago
    Also, Teams integrates with the other MS stuff. If I share files in a channel, in the background it is "just" a SharePoint which in turn I can add to my OneDrive. Meaning I can save a file in Word to that SharePoint and everyone in the channel can access it.
    - draugadrotten 3y ago
      Teams is a security nightmare, and Sharepoint as well. Access permissions are nearly impossible to grasp for normal users. The feature that all files dropped are shared instantly by everyone through sharepoint is a huge security risk. People in general have no understanding that they are sharing files with everyone that can join a Teams channel, meaning that confidential and sensitive information frequently gets added to Teams chats in "public" channels. Managing the correct permissions on thousands of Teams channels is hard to impossible, even with extra tools. Channel owners often adopt a "allow anyone who knocks" policy when they get permissions requests, because they are busy and do not really understand what they are doing. Sharing files needs to be more cordoned off for security reasons. Not harder or more difficult, just less integrated and not inheriting permissions.
      - EGreg 3y ago
        What if there was a free, open source alternative for Teams? I don’t mean Matrix or Mastodon. I mean something you could run on-prem and it would have chats, meetings, attach files etc. Do you know anything like this?
        Arathorn 3y ago
        Why don't you mean Matrix? This is precisely what Element is, built on Matrix: https://element.io https://element.io
- throwaway2990 3y ago
  Slack is not a knowledge base. Stop trying to use it as a knowledge base.
  - _cenw 3y ago
    I'm not sure what you expect everyone involved in such a culture to do, but the same disregard from executives that caused a lack of documentation (and runbooks for software I was on call for) caused the overnight Slack shutdown.
  - AceyMan 3y ago
    My parent corp guaranteed no one would use it as a knowleldgebase by implementing a 30-day maximum retention period in Slack. (Same for Teams chats). Lots of our staff got caught out when all the channels got truncated. Oof.
    - esafak 3y ago
      Not sure if that counts as a success or a failure. More like a failure because you learn after wasting a whole month. And then everybody has to learn the same lesson.
      - tekla 3y ago
        Success. It got everyone to stop using slack as a knowledge base. It's like when sysadmins get confused when people use the recycle bin as storage and the user gets angry when the bin gets cleared.
- impendia 3y ago
  > Teams feels like it is imposing a culture that seems antithetical to most of the organisations My employer, a large university, has moved to Microsoft, and I've definitely noticed this in MS's software. It feels like the software is designed with certain office culture and workflow patterns in mind. For example, previously I was able to use standalone email software. Outlook, in contrast, pushes its calendaring features, which are not something I care to use. I've gotten an increasing number of meeting invitations through this calendar, and Outlook "helpfully" tells me whether I'm available or not. I'm in fact always "available", because I don't use Outlook to manage my schedule.
  - reaperducer 3y ago
    Outlook, in contrast, pushes its calendaring features I've never understood Outlook being both email and calendar. Does no one at Microsoft ever want to read an email and reference their calendar at the same time, or vice versa?
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      No, people at Microsoft just didn't realize most users forgot how to work with multiple windows. You can have a separate calendar window if you care for it, you can even read individual e-mails in separate windows (that one is annoyingly bound to double-click...). That works on the web too - at least for people realizing you can have the same app open in two tabs, and then break them out into separate browser windows... Beyond that, maybe I'm thoroughly infused with corporate culture at this point, but I find this perfectly obvious and natural bundling. E-mail, calendars and TODO lists belong together.
      - impendia 3y ago
        My attitude -- and I acknowledge that this comes from a place of privilege -- is that I don't care to share my calendar with my employer. I'm a university professor; there's always pressure to join this or that initiative, to participate in more committees, and the like. But in the long term, success depends on maintaining much of my focus on my long-term research goals, which means saying no a lot. PG wrote about "makers' schedules vs managers' schedules" http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html and this feels similar to me. Outlook feels designed around the manager's schedule.
- lost_tourist 3y ago
  I don't use teams, but doesn't it have a web interface that runs on any platform? I have to say we use slack and the web version work just fine for me and I don't need anything fancy, chat/share files&code/threaded chats off to the side.
- tracker1 3y ago
