4 ms·

> Microsoft did, and Teams is by all reports a solid success. Not sure if the author has used Teams. But otherwise, I agree we need an actual good, adorable S

• spprashant 8mo ago
  Its a solid success if you squint just at the adoption numbers they achieved by cross selling it.
• Muromec 8mo ago
  I use teams at work and it's okay. Not the best, not the worst, but okay piece of software. At least I have both the calendar and the videocall things in one app and see when the call starts, so I don't accidentally ADHD myself into missing it.
  • simfree 8mo ago
    Exactly, no on is truly overjoyed with Teams. As shovelware goes it is passable, but that is a low bar
  • viraptor 8mo ago
    Anything that accepts webhook integrations will be able to do this. I've got the Google calendar and meeting notifications on Slack, but it would be trivial to replicate with any two systems that have APIs available.
    • PretzelPirate 8mo ago
      My company would never let me expose my calendar data to Slack. That's why they like M365, all the integration is there with less risk of oversharing data.
      • viraptor 8mo ago
        It would be less of an issue if they hosted it themselves.
• MattGaiser 8mo ago
  Yeah, I would be curious if there is anyone out there paying for Teams. Teams wins as Teams is free with your other Office stuff.
• tootie 8mo ago
  I guess I'm in the minority but I haven't noticed a significant variance in quality and features on any chat app I've used in the past 20 years. It seems like a thoroughly solved problem. Slack's "killer feature" was that they really streamlined onboarding which is feels neat the first time you do it. Otherwise, chat is chat. The biggest obstacle has always been getting everyone you need to talk to to agree on which platform to use.
• simfree 8mo ago
  Teams is shovelware. Force bundled, with questionably reliable messaging, okay video calling (if your organization policies don't break it), and a fairly useless Phone System component that misbehaves often. Great for organizations that believe these forms of communication should be an afterthought that has rough edges and inconsistent reliability. The recent changes to end webhook support, kill Linux desktop support and do yet another rewrite are inane. Don't expect features you use today in Teams to work in 2 years...
  • icameron 8mo ago
    My org went all in on Teams over 6 years ago. Removed all PBX systems and desk phones. Pulled out Cisco phones from 20 offices. Ported all numbers to MS. By all accounts it was unremarkable to the end users, and when WFH mandates started it was seamless. Definitely a lot less IT support for configuring and troubleshooting a phone system too. There is far less downtime because Teams will ring through to your cell phone if the office internet is down or your laptop is off. That was not possible when the Cisco routers and CallManager in the office were running the DIDs and local extensions
    • viraptor 8mo ago
      > That was not possible when the Cisco routers and CallManager in the office were running the DIDs and local extensions You could do it with other software hosted outside the office though. There are definitely options here.
      • anthonypasq96 8mo ago
        yeah, thats why people just use Teams
    • stonogo 8mo ago
      It was, in fact, even with existing Microsoft products (Lync/Skype for Business). It was even possible if you had paid for those features for UCM from Cisco. Teams was simply the cheaper option (although they tried to keep charging my org Lync prices, and we had to threaten to uproot MS products and go to Cisco before they gave us the new pricing).
• MagicMoonlight 8mo ago
  What issues do you have with teams? It works well and there’s nothing I can think of that I want in it. It’s just a video and chat app.
  • 4nonverbal-alit 8mo ago
    Let me clear my cache after logging in twice to get the OOM fixed so I can finally login to show you what’s wrong with it over a teams call and hope it doesn’t logout and reload randomly during the call.
  • udfalkso 8mo ago
    Teams suffers from one giant problem. There is a totally odd, but understandable from tech debt perspective, segregation between “chats” and “teams” which makes it practically impossible to find everything. It’s a fatal flaw. Slack is beautifully simple and effective in comparison. Also, the reminder feature on slack is extremely useful to me personally and I miss it dearly in teams.
    • snowfield 8mo ago
      Yes, in a world of dynamic virtual teams and cross cooperation across teams. «Teams» is an ancient construct
  • vladvasiliu 8mo ago
    It's by and large the slowest, jankiest, laggiest software I use regularly. And I say that as someone who swears Adobe has added a bunch of sleeps in Lightroom. On basic chat: it will sometimes scroll up when I get a new message, while I'm actively participating in that chat, so I need to scroll back down to read the new messages. Occasionally it flickers, for bonus points. It will not mark the chat as read if I'm on it without clicking on a different chat and coming back. It's the only software I use that, for some reason, has an effect on my typing accuracy. Don't even get me started on its handling of copy/paste. I'm also pretty sure there's some joke I just don't get around the search function. For calls: it refuses to pick the correct microphone, and will sometimes mute it completely somehow (I lose the feedback in the headphones – I have a jabra headset that does this). This will even happen when I hang up a call and start another one right away. Other times it works well. My default mic is always my wired, always connected, headset mic. I don't use BT headsets that switch from music to communications or whatever depending on what I do, which could confuse the available / selected mics. It drains my laptop's and iphone's battery like no tomorrow, even if I turn off video and only do voice chat, even if nobody has the camera on or shares a screen. Also, on Windows, for some reason it doesn't use the native notifications, but implements its own crappy ones – but this isn't that big of an issue, since I mostly disable them anyway. All this is happening on both the "heavy" (heh) Windows client, and on chrome on Linux, both running on a fairly beefy new PC with gobs of RAM. Fun fact: the experience was exactly the same on my 5-year-old laptop with a U-series Intel CPU, so I don't think it's a resources problem.
• cj 8mo ago
  > I thought Google might do this after not buying Slack They did: Google Chat. It’s bundled with Google Workspace.
