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> Skype didn’t have half of the functionality Teams provides If one uses Teams, one would definitely see the edges of where Microsoft just started bolting thin

> Skype didn’t have half of the functionality Teams provides If one uses Teams, one would definitely see the edges of where Microsoft just started bolting things on to compete with other platforms. Skype was much closer to AIM with a phone bolted on than Teams. Like, why are there two different paradigms for text communication in Teams? A Teams team is a threading conversation, but there is also unthreaded chat? Teams definitely smells of Microsoft trying to compete where it can.

TeMPOraL 3y ago
> Like, why are there two different paradigms for text communication in Teams? A Teams team is a threading conversation, but there is also unthreaded chat? Teams definitely smells of Microsoft trying to compete where it can. To be fair, those are two different paradigms, and both are needed simultaneously. This alone makes Teams better than Discord and Slack, both of which - last I checked on them (~3 years ago for the former, and ~6 months for the latter) - try to shoehorn long-lived multiplayer threads into a sequential chat format. Maybe it is anticompetitive in some ways, but out of the trio mentioned above, Teams seems to be the only one to avoid the fate of becoming the communication platform where knowledge goes to die.
- mehdix 3y ago
  Slack added threads somewhere last year iirc.
- TedDoesntTalk 3y ago
  Threaded conversation applies to both. I want it for both. Why don’t you?
- vladvasiliu 3y ago
  > Teams seems to be the only one to avoid the fate of becoming the communication platform where knowledge goes to die. I wonder how many people actually find any kind of information in teams logs that are older than, say, a few days. Even leaving aside the fact that it's a horrendous experience because of the lag and messages jumping all over the place as they're loaded, the search function is an absolute joke. Half the time it doesn't find anything, and the other half it'll just give you give the message that exactly matches your query, without any kind of context.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    I agree - search in Teams absolutely sucks. Fortunately, a basic threading capability that's separate from chat helps a bit - but more importantly, search in Outlook and SharePoint sucks much less (though still some), so in an integrated system, there are other ways to browse chat history, more suitable for building up a knowledge base.
    - vladvasiliu 3y ago
      Yeah, search in Outlook has a hope of finding stuff. Am I to understand you can use Outlook to browse Teams chats? How would one go about doing that?
      - TeMPOraL 3y ago
        I'd have to ask my corporate IT, but I understand that if you perform enough unholy rituals to bind Exchange and SharePoint and AD together, everything somehow becomes smoothly accessible from everything else. Like, e.g., hovering over someone's profile on Teams is the quickest way for me to check if they're on a leave and have auto-responder set for their e-mail. Or, calendars staying in sync, and Teams automatically applying a "Busy/DND" status based on your "busy" blocks. Or, from the more annoying side, how Yammer (Microsoft's pseudo-Facebook for Work) updates pop up in both Teams and Outlook. Or how the same files you exchange inside teams in Teams can also be found via SharePoint, and even pop up in Outlook. Etc. There's a lot of those tiny things.
- falsenapkin 3y ago
  As a tool to casually/ephemerally chat I rank best to worst Discord, Slack, Teams. The threading/replies in Discord is easily better than whatever Slack/Teams are doing. Casual VC is better in Discord, code blocks are better in Discord. Teams I am frequently confused on where anything is and whether notifications are important or not. People never know if they should chat/share in the meeting thread or the team thread but oh wait we invited this random person so it really should be in the meeting cause they're not in the team but oh wait these 2 team members weren't invited but they really need to know as well... I see what they were going for and maybe it's just UI issues but at the moment it's a bad UX. Knowledge does die in Teams though, hard disagree on them avoiding that fate.
TedDoesntTalk 3y ago
> Like, why are there two different paradigms for text communication in Teams? A Teams team is a threading conversation, but there is also unthreaded chat? This drives me nuts. Teams UX is a joke, at least on mac.

TeMPOraL 3y ago

> Like, why are there two different paradigms for text communication in Teams? A Teams team is a threading conversation, but there is also unthreaded chat? Teams definitely smells of Microsoft trying to compete where it can. To be fair, those are two different paradigms, and both are needed simultaneously. This alone makes Teams better than Discord and Slack, both of which - last I checked on them (~3 years ago for the former, and ~6 months for the latter) - try to shoehorn long-lived multiplayer threads into a sequential chat format. Maybe it is anticompetitive in some ways, but out of the trio mentioned above, Teams seems to be the only one to avoid the fate of becoming the communication platform where knowledge goes to die.

mehdix 3y ago
Slack added threads somewhere last year iirc.
TedDoesntTalk 3y ago
Threaded conversation applies to both. I want it for both. Why don’t you?
vladvasiliu 3y ago
> Teams seems to be the only one to avoid the fate of becoming the communication platform where knowledge goes to die. I wonder how many people actually find any kind of information in teams logs that are older than, say, a few days. Even leaving aside the fact that it's a horrendous experience because of the lag and messages jumping all over the place as they're loaded, the search function is an absolute joke. Half the time it doesn't find anything, and the other half it'll just give you give the message that exactly matches your query, without any kind of context.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  I agree - search in Teams absolutely sucks. Fortunately, a basic threading capability that's separate from chat helps a bit - but more importantly, search in Outlook and SharePoint sucks much less (though still some), so in an integrated system, there are other ways to browse chat history, more suitable for building up a knowledge base.
  - vladvasiliu 3y ago
    Yeah, search in Outlook has a hope of finding stuff. Am I to understand you can use Outlook to browse Teams chats? How would one go about doing that?
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      I'd have to ask my corporate IT, but I understand that if you perform enough unholy rituals to bind Exchange and SharePoint and AD together, everything somehow becomes smoothly accessible from everything else. Like, e.g., hovering over someone's profile on Teams is the quickest way for me to check if they're on a leave and have auto-responder set for their e-mail. Or, calendars staying in sync, and Teams automatically applying a "Busy/DND" status based on your "busy" blocks. Or, from the more annoying side, how Yammer (Microsoft's pseudo-Facebook for Work) updates pop up in both Teams and Outlook. Or how the same files you exchange inside teams in Teams can also be found via SharePoint, and even pop up in Outlook. Etc. There's a lot of those tiny things.
falsenapkin 3y ago
As a tool to casually/ephemerally chat I rank best to worst Discord, Slack, Teams. The threading/replies in Discord is easily better than whatever Slack/Teams are doing. Casual VC is better in Discord, code blocks are better in Discord. Teams I am frequently confused on where anything is and whether notifications are important or not. People never know if they should chat/share in the meeting thread or the team thread but oh wait we invited this random person so it really should be in the meeting cause they're not in the team but oh wait these 2 team members weren't invited but they really need to know as well... I see what they were going for and maybe it's just UI issues but at the moment it's a bad UX. Knowledge does die in Teams though, hard disagree on them avoiding that fate.

TedDoesntTalk 3y ago

> Like, why are there two different paradigms for text communication in Teams? A Teams team is a threading conversation, but there is also unthreaded chat? This drives me nuts. Teams UX is a joke, at least on mac.