  Not just teams on intel macs... running anything under Docker would do similarly... the Intel macbooks in particular would run against thermal thresholds all the time, and freeze sporatically to be nearly unusable. The last one I was issued was replaced with an M1 max after 3 months of being bottlenecked by the thing. And I couldn't underclock/volt it because it was locked down corporate hardware, I could do a lot, but not that. It was an i9 (10th? gen), and performed worse than a 4th gen i3 in practice.
- trympet 3y ago
  I've used Power Automate in the past to create bots. Worked fairly well.
azalemeth 3y ago
Many, many employers have done just that around the world. Because it's "free". It really is a massive anticompetitive move, made clear by the market-dominating force that is Microsoft. I have to say, I think the EU has them bang to rights, and they probably know it.
consp 3y ago
I've been forced to use it because it's the only "allowed" one for a project I'm on (since the other party has the "we already have teams for free" syndrome). It's horrible to work with, sound fails to function half of the time and it is "incompatible" with firefox (our main browser of choice). I tried using the linux client but it simply will not allow me to connect to anyone and keeps telling me I need to login and enable teams on my "account" (we do not have a microsoft company account).
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  > it is "incompatible" with firefox Somehow, everything works, except for starting and receiving calls. Meetings work just fine, so it's not lack of some browser functionality.
elric 3y ago
It's particularly galling how Outlook invites *by default* include a Teams link. You can disable this on a per invite basis or in your settings, but it's pretty icky behaviour.
- lrem 3y ago
  That's not quite unique, is it?
- arethuza 3y ago
  It may a per-tenant setting but I checked that and a new meeting created in Outlook doesn't contain a Teams link - you have to either select "New Teams Meeting" or select "New Meeting" and then explicitly make it a Teams meeting. New meetings created in Teams do include a Teams link - but isn't that what you would expect?
  - rotzgoober 3y ago
    [dead]
  - majewsky 3y ago
    In my work Outlook, it's similar to what GP says. There is only "New Meeting" (not "New Teams Meeting") and the message starts out with a Teams link, and then I actively have to opt out of that with an extra button press in the meeting composer.
- fuzzy2 3y ago
  You can disable that: Outlook Options → Calendar → Calendar options → Add online meeting to all meetings
- prepend 3y ago
  I don’t like Teams, but I use it. I like the auto Teams link because it saves me a click when setting up every meeting (and pretty much 99% of my meetings are Teams meetings). I think this is a case where it makes sense to default on because most people will leave it defaulted on.
mdasen 3y ago
but it's hard to argue for another solution because why pay for Slack when we already have Teams "for free"? I definitely understand this argument and I definitely understand how it plays out in the real world. At the same time, it strikes me as one of the ways companies can be foolishly cheap. If a product like Teams is making employees so unhappy, it's definitely worth spending some money to fix that. I've never used Teams, but I hear so much complaining about it. When friends are complaining unprompted about a piece of software from work, that seems pretty striking to me. Yes, it's included with Microsoft 365, but it seems like the cost of it in employee pain make it far from free. I know the appeal of "free" for companies, but Teams seems like an occasion where they're really ignoring a lot of time/effort/frustration that their employees have to go through and the impact that has on their work. Slack isn't cheap, but if you have reasonably compensated employees do you really want them wasting time and energy over Teams? Though, as I said, I certainly understand how this plays out in the real world. Many companies look at what something is costing them in their budget without having the ability to measure the pain and lost productivity those decisions might be causing.
- itsoktocry 3y ago
  >I've never used Teams, but I hear so much complaining about it. People will complain about anything, though. The nature of my work has me dealing with all of these platforms, depending on the clients. Guess what? I don't find Slack to be some joyous piece of software to use. It's better than the alternatives, I guess, but not to the point that I really care one way or the other. Some people complain about the bundling, but that can be really convenient for your organization.
  - tacticus 3y ago
    > that can be really convenient for your organization Yeah just like the AD bundling with windows was convenient. Up until you had no other choice than retaining an AD if anyone wanted windows anything.
  - CubsFan1060 3y ago
    For many remote workers, this is the single largest connection they have to their coworkers and work. It is your main communication method you use. I think the argument is that if you define the problem as "all of them let you chat with one another", then they all satisfy it. But when it's your main communication method, you want people to enjoy it, use it, and want to use it more. You don't want people to avoid communication because they have to use a crappy IM client. These small differences have huge impacts. I've used all of them in the past, and Teams was, and still is, the one I avoid chatting with someone unless absolutely necessary.
