6 ms·

Refreshing. No more Teams? Sounds like a dream... Of all the crapware I am forced to work with, Teams really pushes the envelope in every single negative way co

Refreshing. No more Teams? Sounds like a dream... Of all the crapware I am forced to work with, Teams really pushes the envelope in every single negative way conceivable. I think I have more love for SharePoint than Teams, and that is a massive concession.

Banditoz 9mo ago
Every Teams team is backed by SharePoint, unfortunately.
- muwtyhg 9mo ago
  And every private channel as well. And if you rename the Team, the SharePoint will become out-of-sync and all URLs will still use the old Team name.
  - zelphirkalt 9mo ago
    Oh, this is useful info... Another tool in the box of making other people realize how much it sucks.
- jl6 9mo ago
  Teams, Sharepoint, Exchange, and OneDrive seem to be connected by a maze of dark twisty integration passages which no single human has mapped fully.
  - procflora 9mo ago
    Somewhere, in the deepest bowels, Skype still lives. I'm sure of it.
    - marcosdumay 9mo ago
      Lync is still there, lurking. With Communicator blocking every contact with the outside world. But eventually some message will pass through!
    - zelphirkalt 9mo ago
      It actually does or at least did, until at least a few years ago. When you opened the audio mixer (alsamixer or pulse audio control?) on XFCE, you could still see MS Teams labeled as Skype there. Not sure how it would be now, because I only ever use MS Teams isolated in a separate Ungoogled Chromium browser now, and have given up on the client for GNU/Linux.
- blitzar 9mo ago
  I knew I could smell a poo in the room, I didn't know what or who was responsible but it all makes sense now.
macspoofing 9mo ago
It's not that bad. It's well integrated into Sharepoint, Exchange, and Office, and does the job. I've used both Slack and Teams and if you're using MS365, then Teams is absolutely the better option.
- Lio 9mo ago
  Teams not being able to do threaded conversations consistently or reliably is a massive pain for me. I hate it. Corporate IT is just hell for users.
- clhodapp 9mo ago
  For many of us, you are describing a black hole of integrated nightmare software
- sigmoid10 9mo ago
  As someone who has gone from 100% Slack in startups to all-in Teams in big corpo, I disagree. Teams won't even display all office file formats without you having to open the dedicated app. And if it does it's usually a half-baked browser mess. And don't even get me started on the UX or meeting options or mobile support or the complete lack of a dedicated Linux client. I don't need one app to do everything half-assed, I need one app that does exactly what it's meant for well. Preferably on every platform.
  - thewebguyd 9mo ago
    > I don't need one app to do everything half-assed That's primarily why it sucks, and that seems to be Microsoft's standard operating procedure. Everything they put out is in the category of "does everything, but half-assed with a web of fragile "integrations" that break if you look at it funny." Worse, it's all SharePoint all the way down. Every team (and private channel!) is a SharePoint site, every user's OneDrive in the same tenant is a personal SharePoint Site. Every M365 Group gets its own SharePoint site (and mailbox). Creating a Team also creates an M365 group, but not vice versa. Heaven forbid you rename something in the stack or you are in for a world of pain. It's also by design that way. SharePoint storage is expensive, and boy what a disaster it is to ever try and get your data out of it. Yet, for some reason, companies keep buying it and keep using it, letting Microsoft suck them in and hold them there for eternity. If you're starting a new company, never, ever, buy anything Microsoft. Just don't go down that road. It's not worth it.
boringg 9mo ago
I couldn't agree more with this. Teams somehow managed to supercede my other microphone preferences when I'm not even using teams (took me a while to figure out). It might be one of the apps I detest the most. There is very little satisfaction with it and much annoyance.
- PeterStuer 9mo ago
  By default, Teams never releases your audio input channel, even when you close it.
  - boringg 9mo ago
    Why would they do that? So annoying.
    - zelphirkalt 9mo ago
      2 theories: (1) They couldn't imagine anyone ever closing their gloriously developed MS Teams. (2) Since everyone knows MS Teams and sitting in meetings all day is the one most important thing to get stuff done, they went ahead and made MS Teams a "priority". F using anything else! Maybe if it doesn't release the audio input, it will be 50ms faster next call! That ought to be enough for you!
- marcosdumay 9mo ago
  Somehow, Teams overrides the volume controls on my Android phone. It's physically user-hostile.
tartoran 9mo ago
Teams is the bane of my existence. Oh well, one of them at least and am forced to use it for the time being. Europeans may get lucky with some sane software or get something even worse than Teams. It remains to be seen how they do. If their software is starting to get better, perhaps US software will get better too because they can no longer justify the junk they're pumping out on us.
- pelagicAustral 9mo ago
  > get something even worse than Teams I'm not sure that's actually possible, you know...
  - tartoran 9mo ago
    I hope for the best for Europeans but until I see results I'm not sure what they're capable of.
    - zelphirkalt 9mo ago
      I guess we could concoct something made out of PHP4/5 and jQuery and use Xampp stack, to get something worse. Or wait, I have it! We build it on top of MS Excel!
