8 ms·

Microsoft lost its way much earlier than 4 years ago. It abused users at the time of Netscape wars and forcing Internet Explorer down people's throats. But the

• mschild 6mo ago
  I find Teams is often simply picked because of cost reasons. A lot of companies are paying for office and teams comes bundled with it. Why pay extra when its included?
  • joe_mamba 6mo ago
    Yep, the amount of penny pinching some companies do nowadays is insane. Teams coming "for free" with their Microsoft 365 subscription is net positive for the bean counters.
    • hsbauauvhabzb 6mo ago
      Chat software is absurdly expensive. I’m not saying teams is good, but being nickel and dimed is a real risk for businesses too.
      • Ekaros 6mo ago
        18€ a month per user for Business+ with Slack... I really do question whole thing... Ofc, when someone is making quarter to half a million paying twenty for basic cup of coffee is nothing. But still whole thing for chat application seems absolutely insane.
      • joe_mamba 6mo ago
        >Chat software is absurdly expensive. Define absurdly expensive here. I can probably guarantee that for small to medium sized business paying Slack or Microsoft for chat software is miles cheaper than self hosting it yourself. My Google-Fu says Slack costs $18.00 /user/mo for their Business+ subscription plan. That's still relative peanuts compared to the yearly salary, let's say 60k/year, of developer you hire to self-host and maintain an on-prem Matrix/Jitsi instance with all the equivalent bells and whistles of Slack/Teams, but guess what, even then your clients/partner will send you MS Teams invites for calls, so you still have to pay for it anyway. Then isn't it easier if you just fork out the cash for Teams so you can focus on your product instead?
        • OkayPhysicist 6mo ago
          You do not need anywhere need a full time employee to spin up a Matrix instance. You need 1 of the IT people you're paying already to do a couple of hours of allocating a server, running it, and setting up permissions.
          • joe_mamba 6mo ago
            >You need 1 of the IT people you're paying already to do a couple of hours of allocating a server, running it, and setting up permissions. We did that at my previous job during covid because we also though maintenance would only be a couple of hours of effort. It didn't work out that easy. It became a full time job so it was scrapped. People underestimate the amount of effort required maintaining on-prem infra across an org to match what cloud hypersacler providers offer.
            • OkayPhysicist 6mo ago
              What on earth could someone being doing to a poor Matrix server that would necessitate a full time job?
              • Arathorn 6mo ago
                potentially wrapping their own package or distro rather than using something like ESS Community? Or perhaps they left registration open and had abuse problems?
  • 9dev 6mo ago
    That was the reason we ditched Slack. I hate Teams with a passion, but we're not going to pay 6k per year for a chat app if we get Teams for free. There's just no way to defend that decision.
    • iso1631 6mo ago
      We used to have anti trust regulators. We don't now.
      • 9dev 6mo ago
        We've got a lot of billionaires with a higher balance on their bank accounts though, so you can't say it was all for nothing
        • iso1631 6mo ago
          It's not the billionaires that depress me, it's the "temporarily embarrased billionaires", the wannabes who don't believe in the American Dream but idolise instead a winner takes all Ferengi style system.
    • hnthrow0287345 6mo ago
      You can easily defend that for only 6k with 'but we like it and we'll be more productive with it and we won't hate our jobs'
      • 9dev 6mo ago
        yeah, but that wouldn't be honest. Slack is more pleasant to use, but not 6k more pleasant to use. I'd rather put up with Teams and get my devs a raise instead.
        • craftkiller 6mo ago
          How few devs do you have? Assuming a small startup of 12, you'd be able to give each dev a raise of $42 per month. Your devs would have to be severely underpaid to notice a $42/month raise.
  • dahcryn 6mo ago
    yeah I don't understand how this isn't blatant market abuse through their monopoly position Regulators should be all over it. EU has tried, but unsuccesfully, since it was lawyers who came up with the mitigation.