Neil44 3y ago
And the rest of the MS ecosystem is full of dark patterns to funnel you onto it also. Create a new meeting in Outlook - there's automatically a Teams link in it that nobody asked for. Even if it's a Zoom meeting.
- LegitShady 3y ago
  We have teams and zoom. My outlook has three different buttons - new zoom meeting, new teams meeting, and new meeting. Maybe your system admins just suck?
  - matwood 3y ago
    The default in Outlook when creating a meeting is to add a Teams meeting link. You can turn it off in settings (maybe for the whole org?).
BenFranklin100 3y ago
Teams main feature is that it is a front end to SharePoint. Not chat. Not video. Even before the pandemic we were using Teams for project management (via the OneNote integration) and file sharing. Each team is a full SharePoint group. Now that we are all back in the office and don’t use video, we are using Teams even more. The chat is a nice function we’ve adopted since the pandemic, but it’s a side offering really. MS 365 is a godsend for many small businesses.
- BenFranklin100 3y ago
  It’s ridiculous this comment is downvoted. It’s a straightforward comment from the perspective of a long time user of Teams n a small business setting.
- falsenapkin 3y ago
  I think the downvotes are unwarranted but I understand why people would disagree. Was SharePoint so bad before Teams? Is Teams that much better? I don't really know, my mega-corp work culture isn't "all in" and is not frankly that competent with a lot of tools so maybe we're missing out. But pre-teams we used SharePoint/OneDrive/WhateverBranding and it was fine. The big difference I've seen with document sharing is now you navigate a chat app to find stuff instead of a website and then you waste 3 minutes of a meeting trying to figure out how to open the document in the native app because the Teams embed is shit.
  - BenFranklin100 3y ago
    It was much more difficult to use SharePoint, at least for us, as we were a small team and had no dedicated IT person. You could use SharePoint and OneNote, sure, but it wasn’t obvious how to create a group with all the docs/notes in one place. We had Teams up and running in a couple of days. Anyone now can create a SharePoint site through Teams. Super simple. MS has released a native app for Teams by the way. Performance is much better. I’m not an advocate for MS, I’m just saying Teams is far more than a chat or video app.
    - 3y ago
drvd 3y ago
Either we work at the same company or this is a recurring theme everywhere.
- xxs 3y ago
  The latter...
mcny 3y ago
My complaints are not even big ones. It costs Microsoft ZERO dollars to remove the asinine keyboard shortcut control + shift + c to start a call. Who does that? Why is this right next to the ctrl + shift + v (for unformatted paste) What is the point of collecting all this metrics (kusto, whatever) if you don't ACT on it? My complaint against Azure DevOps: Why is there no "date" field? From what I've heard there are internal people at Microsoft who suffer because of this nonsense. How hard is it to give a date only option? And no, 00:00:00 is not the same as date only.
- badwolf 3y ago
  I will never understand how anyone thought "ctrl shift C" was a good idea to start a call -_-
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  Oh, my one complaint about azure devops is that when somebody goes to the build or release pages and interacts with a build or release, the default action should never be to edit them. That's asinine and makes onboarding people way harder than it should be.
- hulitu 3y ago
  > What is the point of collecting all this metrics (kusto, whatever) if you don't ACT on it? To sell it later together with other data. There are a lot of bugs and stupid UI decisions which go unfixed by MS and telemetry hasn't improved anything.
smcleod 3y ago
This is the case with all of the management led (as opposed to technology led) clients I’ve worked with over the past 2-3 years. Pretty much everyone hates teams with a passion - even many of the managers now, but they’re forced to use it because the business gets it bundled with office365. Thankfully all of the technical teams I’ve worked with only use it for video calls and use Slack (not that it’s perfect) for all chat, bots and huddles.
falsenapkin 3y ago
My company also killed Slack when Teams became bundled. With some bureaucracy and a written exception you can continue to use Slack if you're a "developer" which is like ?? but I'm not complaining because the code blocks and screen sharing on Teams are actual garbage so good to have an alternative. What an awful experience, both the app and the forced move. The only people who like it are warm bodies who can barely use other Office products as it is.
xxs 3y ago
I quite confident if there would be a group of people attempting to make Teams worse, exhibit a different buggy behavior on a weekly basis, they would absolutely fail miserably. Teams is a peak example of what 'tying' looks like.
Yabood 3y ago
There’s a bit more to it I think. Pricing and basic messaging aside, you can build robust applications on top of MS Teams and have complete freedom over the UI, functionality, etc., but you can’t do the same with Slack. In many cases, MS Teams can replace Slack, but Slack can’t replace Teams.