  • figmert 8mo ago
    And it's worse than Teams
    • 2muchcoffeeman 8mo ago
      It’s fine if you want a barebones chat.
      • mvanbaak 8mo ago
        so is IRC
        • olyjohn 8mo ago
          God please let me switch my company to an internal IRC server...
    • cj 8mo ago
      I used it for about a year with a small team. It worked well for what it does, but the functionality is definitely stripped down and barebones compared to Slack. I don't remember any performance or reliability issues.
    • bigstrat2003 8mo ago
      In no way is Gchat worse than teams. It's basic, but the basic functionality works... which is a lot more than you can say for teams.
    • ngrilly 8mo ago
      Hard disagree. We use both in my company. Google Chat is definitely better than Teams for actual collaboration: it's easier to track unread messages in "Home" (it's the "inbox"), and channels (called "spaces") are much better designed (they are conceptually closer to Slack's channels). Also, it's not crashing all the time. What's missing: the message editor doesn't support nested bulleted lists, we can't archive a space/channel.
• darth_avocado 8mo ago
  We are being forced to dump slack for Teams. The only people who like Teams is Sales and Marketing for some reason. Not a single engineer likes this, and it will break every engineering convenience that exists on Slack.
  • awesome_dude 8mo ago
    As an ENG - I REALLY dislike teams - but I also dislike Slack Slack should be emails that have been arranged into different folders - it just doesn't vibe with me for much otherwise (oo look you have 200 channels on unread - or, if you are the reverse, ooo look 200 channels with people chatting and I have to check every single one of them :(
    • BoredPositron 8mo ago
      I hate unified inboxes with a burning passion.
      • awesome_dude 8mo ago
        Ha ha ha, it's agreed then - NOBODY TALKS TO ENG
      • rpdillon 8mo ago
        Yeah, I mean the first thing we all do when we get one giant unified inbox is write a bunch of rules to break it back out to a set of folders so that we can triage it appropriately. Slack channels just do this from the get go.
• e12e 8mo ago
  Google gave us Wave - surely that's enough? /s
  • outofpaper 8mo ago
    Lol it aas an admirable attempt at something new. I loved the interesting blend of messaging and document creation. It the code still lives on as an archived open project btw. https://github.com/apache/incubator-retired-wave https://github.com/apache/incubator-retired-wave
• steeleduncan 8mo ago
  Discord if you don't mind something proprietary, Mattermost or Rocketchat if you do, Zulip if you want something slightly different . . . and no doubt many other alternatives Slack is easy to replace with something cheaper and better on a product or technical level. The network effects are strong of course, but they won't sustain it forever
  • glerk 8mo ago
    Discord is a solid product. They just need to launch a simple business-friendly alternative UI without the teenager gamer aesthetics. I’m surprised they never tried going after the enterprise market.
    • roncesvalles 8mo ago
      Enterprise doesn't buy chat/meeting products without PSTN interop (dial-in dial-out to traditional phone line). Discord would probably need to double their dev team to add PSTN. Building something like Slack or Teams to the level that a F500 company would make it their primary videoconferencing solution is a multi-thousand-employee project. It's not a little skunkworks project for 15-20 people in some corner of the office. That's why TFA is hilariously flawed. When Altman says "tell us what we should build, we'll probably build it!", he's talking about driveways and backyard pools, not the Golden Gate Bridge. It's like asking mall Santa for a summer home in the Hamptons.
      • redserk 8mo ago
        There’s a size of enterprise where you can get away without PSTN integration but do need an answer for SSO and account provisioning/deprovisioning.
      • glerk 8mo ago
        > multi-thousand-employee project I know absolutely nothing about PSTN interop and I'm sure it's very complex to implement. However, at the end of the day, this is just software we're talking about right? Software is cheap and easy to produce these days and I doubt you need thousands of people to implement something that syncs your meeting's audio stream to a phone line especially given that it's a problem that has been solved before.
• dgxyz 8mo ago
  Sod it all. Just give me a decent email client again. Business instant messaging is electric shoulder tapping and that makes me want to punch people. I literally feel Slack drains me every day.
• miki123211 8mo ago
  Teams is definitely a solid success. It is by no means a good app. Those two things aren't the same. Slack started with an aggressive "bottom up" approach, they made something actually good and got to worrying about the sales part later. You don't need sales as much when companies come to you, begging you for an actual contract that fulfills their enterprise requirements, knowing that rooting you out is almost impossible. Teams went the other way, in typical Microsoft style. Microsoft sells it bundled with all the other Microsoft things it sells. Most companies want a Microsoft contract anyway, and have an established sales relationship with MS, so adopting Teams is a lot less compliance, integration and procurement work than adopting anything else. You don't need good UI if your sales strategy isn't predicated on users choosing you for UI. And then there's Discord, which really isn't a bad work comms app if you're small enough not to need the compliance stuff. It gives you almost everything the big apps do for free, including unlimited calls, an advanced RBAC system, as many channels / messages as you want, a decent bot API (including media streaming), good notification management, multi-server / cross-organization support etc. They're actively disinterested in selling to businesses (which is what makes them so good, the features they paywall are the features needed by gamers, not serious professionals), but that also means you'll need to eventually migrate off of it when compliance requirements set in.
  • lovich 8mo ago
    I thought Slack started as a failed game and they only pivoted when their in game chat proved popular. They still have game assets around like their 404 page iirc.
    • mjcl 8mo ago
      Not quite, they built Slack as an internal communication tool while building the game Glitch (RIP) and after the game failed they decided to productize Slack.
  • moribunda 8mo ago
    Slack was a sluggish version of IRC... And somehow the world bought it.