5 ms·

It's deeply frustrating to witness how MS is able to force their often inferior products on everyone through their dominance. If competition was working well a

It's deeply frustrating to witness how MS is able to force their often inferior products on everyone through their dominance. If competition was working well a product like teams would have been forced to become much better or it would have died.

dmonitor 2y ago
Teams is legitimately such awful software that it alone serves as evidence that Microsoft needs to be broken up. At any given point of using the software, there are between 5 and 7 "..." buttons on the UI hiding menu options. There is no "test audio" button. You have to call their loopback server. Nobody can compete with Microsoft's office suite all-in-one + the kitchen sink bundle, though, so it persists.
- diggan 2y ago
  > Teams is legitimately such awful software that it alone serves as evidence that Microsoft needs to be broken up That has to be the weirdest argument I've heard for why a company should be broken up. Microsoft obviously doesn't understand UX nor UI design, hence the company needs to be broken up into parts? I agree with the former, but I don't understand how the conclusion would fix that.
  - bearjaws 2y ago
    Why is that weird? A product that would not have stood on its own, would have 100% failed, has only finally been made DECENT almost 8 years later due to the fact its bolted on to O365.
    - blibble 2y ago
      > has only finally been made DECENT almost 8 years later decent? you can't mean teams?? one instance of the client uses more memory and resources than every ircd on the planet combined
  - dijit 2y ago
    The argument is that Teams is so legitimately terrible that it's dominance is proof that market forces aren't working and that Microsoft is using its dominance in one area to enter other areas.
- Cockbrand 2y ago
  > Nobody can compete with Microsoft's office suite all-in-one + the kitchen sink bundle, though, so it persists. Well, there's Google Workspace (and a few smaller, less comprehensive suites) as a very competitive alternative with everything + kitchen sink, but - nobody ever got fired buying ~IBM~ Microsoft - MS is already in all enterprises, so it's quite easy for their sales people to position their products - the people who make the decision to buy M365 aren't the power users who suffer from the poor design in the products - there's a huge vendor lock-in due to lots of legacy .docx, .pptx and .xlsx files that won't be parsed correctly by 3rd party software due to the formats' intentional complexity
  - dijit 2y ago
    Interesting factoid about Google Workspace: if you send me a google docs link, I, with any Google account (even Federated identity account) can use and modify that document as a regular user. That's not true for Microsoft, and I was forced to buy some Office software for our business because an external company used Microsoft products. Quite infectious. Yet they could use our tools free of charge, they just refused.
AStonesThrow 2y ago
It's deeply frustrating to see people who resent giants because they're strong. MS did what anyone else would do in their position, inferior or not. This was not a situation where everyone chose to wear potato sacks instead of Nike. Clothing is a stylistic and individualistic choice, whereas your business's OS, platform, and software have concerns of support, compatibility, interoperation, long-term stability, etc. Compatibility and interop are things that large software vendors simply can't uphold very well at all. Even if they were magnanimous, generous, 100% committed to interop with everything else, they would incur massive tech debt and support burdens to arrange for those things. So of course they build in unique features. Of course they make breaking changes. Of course they're ensuring you stay as a customer. More than that, if a business looks around and 9/10ths of their partners use FOOBAR WIDGETS, and 99% of their workforce is trained exclusively in FOOBAR WIDGETS, what widgets are they gonna choose? The network effect has been strong for choice of platform/software, and once a plurality was achieved, MS essentially had a commitment and responsibility to the business world to be their huckleberry. At that point, force isn't necessary when customers are clamoring to be let in to the club. Force isn't necessary when your labor pool is full of MCSEs competing with neckbeards who spit on Bill Gates.
- dmonitor 2y ago
  People don't hate MS because they're big. They hate them because they make shit software and are force people to use it with anti-competitive practices. If each of Microsoft's products had to compete individually, most of them would go the way of Windows Phone, Zune, Internet Explorer, and Xbox. Their few good products would benefit from this too by increasing interoperability with other software. They need to be broken up.
  - AStonesThrow 2y ago
    > People don't hate MS because they're big. I'm sorry that you're blanket speaking for everyone else, because I certainly did. I hated MS because they were big, they were powerful, they were my father's favorite. I reviled Bill Gates because of his education and privilege and vision, and I renamed "win.com" to "lose.com" and plastered "Satan Inside" stickers on my AMD-processor machines that eventually ran Minix and OpenBSD. In college I became an arrogant Unix bigot, and I cultivated a distinct superiority complex, as if I could singlehandedly usher in The Year of Linux on the Desktop. Eventually I came to accept that it was just software; it was software that everyone else used just fine; and that a uniform installation of adequate software is better for the collective good than some idealistic, unachievable utopia of Richard Stallman's wet dreams.

