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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, a

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
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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
      - EGreg 3y ago
        Is it a good replacement for Teams?
        Arathorn 3y ago
        Well, I think so, but i'm probably biased given it's my company. Empirically we dogfood it successfully as a Teams/Slack replacement (and a WhatsApp/Signal replacement) while building it, and lots of others use it for that use case too: https://element.io/customers https://element.io/customers. The biggest problems have been that the 'classic' mobile apps are stale, and are currently being replaced with Element X: https://element.io/blog/element-x-experience-the-future-of-element/ https://element.io/blog/element-x-experience-the-future-of-e... - which far surpasses the Teams mobile clients in terms of UX & performance. Also, the E2EE reliability and UX on the old apps was also not great, but that's also fixed (at last) by Element X.
        TeMPOraL 3y ago
        Will it allow my calendar to automatically attach Matrix/Element video calls to every appointment invite? Will it chime when such appointment is about to start? This is the kind of stuff that corporate customers care about. They want systems that integrate well.
        3y ago
- fingerlocks 3y ago
  How is that any different from sharing a google doc link?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- bob1029 3y ago
  This is 95% of why we use it. We have <20 employees and managing an extra vendor for a chat application is a non-negligible % of our time. Our new hires can log with their work account using a shrink-wrapped machine from Best Buy and will have all of their needed applications ready to go & signed-in without going to random vendor sites or file shares.
  - matwood 3y ago
    I'm managed GSuite and Slack in a small company for years. What is taking so much of your time?
deleted 3y ago
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jp_nc 3y ago
Slack dropped the ball earlier than that on audio/video. They acquired Screenhero in 2015 and did nothing of substance with it. Also, the lack of any real meeting features means that Zoom or Teams always has to be in the picture.
- CSMastermind 3y ago
  This still makes me mad. Screenhero was the best screensharing software I've used to this day. If anyone here knows the inside story of what went down with that acquisition, please share because I was expecting such great things when I heard Slack got them and then ... just nothing. Was it a tech integration problem? A key team member leaving? Like what happened?
  - wasmitnetzen 3y ago
    I have no inside knowledge, but that sounds like your regular acquihire to me.
  - DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
    I think part of it was because around the same time that Chromium (which Electron is based on, thusly inherited by Slack) added baked-in support for capturing the user's screen and individual application windows - so Slack had no incentive to spend money to build their own native screen-capture and sharing code when they could simply wait and do nothing and then get it for free. ...but that still doesn't explain why Slack otherwise seems frozen-in-time: none of the significant end-user usability and quality-of-life issues I've had with Slack since I started using it in 2016 have been addressed (e.g. we can't right-click a message to get its context-menu: you still have to hunt for that awkwardly-placed "..." menu button). See https://slack.com/release-notes/windows https://slack.com/release-notes/windows - this is their changelist for their Windows release and most of the releases since 2020 are described as "tweaks", was "tinkered with", or is "tuned-up" which, or "minor security updates" - which, as any npm user will tell you just means they ran `npm update` and not much else (well, besides the bare minimum of automated testing).
  - selykg 3y ago
nineteen999 3y ago
> By mid-April was in a usable state. Do you mean April 2024 or 2025? Because the Teams I use on a regular daily basis is still unusable garbage. Granted it's better than February 2020, but it's still a train wreck of chats that don't work, calls dropped often, and files that won't attach to messages. Not that I am all that fond of Slack either.
- Bootvis 3y ago
  I don’t like Teams either but in my corporate environment it’s mostly without bugs at the moment. They dropped support for disabling incoming video for some unknown reason but that’s my only complaint right now.
  - cglong 3y ago
    It's still available, at least internally; it did move fairly recently though. Try looking under View > More options :) Edit: confirmed location
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  I must be an unique snowflake, because I switched jobs around March 2020, and the new place used Teams exclusively, and... it was good. Not stellar, but good for the standards of software in this decade. Better than Slack, anyway. There were some weird glitches happening couple times a year, but nothing major. So either I'm incredibly lucky, or - my going hypothesis - Teams actually does work quite well, if you deploy it along with SharePoint, Exchange, and other Microsoft products it integrates with.
  - justinclift 3y ago
    "Incredibly lucky" this time around I'm thinking. :) Oh, are you using it on an Apple Silicon mac?
    - tacotacotaco 3y ago
      Not the OP but I do run Teams on Apple Silicon and it is still a bug-ridden mess. Crashes, rendering bugs, file attachment bugs. At least once a week, usually more. Searches fail to find results that I can manually locate by scrolling through the chat history. I have reinstalled the app more than once. I have shared these observations in their feedback pop ups and I know Microsoft loves collecting telemetry. Why should they dedicate more money/resources to fix defects when it clearly hasn’t stopped them from growing their market share? Teams is the first example I use to begrudgingly explain to someone that quality doesn’t matter.
pmontra 3y ago
Huddles... I never understood what they are for. Slack already had video calls with screen sharing. They were easy to start and they worked well. Then they added these huddles, more difficult to see (sometimes people do not realize they are invited to one) and they seem like the old video calls with a worst onboarding. There are only huddles now. So nothing changed except the setup of the call. By the way, I'm not a native speaker. I know what a call is, I eventually checked what's a huddle now. "a close grouping of people or things."
matwood 3y ago
> I think Slack really dropped the ball IMO, Slacked drop it again. The old slack video worked much better than the new one. I use the zoom plugin now for quick chats. Teams is a dumpster fire every time I'm forced to use it. Not much to say about that.
dboreham 3y ago
Quick contrary datapoint: I'm a heavy Windows user but the only interaction I've ever had with Teams is to figure out how to delete its icon from the task bar.
kevincox 3y ago
Slacks video calls and Huddles don't even work on Firefox. They are a joke.