_cenw 3y ago

Saw the same pattern with 3 employers over the past 5 years. One killed Slack and all institutional knowledge in its search engine within a month. One replaced all remaining Intel Macs (not an insignificant amount) because Teams would being them to a standstill. The last one is currently happening and I'm wondering what unexpected cost will come to haunt this decision this time. Though one thing that always suffers in Teams is the ability to self-organize. Slack makes it very easy to let everyone write an automation or open a channel. Teams feels like it is imposing a culture that seems antithetical to most of the organisations that I saw adopt Teams, at least until they did.

loehnsberg 3y ago
To be fair, video calls on Slack were below par at the time when Teams came out, and little effort was made by Slack to improve the call feature in the months that followed.
Shrezzing 3y ago
I think Slack really dropped the ball in 2020, and that's ultimately why the inferior Teams and Zoom platforms have been able to solidify their market shares, and Discord was able to bastardise some of Slack's old market share. It took Slack nearly 2 years after the pandemic started to introduce features like Huddles - by which point, everyone who needed video conferencing software (which was basically every white-collar worker in the world) had adopted one of its competitors. Now, even at companies where Slack is used, they'll also have a Teams account where video calls happen. This is the case, even though Slack had a video call feature hidden in their UI all the way back in 2019. Although it's bad now, in Feb 2020 Teams was genuinely unusable hot garbage, chats didn't work, calls dropped often, files wouldn't attach to messages etc. Microsoft, for all their sins, recognised the imminent need for mass work-from-home tools relatively early, and made huge improvements to the platform before the end of March. By mid-April was in a usable state. Slack's better software, but better software's not going to be adopted if it's missing or hiding huge key features.
- 666satanhimself 3y ago
  [dead]
- leokennis 3y ago
  Also, Teams integrates with the other MS stuff. If I share files in a channel, in the background it is "just" a SharePoint which in turn I can add to my OneDrive. Meaning I can save a file in Word to that SharePoint and everyone in the channel can access it.
  - draugadrotten 3y ago
    Teams is a security nightmare, and Sharepoint as well. Access permissions are nearly impossible to grasp for normal users. The feature that all files dropped are shared instantly by everyone through sharepoint is a huge security risk. People in general have no understanding that they are sharing files with everyone that can join a Teams channel, meaning that confidential and sensitive information frequently gets added to Teams chats in "public" channels. Managing the correct permissions on thousands of Teams channels is hard to impossible, even with extra tools. Channel owners often adopt a "allow anyone who knocks" policy when they get permissions requests, because they are busy and do not really understand what they are doing. Sharing files needs to be more cordoned off for security reasons. Not harder or more difficult, just less integrated and not inheriting permissions.
    - EGreg 3y ago
      What if there was a free, open source alternative for Teams? I don’t mean Matrix or Mastodon. I mean something you could run on-prem and it would have chats, meetings, attach files etc. Do you know anything like this?
      - Arathorn 3y ago
        Why don't you mean Matrix? This is precisely what Element is, built on Matrix: https://element.io https://element.io
throwaway2990 3y ago
Slack is not a knowledge base. Stop trying to use it as a knowledge base.
- _cenw 3y ago
  I'm not sure what you expect everyone involved in such a culture to do, but the same disregard from executives that caused a lack of documentation (and runbooks for software I was on call for) caused the overnight Slack shutdown.
- AceyMan 3y ago
  My parent corp guaranteed no one would use it as a knowleldgebase by implementing a 30-day maximum retention period in Slack. (Same for Teams chats). Lots of our staff got caught out when all the channels got truncated. Oof.
  - esafak 3y ago