dgxyz 9mo ago
They just shot Slack and moved to Teams only here. The company is falling apart so quickly they are going to have to pay up again before the end of the month.
- andix 9mo ago
  Because slack startet to extort their customers. I guess many moved away, to be prepared if slack decides to push their prices even further.
  - wrs 9mo ago
    Though, if your choice is between Salesforce licensing and Microsoft licensing, at least it’s possible to understand Salesforce licensing.
    - andix 9mo ago
      A lot of companies already have Teams included in their existing licenses. But yeah, Microsoft licensing is impossible to understand.
kenjackson 9mo ago
I have to admit, I have almost no problems with Teams. The one big issue I had was performance when screen sharing. But I got a new laptop and this problem went away. Seems so odd that so many people have major problems with it, while I feel like within my workgroup there are almost no problems to speak of.
- pjmlp 9mo ago
  One day they will discover threaded conversions.
  - zelphirkalt 9mo ago
    And then we will get rid of them again, because some suits are telling us that we don't actually want them, that they are "complicated", we must trust them and that recursive data types are too hard to get right. Let's all write SMS again. Or better yet, send fax. Some engineers will facepalm super hard but won't be listened to, as usual, and we will enter the next cosmic age of self-inflicted suffering.
    - pjmlp 9mo ago
      Thankfully I only have to use Teams in very specific projects, thus I still have them. :)
- delecti 9mo ago
  How extensively do you use it? When my team was just using it for meetings and the attached chats, it did actually work completely fine. When broader orgs started pushing more communications through it (the "teams" in teams, and all the weird chat room/forums that entails) all of the rough edges became very apparent. All of that is just a shockingly disorganized mess.
- andix 9mo ago
  This was discussed before: if your Windows computer doesn't have a valid HEVC license installed, then Teams falls back to software encoding and performs horrible. Most manufacturers include the license, but not all. It's also only 99 cents on the Microsoft store (which might be unavailable on enterprise managed devices)
e12e 9mo ago
Heh, now that our team has standardized on Teams rather than Zulip (so that we suffer/connect with the rest of the org whom are stuck in MS land) - and I've been given the chance to use Teams for a while - it really is worse than I initially thought. Which means it's time to look for alternative clients. I ws hoping for something like WeeSlack: https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack But all I found was: https://github.com/btp/teams-cli https://github.com/btp/teams-cli https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-teams https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-teams Are there really no good Teams clients? Doesn't have to plug in to WeeChat or be a TUI... But something?
- dijit 9mo ago
  You'd understand why there's no even half-decent clients for Teams if you ever tried to write a bot in Teams. That's just a pure lesson in pain. Webhooks work, but proper bots are borderline impossible; at least without giving you the feeling that you'd rather pull your own teeth out with pliers.
  - exceptione 9mo ago
    Sorry to hear. Pulling teeth with pliers on-premise has been out of support for a while. Please contact our sales team if you haven't tried our Pliers Copilot 365 For Teams and Dentists offering yet. It solves any problems you might currently experience.
    - dijit 9mo ago
      Audibly laughed. Thank you for that.
- wizzwizz4 9mo ago
  Even authenticating to Teams is a herculean task. Microsoft's official APIs seem purpose-built to prevent people from writing proper Teams interfaces, and attempting to replicate their proprietary SSO flow is extremely painful. (In theory, you could hook into it by starting a fresh web browser at the appropriate login page, waiting for the appropriate redirects, and then harvesting the relevant cookies, but that's a really ugly solution, and it already represents a lot of invested work.)
TulliusCicero 9mo ago
The risk is of course that the new thing might be worse than Teams somehow.
- soperj 9mo ago
  The only possibility is if you get it from Oracle instead.
  - TulliusCicero 9mo ago
    Well no, there's always the European Oracle: SAP.
    - marcosdumay 9mo ago
      It's a good thing in this context that they are on the other side of the border.
- ziotom78 9mo ago
  It will surely be worse, at least at the beginning. But there is a significant chance that with time they will improve it, and one can hope that one year after the first release the product will actually be better than Teams, given that the developers will improve it based on their own experience.
andix 9mo ago
I don't have a lot of complaints with the current version of teams. Messaging and video calls work without major issues. It's bloated, and all those plugins are usually bad, but the basics work well for me. The new Outlook app is horrible though.
elzbardico 9mo ago
You kids have it easy. Once I worked in a company with two brands after a fusion, and all of us had to use both Exchange and Lotus Notes. And I was almost forgetting SharePoint.
tedggh 9mo ago
What’s so bad about Teams that makes it so hated? I used it lately and often to work with a customer and I don’t find anything terrible about it, other than some minor usability annoyances like phantom chat notifications once in a while. But overall it does what it’s supposed to do, get on a video call, share your screen and share files over channels. The transcript feature seems to work well too. I’m not amazed by it, but I don’t see anything to hate either. I guess it is one of those tools I don’t have a strong opinion about.