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
    - EGreg 3y ago
      Is it a good replacement for Teams?
      - Arathorn 3y ago
        Well, I think so, but i'm probably biased given it's my company. Empirically we dogfood it successfully as a Teams/Slack replacement (and a WhatsApp/Signal replacement) while building it, and lots of others use it for that use case too: https://element.io/customers https://element.io/customers. The biggest problems have been that the 'classic' mobile apps are stale, and are currently being replaced with Element X: https://element.io/blog/element-x-experience-the-future-of-element/ https://element.io/blog/element-x-experience-the-future-of-e... - which far surpasses the Teams mobile clients in terms of UX & performance. Also, the E2EE reliability and UX on the old apps was also not great, but that's also fixed (at last) by Element X.
      - TeMPOraL 3y ago
        Will it allow my calendar to automatically attach Matrix/Element video calls to every appointment invite? Will it chime when such appointment is about to start? This is the kind of stuff that corporate customers care about. They want systems that integrate well.
        3y ago
fingerlocks 3y ago
How is that any different from sharing a google doc link?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bob1029 3y ago
This is 95% of why we use it. We have <20 employees and managing an extra vendor for a chat application is a non-negligible % of our time. Our new hires can log with their work account using a shrink-wrapped machine from Best Buy and will have all of their needed applications ready to go & signed-in without going to random vendor sites or file shares.
- matwood 3y ago
  I'm managed GSuite and Slack in a small company for years. What is taking so much of your time?

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

jp_nc 3y ago

Slack dropped the ball earlier than that on audio/video. They acquired Screenhero in 2015 and did nothing of substance with it. Also, the lack of any real meeting features means that Zoom or Teams always has to be in the picture.

CSMastermind 3y ago
This still makes me mad. Screenhero was the best screensharing software I've used to this day. If anyone here knows the inside story of what went down with that acquisition, please share because I was expecting such great things when I heard Slack got them and then ... just nothing. Was it a tech integration problem? A key team member leaving? Like what happened?
- wasmitnetzen 3y ago
  I have no inside knowledge, but that sounds like your regular acquihire to me.
- DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
  I think part of it was because around the same time that Chromium (which Electron is based on, thusly inherited by Slack) added baked-in support for capturing the user's screen and individual application windows - so Slack had no incentive to spend money to build their own native screen-capture and sharing code when they could simply wait and do nothing and then get it for free. ...but that still doesn't explain why Slack otherwise seems frozen-in-time: none of the significant end-user usability and quality-of-life issues I've had with Slack since I started using it in 2016 have been addressed (e.g. we can't right-click a message to get its context-menu: you still have to hunt for that awkwardly-placed "..." menu button). See https://slack.com/release-notes/windows https://slack.com/release-notes/windows - this is their changelist for their Windows release and most of the releases since 2020 are described as "tweaks", was "tinkered with", or is "tuned-up" which, or "minor security updates" - which, as any npm user will tell you just means they ran `npm update` and not much else (well, besides the bare minimum of automated testing).
- selykg 3y ago

nineteen999 3y ago

> By mid-April was in a usable state. Do you mean April 2024 or 2025? Because the Teams I use on a regular daily basis is still unusable garbage. Granted it's better than February 2020, but it's still a train wreck of chats that don't work, calls dropped often, and files that won't attach to messages. Not that I am all that fond of Slack either.

Bootvis 3y ago
I don’t like Teams either but in my corporate environment it’s mostly without bugs at the moment. They dropped support for disabling incoming video for some unknown reason but that’s my only complaint right now.
- cglong 3y ago
  It's still available, at least internally; it did move fairly recently though. Try looking under View > More options :) Edit: confirmed location
TeMPOraL 3y ago
I must be an unique snowflake, because I switched jobs around March 2020, and the new place used Teams exclusively, and... it was good. Not stellar, but good for the standards of software in this decade. Better than Slack, anyway. There were some weird glitches happening couple times a year, but nothing major. So either I'm incredibly lucky, or - my going hypothesis - Teams actually does work quite well, if you deploy it along with SharePoint, Exchange, and other Microsoft products it integrates with.
- justinclift 3y ago
  "Incredibly lucky" this time around I'm thinking. :) Oh, are you using it on an Apple Silicon mac?
  - tacotacotaco 3y ago
    Not the OP but I do run Teams on Apple Silicon and it is still a bug-ridden mess. Crashes, rendering bugs, file attachment bugs. At least once a week, usually more. Searches fail to find results that I can manually locate by scrolling through the chat history. I have reinstalled the app more than once. I have shared these observations in their feedback pop ups and I know Microsoft loves collecting telemetry. Why should they dedicate more money/resources to fix defects when it clearly hasn’t stopped them from growing their market share? Teams is the first example I use to begrudgingly explain to someone that quality doesn’t matter.

pmontra 3y ago

Huddles... I never understood what they are for. Slack already had video calls with screen sharing. They were easy to start and they worked well. Then they added these huddles, more difficult to see (sometimes people do not realize they are invited to one) and they seem like the old video calls with a worst onboarding. There are only huddles now. So nothing changed except the setup of the call. By the way, I'm not a native speaker. I know what a call is, I eventually checked what's a huddle now. "a close grouping of people or things."

matwood 3y ago

> I think Slack really dropped the ball IMO, Slacked drop it again. The old slack video worked much better than the new one. I use the zoom plugin now for quick chats. Teams is a dumpster fire every time I'm forced to use it. Not much to say about that.

dboreham 3y ago

Quick contrary datapoint: I'm a heavy Windows user but the only interaction I've ever had with Teams is to figure out how to delete its icon from the task bar.

kevincox 3y ago

Slacks video calls and Huddles don't even work on Firefox. They are a joke.