dmonitor 2y ago

Teams is legitimately such awful software that it alone serves as evidence that Microsoft needs to be broken up. At any given point of using the software, there are between 5 and 7 "..." buttons on the UI hiding menu options. There is no "test audio" button. You have to call their loopback server. Nobody can compete with Microsoft's office suite all-in-one + the kitchen sink bundle, though, so it persists.

diggan 2y ago
> Teams is legitimately such awful software that it alone serves as evidence that Microsoft needs to be broken up That has to be the weirdest argument I've heard for why a company should be broken up. Microsoft obviously doesn't understand UX nor UI design, hence the company needs to be broken up into parts? I agree with the former, but I don't understand how the conclusion would fix that.
- bearjaws 2y ago
  Why is that weird? A product that would not have stood on its own, would have 100% failed, has only finally been made DECENT almost 8 years later due to the fact its bolted on to O365.
  - blibble 2y ago
    > has only finally been made DECENT almost 8 years later decent? you can't mean teams?? one instance of the client uses more memory and resources than every ircd on the planet combined
- dijit 2y ago
  The argument is that Teams is so legitimately terrible that it's dominance is proof that market forces aren't working and that Microsoft is using its dominance in one area to enter other areas.
Cockbrand 2y ago
> Nobody can compete with Microsoft's office suite all-in-one + the kitchen sink bundle, though, so it persists. Well, there's Google Workspace (and a few smaller, less comprehensive suites) as a very competitive alternative with everything + kitchen sink, but - nobody ever got fired buying ~IBM~ Microsoft - MS is already in all enterprises, so it's quite easy for their sales people to position their products - the people who make the decision to buy M365 aren't the power users who suffer from the poor design in the products - there's a huge vendor lock-in due to lots of legacy .docx, .pptx and .xlsx files that won't be parsed correctly by 3rd party software due to the formats' intentional complexity
- dijit 2y ago
  Interesting factoid about Google Workspace: if you send me a google docs link, I, with any Google account (even Federated identity account) can use and modify that document as a regular user. That's not true for Microsoft, and I was forced to buy some Office software for our business because an external company used Microsoft products. Quite infectious. Yet they could use our tools free of charge, they just refused.

AStonesThrow 2y ago

It's deeply frustrating to see people who resent giants because they're strong. MS did what anyone else would do in their position, inferior or not. This was not a situation where everyone chose to wear potato sacks instead of Nike. Clothing is a stylistic and individualistic choice, whereas your business's OS, platform, and software have concerns of support, compatibility, interoperation, long-term stability, etc. Compatibility and interop are things that large software vendors simply can't uphold very well at all. Even if they were magnanimous, generous, 100% committed to interop with everything else, they would incur massive tech debt and support burdens to arrange for those things. So of course they build in unique features. Of course they make breaking changes. Of course they're ensuring you stay as a customer. More than that, if a business looks around and 9/10ths of their partners use FOOBAR WIDGETS, and 99% of their workforce is trained exclusively in FOOBAR WIDGETS, what widgets are they gonna choose? The network effect has been strong for choice of platform/software, and once a plurality was achieved, MS essentially had a commitment and responsibility to the business world to be their huckleberry. At that point, force isn't necessary when customers are clamoring to be let in to the club. Force isn't necessary when your labor pool is full of MCSEs competing with neckbeards who spit on Bill Gates.

dmonitor 2y ago
People don't hate MS because they're big. They hate them because they make shit software and are force people to use it with anti-competitive practices. If each of Microsoft's products had to compete individually, most of them would go the way of Windows Phone, Zune, Internet Explorer, and Xbox. Their few good products would benefit from this too by increasing interoperability with other software. They need to be broken up.
- AStonesThrow 2y ago
  > People don't hate MS because they're big. I'm sorry that you're blanket speaking for everyone else, because I certainly did. I hated MS because they were big, they were powerful, they were my father's favorite. I reviled Bill Gates because of his education and privilege and vision, and I renamed "win.com" to "lose.com" and plastered "Satan Inside" stickers on my AMD-processor machines that eventually ran Minix and OpenBSD. In college I became an arrogant Unix bigot, and I cultivated a distinct superiority complex, as if I could singlehandedly usher in The Year of Linux on the Desktop. Eventually I came to accept that it was just software; it was software that everyone else used just fine; and that a uniform installation of adequate software is better for the collective good than some idealistic, unachievable utopia of Richard Stallman's wet dreams.