- wolvoleo 9mo ago
  It's a resource hog, crashes, it's constantly littering files all over SharePoint which becomes even more than a garbage bin than it already is. And the UI is terrible, huge balloons around everything. I want density but even at the densest setting it sucks. Oh and it also fails to update online status. Often I click on a colleague who seems green and only then it updates and it turns out they've been away for 3 hours. Grrr
- dijit 9mo ago
  "I don't have an issue with it" tells me you've never used anything else. Have you tried Slack? Zulip? Mattermost? Fucking... IRC from 1988? Teams isn't just mediocre, it's aggressively hostile to basic usability. The camera bar sits at the top of the window, directly blocking where you're supposed to position your camera for eye contact. Chat organisation is broken: you get duplicate groups because the order people were added matters somehow. Notifications phantom in and out. Reactions are buried in an activity feed. Search is useless. You can't reliably paste text without major formatting issues. The mobile app logs you out randomly and doesn’t tell you unless you manually check it. Desktop notifications don't sync with read state. Files uploaded to chat don't appear in the Files tab. The "new Teams" broke half the features that worked in classic Teams. Presence status is a coin flip. Audio settings reset themselves between calls. Screen sharing has a 50/50 chance of sharing the wrong window. The difference between a chat and a channel is arbitrary and confusing. You can't edit messages older than a few hours. Threading is bolted on and barely works. Performance is inexcusable. Multiple gigabytes of RAM to display text messages and lag constantly on modern hardware. How do you make a chat application lag? It's rendering text, not computing fluid dynamics. Opening the application takes 30 seconds on an SSD. Switching between chats stutters. Typing has input delay. The real problem isn't that Teams is terrible. It's that "it technically functions" has become an acceptable standard. When you've never experienced better, "it works" seems fine. But Teams is what happens when a monopoly position means you don't have to care about quality. Microsoft has unlimited resources and still ships this. Even Skype for Business was more stable, and in Skype for Business you couldn't reliably select text. That's how low the bar is.
randusername 9mo ago
The Zen of Teams is that Teams is so clunky it cannot be Slack. Without threads, there is no breach of thread-etiquette. When "channels" are so awkward, nobody uses them. Then there is no constant deluge of middle-age folks creating a Facebook out of work, needing to be reminded that the photos channel is for business-photos, not pictures of their kids. When emoji support is limited, nobody has to police people pushing the boundaries of what emojis are appropriate. The software is baffling. But I like it that way.
- wilsonnb3 9mo ago
  You can upload custom emoji to teams, most businesses just turn it off
- nickkell 9mo ago
  For the most part I agree with you: there is less functionality and hence less to police. There are also fewer people in chats/channels, as for the most part they are private or undiscoverable. There are definitely still breaches of etiquette though, e.g. people frequently tagging a whole channel when they have a support question, even though it contains hundreds of people.
ergocoder 9mo ago
> No more Teams? Sounds like a dream. No more Words? Introducing a worse software than Words...
rurp 9mo ago
I've had to start using Teams more lately and it is indeed as terrible as I'd heard. The other day I needed to copy a number of items from an ongoing chat. Seems like an extremely simple and normal thing, but every time I hover over a message a popup jumps up with emoji reactions that partially covers the text I'm trying to copy. Trying to move quickly, I kept accidentally "reacting" to messages instead of double clicking the text. To make matters worse there's no way to disable this "feature"! Why?! Teams is supposed to be a professional workplace tool from one of the biggest software companies in the world, but it feels like something a high schooler coded up for fun. Weirdly Discord, a platform explicitly meant for gamers, is a more useful chat tool. I don't like Discord at all, but it's better than Teams.
- internet_points 9mo ago
  What are the downsides of Discord?
zelphirkalt 9mo ago
As bad and evil as MS Teams may be, I recently got invited to a Zoom meeting, and you simply can't use it in the browser! They just force you to download their shitty app to join. Naturally, I did not install crapware and closed the tab, as fortunately it was no mandatory event for me. At least in MS Teams I can isolate it into its separate ungoogled Chromium installation and treat that as a shitty app, without having to install crap onto my system.
- tlarkworthy 9mo ago
  It makes you download it but then a button appears saying join in browser. I have tons of zoom binary copies
- distances 9mo ago
  Zoom calls work fine in the browser. They first make it look like you need the native client, but there's some dance you need to make to get the web link. Reload, wait, spin in your chair, something like that. Of course I would never choose Zoom or Teams if I had the power, but Chromium does work with both when those are the tools your client uses.