    Not sure if that counts as a success or a failure. More like a failure because you learn after wasting a whole month. And then everybody has to learn the same lesson.
    - tekla 3y ago
      Success. It got everyone to stop using slack as a knowledge base. It's like when sysadmins get confused when people use the recycle bin as storage and the user gets angry when the bin gets cleared.
impendia 3y ago
> Teams feels like it is imposing a culture that seems antithetical to most of the organisations My employer, a large university, has moved to Microsoft, and I've definitely noticed this in MS's software. It feels like the software is designed with certain office culture and workflow patterns in mind. For example, previously I was able to use standalone email software. Outlook, in contrast, pushes its calendaring features, which are not something I care to use. I've gotten an increasing number of meeting invitations through this calendar, and Outlook "helpfully" tells me whether I'm available or not. I'm in fact always "available", because I don't use Outlook to manage my schedule.
- reaperducer 3y ago
  Outlook, in contrast, pushes its calendaring features I've never understood Outlook being both email and calendar. Does no one at Microsoft ever want to read an email and reference their calendar at the same time, or vice versa?
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    No, people at Microsoft just didn't realize most users forgot how to work with multiple windows. You can have a separate calendar window if you care for it, you can even read individual e-mails in separate windows (that one is annoyingly bound to double-click...). That works on the web too - at least for people realizing you can have the same app open in two tabs, and then break them out into separate browser windows... Beyond that, maybe I'm thoroughly infused with corporate culture at this point, but I find this perfectly obvious and natural bundling. E-mail, calendars and TODO lists belong together.
    - impendia 3y ago
      My attitude -- and I acknowledge that this comes from a place of privilege -- is that I don't care to share my calendar with my employer. I'm a university professor; there's always pressure to join this or that initiative, to participate in more committees, and the like. But in the long term, success depends on maintaining much of my focus on my long-term research goals, which means saying no a lot. PG wrote about "makers' schedules vs managers' schedules" http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html and this feels similar to me. Outlook feels designed around the manager's schedule.
lost_tourist 3y ago
I don't use teams, but doesn't it have a web interface that runs on any platform? I have to say we use slack and the web version work just fine for me and I don't need anything fancy, chat/share files&code/threaded chats off to the side.
tracker1 3y ago
Not just teams on intel macs... running anything under Docker would do similarly... the Intel macbooks in particular would run against thermal thresholds all the time, and freeze sporatically to be nearly unusable. The last one I was issued was replaced with an M1 max after 3 months of being bottlenecked by the thing. And I couldn't underclock/volt it because it was locked down corporate hardware, I could do a lot, but not that. It was an i9 (10th? gen), and performed worse than a 4th gen i3 in practice.
trympet 3y ago
I've used Power Automate in the past to create bots. Worked fairly well.

azalemeth 3y ago

Many, many employers have done just that around the world. Because it's "free". It really is a massive anticompetitive move, made clear by the market-dominating force that is Microsoft. I have to say, I think the EU has them bang to rights, and they probably know it.

consp 3y ago

I've been forced to use it because it's the only "allowed" one for a project I'm on (since the other party has the "we already have teams for free" syndrome). It's horrible to work with, sound fails to function half of the time and it is "incompatible" with firefox (our main browser of choice). I tried using the linux client but it simply will not allow me to connect to anyone and keeps telling me I need to login and enable teams on my "account" (we do not have a microsoft company account).

marcosdumay 3y ago
> it is "incompatible" with firefox Somehow, everything works, except for starting and receiving calls. Meetings work just fine, so it's not lack of some browser functionality.

elric 3y ago

It's particularly galling how Outlook invites *by default* include a Teams link. You can disable this on a per invite basis or in your settings, but it's pretty icky behaviour.

lrem 3y ago
That's not quite unique, is it?
arethuza 3y ago
It may a per-tenant setting but I checked that and a new meeting created in Outlook doesn't contain a Teams link - you have to either select "New Teams Meeting" or select "New Meeting" and then explicitly make it a Teams meeting. New meetings created in Teams do include a Teams link - but isn't that what you would expect?
- rotzgoober 3y ago
  [dead]
- majewsky 3y ago
  In my work Outlook, it's similar to what GP says. There is only "New Meeting" (not "New Teams Meeting") and the message starts out with a Teams link, and then I actively have to opt out of that with an extra button press in the meeting composer.
fuzzy2 3y ago
You can disable that: Outlook Options → Calendar → Calendar options → Add online meeting to all meetings
prepend 3y ago
I don’t like Teams, but I use it. I like the auto Teams link because it saves me a click when setting up every meeting (and pretty much 99% of my meetings are Teams meetings). I think this is a case where it makes sense to default on because most people will leave it defaulted on.

mdasen 3y ago

but it's hard to argue for another solution because why pay for Slack when we already have Teams "for free"? I definitely understand this argument and I definitely understand how it plays out in the real world. At the same time, it strikes me as one of the ways companies can be foolishly cheap. If a product like Teams is making employees so unhappy, it's definitely worth spending some money to fix that. I've never used Teams, but I hear so much complaining about it. When friends are complaining unprompted about a piece of software from work, that seems pretty striking to me. Yes, it's included with Microsoft 365, but it seems like the cost of it in employee pain make it far from free. I know the appeal of "free" for companies, but Teams seems like an occasion where they're really ignoring a lot of time/effort/frustration that their employees have to go through and the impact that has on their work. Slack isn't cheap, but if you have reasonably compensated employees do you really want them wasting time and energy over Teams? Though, as I said, I certainly understand how this plays out in the real world. Many companies look at what something is costing them in their budget without having the ability to measure the pain and lost productivity those decisions might be causing.

itsoktocry 3y ago
>I've never used Teams, but I hear so much complaining about it. People will complain about anything, though. The nature of my work has me dealing with all of these platforms, depending on the clients. Guess what? I don't find Slack to be some joyous piece of software to use. It's better than the alternatives, I guess, but not to the point that I really care one way or the other. Some people complain about the bundling, but that can be really convenient for your organization.
- tacticus 3y ago
  > that can be really convenient for your organization Yeah just like the AD bundling with windows was convenient. Up until you had no other choice than retaining an AD if anyone wanted windows anything.
- CubsFan1060 3y ago
  For many remote workers, this is the single largest connection they have to their coworkers and work. It is your main communication method you use. I think the argument is that if you define the problem as "all of them let you chat with one another", then they all satisfy it. But when it's your main communication method, you want people to enjoy it, use it, and want to use it more. You don't want people to avoid communication because they have to use a crappy IM client. These small differences have huge impacts. I've used all of them in the past, and Teams was, and still is, the one I avoid chatting with someone unless absolutely necessary.

Neil44 3y ago

And the rest of the MS ecosystem is full of dark patterns to funnel you onto it also. Create a new meeting in Outlook - there's automatically a Teams link in it that nobody asked for. Even if it's a Zoom meeting.

LegitShady 3y ago
We have teams and zoom. My outlook has three different buttons - new zoom meeting, new teams meeting, and new meeting. Maybe your system admins just suck?
- matwood 3y ago
  The default in Outlook when creating a meeting is to add a Teams meeting link. You can turn it off in settings (maybe for the whole org?).