Banditoz 9mo ago

Every Teams team is backed by SharePoint, unfortunately.

muwtyhg 9mo ago
And every private channel as well. And if you rename the Team, the SharePoint will become out-of-sync and all URLs will still use the old Team name.
- zelphirkalt 9mo ago
  Oh, this is useful info... Another tool in the box of making other people realize how much it sucks.
jl6 9mo ago
Teams, Sharepoint, Exchange, and OneDrive seem to be connected by a maze of dark twisty integration passages which no single human has mapped fully.
- procflora 9mo ago
  Somewhere, in the deepest bowels, Skype still lives. I'm sure of it.
  - marcosdumay 9mo ago
    Lync is still there, lurking. With Communicator blocking every contact with the outside world. But eventually some message will pass through!
  - zelphirkalt 9mo ago
    It actually does or at least did, until at least a few years ago. When you opened the audio mixer (alsamixer or pulse audio control?) on XFCE, you could still see MS Teams labeled as Skype there. Not sure how it would be now, because I only ever use MS Teams isolated in a separate Ungoogled Chromium browser now, and have given up on the client for GNU/Linux.
blitzar 9mo ago
I knew I could smell a poo in the room, I didn't know what or who was responsible but it all makes sense now.

macspoofing 9mo ago

It's not that bad. It's well integrated into Sharepoint, Exchange, and Office, and does the job. I've used both Slack and Teams and if you're using MS365, then Teams is absolutely the better option.

Lio 9mo ago
Teams not being able to do threaded conversations consistently or reliably is a massive pain for me. I hate it. Corporate IT is just hell for users.
clhodapp 9mo ago
For many of us, you are describing a black hole of integrated nightmare software
sigmoid10 9mo ago
As someone who has gone from 100% Slack in startups to all-in Teams in big corpo, I disagree. Teams won't even display all office file formats without you having to open the dedicated app. And if it does it's usually a half-baked browser mess. And don't even get me started on the UX or meeting options or mobile support or the complete lack of a dedicated Linux client. I don't need one app to do everything half-assed, I need one app that does exactly what it's meant for well. Preferably on every platform.
- thewebguyd 9mo ago
  > I don't need one app to do everything half-assed That's primarily why it sucks, and that seems to be Microsoft's standard operating procedure. Everything they put out is in the category of "does everything, but half-assed with a web of fragile "integrations" that break if you look at it funny." Worse, it's all SharePoint all the way down. Every team (and private channel!) is a SharePoint site, every user's OneDrive in the same tenant is a personal SharePoint Site. Every M365 Group gets its own SharePoint site (and mailbox). Creating a Team also creates an M365 group, but not vice versa. Heaven forbid you rename something in the stack or you are in for a world of pain. It's also by design that way. SharePoint storage is expensive, and boy what a disaster it is to ever try and get your data out of it. Yet, for some reason, companies keep buying it and keep using it, letting Microsoft suck them in and hold them there for eternity. If you're starting a new company, never, ever, buy anything Microsoft. Just don't go down that road. It's not worth it.

boringg 9mo ago

I couldn't agree more with this. Teams somehow managed to supercede my other microphone preferences when I'm not even using teams (took me a while to figure out). It might be one of the apps I detest the most. There is very little satisfaction with it and much annoyance.

PeterStuer 9mo ago
By default, Teams never releases your audio input channel, even when you close it.
- boringg 9mo ago
  Why would they do that? So annoying.
  - zelphirkalt 9mo ago
    2 theories: (1) They couldn't imagine anyone ever closing their gloriously developed MS Teams. (2) Since everyone knows MS Teams and sitting in meetings all day is the one most important thing to get stuff done, they went ahead and made MS Teams a "priority". F using anything else! Maybe if it doesn't release the audio input, it will be 50ms faster next call! That ought to be enough for you!
marcosdumay 9mo ago
Somehow, Teams overrides the volume controls on my Android phone. It's physically user-hostile.

tartoran 9mo ago

Teams is the bane of my existence. Oh well, one of them at least and am forced to use it for the time being. Europeans may get lucky with some sane software or get something even worse than Teams. It remains to be seen how they do. If their software is starting to get better, perhaps US software will get better too because they can no longer justify the junk they're pumping out on us.

pelagicAustral 9mo ago
> get something even worse than Teams I'm not sure that's actually possible, you know...
- tartoran 9mo ago
  I hope for the best for Europeans but until I see results I'm not sure what they're capable of.
  - zelphirkalt 9mo ago
    I guess we could concoct something made out of PHP4/5 and jQuery and use Xampp stack, to get something worse. Or wait, I have it! We build it on top of MS Excel!

dgxyz 9mo ago

They just shot Slack and moved to Teams only here. The company is falling apart so quickly they are going to have to pay up again before the end of the month.

andix 9mo ago
Because slack startet to extort their customers. I guess many moved away, to be prepared if slack decides to push their prices even further.
- wrs 9mo ago
  Though, if your choice is between Salesforce licensing and Microsoft licensing, at least it’s possible to understand Salesforce licensing.
  - andix 9mo ago
    A lot of companies already have Teams included in their existing licenses. But yeah, Microsoft licensing is impossible to understand.

kenjackson 9mo ago

I have to admit, I have almost no problems with Teams. The one big issue I had was performance when screen sharing. But I got a new laptop and this problem went away. Seems so odd that so many people have major problems with it, while I feel like within my workgroup there are almost no problems to speak of.