BenFranklin100 3y ago

Teams main feature is that it is a front end to SharePoint. Not chat. Not video. Even before the pandemic we were using Teams for project management (via the OneNote integration) and file sharing. Each team is a full SharePoint group. Now that we are all back in the office and don’t use video, we are using Teams even more. The chat is a nice function we’ve adopted since the pandemic, but it’s a side offering really. MS 365 is a godsend for many small businesses.

BenFranklin100 3y ago
It’s ridiculous this comment is downvoted. It’s a straightforward comment from the perspective of a long time user of Teams n a small business setting.
falsenapkin 3y ago
I think the downvotes are unwarranted but I understand why people would disagree. Was SharePoint so bad before Teams? Is Teams that much better? I don't really know, my mega-corp work culture isn't "all in" and is not frankly that competent with a lot of tools so maybe we're missing out. But pre-teams we used SharePoint/OneDrive/WhateverBranding and it was fine. The big difference I've seen with document sharing is now you navigate a chat app to find stuff instead of a website and then you waste 3 minutes of a meeting trying to figure out how to open the document in the native app because the Teams embed is shit.
- BenFranklin100 3y ago
  It was much more difficult to use SharePoint, at least for us, as we were a small team and had no dedicated IT person. You could use SharePoint and OneNote, sure, but it wasn’t obvious how to create a group with all the docs/notes in one place. We had Teams up and running in a couple of days. Anyone now can create a SharePoint site through Teams. Super simple. MS has released a native app for Teams by the way. Performance is much better. I’m not an advocate for MS, I’m just saying Teams is far more than a chat or video app.
  - 3y ago

drvd 3y ago

Either we work at the same company or this is a recurring theme everywhere.

xxs 3y ago
The latter...

mcny 3y ago

My complaints are not even big ones. It costs Microsoft ZERO dollars to remove the asinine keyboard shortcut control + shift + c to start a call. Who does that? Why is this right next to the ctrl + shift + v (for unformatted paste) What is the point of collecting all this metrics (kusto, whatever) if you don't ACT on it? My complaint against Azure DevOps: Why is there no "date" field? From what I've heard there are internal people at Microsoft who suffer because of this nonsense. How hard is it to give a date only option? And no, 00:00:00 is not the same as date only.

badwolf 3y ago
I will never understand how anyone thought "ctrl shift C" was a good idea to start a call -_-
marcosdumay 3y ago
Oh, my one complaint about azure devops is that when somebody goes to the build or release pages and interacts with a build or release, the default action should never be to edit them. That's asinine and makes onboarding people way harder than it should be.
hulitu 3y ago
> What is the point of collecting all this metrics (kusto, whatever) if you don't ACT on it? To sell it later together with other data. There are a lot of bugs and stupid UI decisions which go unfixed by MS and telemetry hasn't improved anything.

smcleod 3y ago

This is the case with all of the management led (as opposed to technology led) clients I’ve worked with over the past 2-3 years. Pretty much everyone hates teams with a passion - even many of the managers now, but they’re forced to use it because the business gets it bundled with office365. Thankfully all of the technical teams I’ve worked with only use it for video calls and use Slack (not that it’s perfect) for all chat, bots and huddles.

falsenapkin 3y ago

My company also killed Slack when Teams became bundled. With some bureaucracy and a written exception you can continue to use Slack if you're a "developer" which is like ?? but I'm not complaining because the code blocks and screen sharing on Teams are actual garbage so good to have an alternative. What an awful experience, both the app and the forced move. The only people who like it are warm bodies who can barely use other Office products as it is.

xxs 3y ago

I quite confident if there would be a group of people attempting to make Teams worse, exhibit a different buggy behavior on a weekly basis, they would absolutely fail miserably. Teams is a peak example of what 'tying' looks like.

Yabood 3y ago

There’s a bit more to it I think. Pricing and basic messaging aside, you can build robust applications on top of MS Teams and have complete freedom over the UI, functionality, etc., but you can’t do the same with Slack. In many cases, MS Teams can replace Slack, but Slack can’t replace Teams.