pjmlp 9mo ago
One day they will discover threaded conversions.
- zelphirkalt 9mo ago
  And then we will get rid of them again, because some suits are telling us that we don't actually want them, that they are "complicated", we must trust them and that recursive data types are too hard to get right. Let's all write SMS again. Or better yet, send fax. Some engineers will facepalm super hard but won't be listened to, as usual, and we will enter the next cosmic age of self-inflicted suffering.
  - pjmlp 9mo ago
    Thankfully I only have to use Teams in very specific projects, thus I still have them. :)
delecti 9mo ago
How extensively do you use it? When my team was just using it for meetings and the attached chats, it did actually work completely fine. When broader orgs started pushing more communications through it (the "teams" in teams, and all the weird chat room/forums that entails) all of the rough edges became very apparent. All of that is just a shockingly disorganized mess.
andix 9mo ago
This was discussed before: if your Windows computer doesn't have a valid HEVC license installed, then Teams falls back to software encoding and performs horrible. Most manufacturers include the license, but not all. It's also only 99 cents on the Microsoft store (which might be unavailable on enterprise managed devices)

e12e 9mo ago

Heh, now that our team has standardized on Teams rather than Zulip (so that we suffer/connect with the rest of the org whom are stuck in MS land) - and I've been given the chance to use Teams for a while - it really is worse than I initially thought. Which means it's time to look for alternative clients. I ws hoping for something like WeeSlack: https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack But all I found was: https://github.com/btp/teams-cli https://github.com/btp/teams-cli https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-teams https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-teams Are there really no good Teams clients? Doesn't have to plug in to WeeChat or be a TUI... But something?

dijit 9mo ago
You'd understand why there's no even half-decent clients for Teams if you ever tried to write a bot in Teams. That's just a pure lesson in pain. Webhooks work, but proper bots are borderline impossible; at least without giving you the feeling that you'd rather pull your own teeth out with pliers.
- exceptione 9mo ago
  Sorry to hear. Pulling teeth with pliers on-premise has been out of support for a while. Please contact our sales team if you haven't tried our Pliers Copilot 365 For Teams and Dentists offering yet. It solves any problems you might currently experience.
  - dijit 9mo ago
    Audibly laughed. Thank you for that.
wizzwizz4 9mo ago
Even authenticating to Teams is a herculean task. Microsoft's official APIs seem purpose-built to prevent people from writing proper Teams interfaces, and attempting to replicate their proprietary SSO flow is extremely painful. (In theory, you could hook into it by starting a fresh web browser at the appropriate login page, waiting for the appropriate redirects, and then harvesting the relevant cookies, but that's a really ugly solution, and it already represents a lot of invested work.)

TulliusCicero 9mo ago

The risk is of course that the new thing might be worse than Teams somehow.

soperj 9mo ago
The only possibility is if you get it from Oracle instead.
- TulliusCicero 9mo ago
  Well no, there's always the European Oracle: SAP.
  - marcosdumay 9mo ago
    It's a good thing in this context that they are on the other side of the border.
ziotom78 9mo ago
It will surely be worse, at least at the beginning. But there is a significant chance that with time they will improve it, and one can hope that one year after the first release the product will actually be better than Teams, given that the developers will improve it based on their own experience.

andix 9mo ago

I don't have a lot of complaints with the current version of teams. Messaging and video calls work without major issues. It's bloated, and all those plugins are usually bad, but the basics work well for me. The new Outlook app is horrible though.

elzbardico 9mo ago

You kids have it easy. Once I worked in a company with two brands after a fusion, and all of us had to use both Exchange and Lotus Notes. And I was almost forgetting SharePoint.

tedggh 9mo ago

What’s so bad about Teams that makes it so hated? I used it lately and often to work with a customer and I don’t find anything terrible about it, other than some minor usability annoyances like phantom chat notifications once in a while. But overall it does what it’s supposed to do, get on a video call, share your screen and share files over channels. The transcript feature seems to work well too. I’m not amazed by it, but I don’t see anything to hate either. I guess it is one of those tools I don’t have a strong opinion about.

wolvoleo 9mo ago
It's a resource hog, crashes, it's constantly littering files all over SharePoint which becomes even more than a garbage bin than it already is. And the UI is terrible, huge balloons around everything. I want density but even at the densest setting it sucks. Oh and it also fails to update online status. Often I click on a colleague who seems green and only then it updates and it turns out they've been away for 3 hours. Grrr
dijit 9mo ago
"I don't have an issue with it" tells me you've never used anything else. Have you tried Slack? Zulip? Mattermost? Fucking... IRC from 1988? Teams isn't just mediocre, it's aggressively hostile to basic usability. The camera bar sits at the top of the window, directly blocking where you're supposed to position your camera for eye contact. Chat organisation is broken: you get duplicate groups because the order people were added matters somehow. Notifications phantom in and out. Reactions are buried in an activity feed. Search is useless. You can't reliably paste text without major formatting issues. The mobile app logs you out randomly and doesn’t tell you unless you manually check it. Desktop notifications don't sync with read state. Files uploaded to chat don't appear in the Files tab. The "new Teams" broke half the features that worked in classic Teams. Presence status is a coin flip. Audio settings reset themselves between calls. Screen sharing has a 50/50 chance of sharing the wrong window. The difference between a chat and a channel is arbitrary and confusing. You can't edit messages older than a few hours. Threading is bolted on and barely works. Performance is inexcusable. Multiple gigabytes of RAM to display text messages and lag constantly on modern hardware. How do you make a chat application lag? It's rendering text, not computing fluid dynamics. Opening the application takes 30 seconds on an SSD. Switching between chats stutters. Typing has input delay. The real problem isn't that Teams is terrible. It's that "it technically functions" has become an acceptable standard. When you've never experienced better, "it works" seems fine. But Teams is what happens when a monopoly position means you don't have to care about quality. Microsoft has unlimited resources and still ships this. Even Skype for Business was more stable, and in Skype for Business you couldn't reliably select text. That's how low the bar is.

randusername 9mo ago

The Zen of Teams is that Teams is so clunky it cannot be Slack. Without threads, there is no breach of thread-etiquette. When "channels" are so awkward, nobody uses them. Then there is no constant deluge of middle-age folks creating a Facebook out of work, needing to be reminded that the photos channel is for business-photos, not pictures of their kids. When emoji support is limited, nobody has to police people pushing the boundaries of what emojis are appropriate. The software is baffling. But I like it that way.

wilsonnb3 9mo ago
You can upload custom emoji to teams, most businesses just turn it off
nickkell 9mo ago
For the most part I agree with you: there is less functionality and hence less to police. There are also fewer people in chats/channels, as for the most part they are private or undiscoverable. There are definitely still breaches of etiquette though, e.g. people frequently tagging a whole channel when they have a support question, even though it contains hundreds of people.

ergocoder 9mo ago

> No more Teams? Sounds like a dream. No more Words? Introducing a worse software than Words...

rurp 9mo ago

I've had to start using Teams more lately and it is indeed as terrible as I'd heard. The other day I needed to copy a number of items from an ongoing chat. Seems like an extremely simple and normal thing, but every time I hover over a message a popup jumps up with emoji reactions that partially covers the text I'm trying to copy. Trying to move quickly, I kept accidentally "reacting" to messages instead of double clicking the text. To make matters worse there's no way to disable this "feature"! Why?! Teams is supposed to be a professional workplace tool from one of the biggest software companies in the world, but it feels like something a high schooler coded up for fun. Weirdly Discord, a platform explicitly meant for gamers, is a more useful chat tool. I don't like Discord at all, but it's better than Teams.

internet_points 9mo ago
What are the downsides of Discord?

zelphirkalt 9mo ago

As bad and evil as MS Teams may be, I recently got invited to a Zoom meeting, and you simply can't use it in the browser! They just force you to download their shitty app to join. Naturally, I did not install crapware and closed the tab, as fortunately it was no mandatory event for me. At least in MS Teams I can isolate it into its separate ungoogled Chromium installation and treat that as a shitty app, without having to install crap onto my system.

tlarkworthy 9mo ago
It makes you download it but then a button appears saying join in browser. I have tons of zoom binary copies
distances 9mo ago
Zoom calls work fine in the browser. They first make it look like you need the native client, but there's some dance you need to make to get the web link. Reload, wait, spin in your chair, something like that. Of course I would never choose Zoom or Teams if I had the power, but Chromium does work with both when those are the tools your client uses.