    • ekianjo 6mo ago
      Regulators are either sleeping on billions of lobby money or asleep at the wheel
  • account42 6mo ago
    Don't forget network effects. If other companies you are working with use Teams then there is less friction if you also use Teams yourself.
• throwa356262 6mo ago
  Am I the only one who prefers Teams to the Slack and Zoom? The ability to write in the meeting chat before and after a meeting for example. That is some serious quality of life function that all others are lacking.
  • smackeyacky 6mo ago
    No but it’s hard to get excited about two different flavours of shit sandwich. Teams is terrible piece of software no doubt but slack is worse, marginally
  • BLKNSLVR 6mo ago
    Yes, and you are wrong. Objectively.
  • Ekaros 6mo ago
    I haven't had that many issues on Windows "native" client. So I really don't get what the critical issue is... To me it has long looked like good enough.
  • jwrallie 6mo ago
    Teams is not that bad if you are using Office and OneDrive anyway, as it integrates well with those. Most of my team members are using different named chats for discussion instead of channels, which are used for more important notices. Somehow it works, and our channels on slack were also basically chats anyway. My only gripe is that Linux does not have a “native” client anymore and the web client is full of bugs on Firefox. But it’s Microsoft, what can you expect. It’s not that bad except for memory consumption on other platforms.
    • hedora 6mo ago
      I use Firefox on Mac when I'm stuck in a Teams meeting. The native client attendees invariably have more problems than I do with connections, authentication, forced updates mid-meeting, etc. I'm guessing the native client has been going downhill, based on frequency of issues people report. I hope they kind of forgot about the web client, and won't enshittify it as quickly.
• dismalpedigree 6mo ago
  Completely agree. Not just govt, but everyone who interacts with govt, especially DoW. Meetings are on DoD teams. Proposals and updates must be Powerpoint. Memos in word. Windows to connect to some networks. We tried not using Office or Windows. Ended up needing a laptop with Windows and Office anyway. Note to MS Product Manager: this should not be a success story. I was once your biggest cheerleader, now I am so desperate to get away from you that I am starting to look at Google as my savior.
• GuB-42 6mo ago
  We could say that Microsoft never lost its way in that regard, it has always been predatory. Where it lost its way however is Microsoft actually cared about Windows, it was their flagship product after all. It was terrible in some aspects, but also excellent in some others. I particular, they took compatibility very seriously, which is far from an easy task in the wild PC ecosystem. They were also quite good in the UI/UX department. The Office suite was unmatched too, I tried a few alternative, none of them came close. Now, they completely broke their UI/UX, and that's not just the ads, forced Copilot stuff, etc... It is pure incompetence. They still have good compatibility, but it is not as impressive of a feat as it once was, as apps today are naturally more portable because of all the abstraction layers (performance be damned, but that's another story). The traditional Office suite is still good, but they are in the process of sabotaging it with web-based apps that remove tons of features without actually simplifying anything.
  • yfw 6mo ago
    Its as steve jobs said, once you control market share theres no incentive to build a good product and you lose the ability to do it.
  • olav 6mo ago
    > The traditional Office suite is still good I don't think so. The web version is mostly incompatible with the Windows or Mac desktop versions. Have you compared the UI of Word/Powerpoint/Excel with alternatives like Apple Pages/Keynote/Numbers or Google Docs/Sheets? For me, the MS products are a complete mess with arbitrary collections of unrelated buttons, abysmal font rendering and insane defaults.
    • GuB-42 6mo ago
      > For me, the MS products are a complete mess with arbitrary collections of unrelated buttons In the case of Office I actually consider it a strength. Office has to take into account a large number of use cases, most people will use only a fraction of what is available, but not everyone use the same fraction. So that "unrelated button" may be someone else's essential feature. The "insane defaults" are what people are used to. I don't know about Apple, but I tend to get to the limits of Google Docs/Sheets rather quickly. It may cover 99% of my needs, but Office gives me the missing 1%. That's for the traditional Office Microsoft are sabotaging, the web versions are only a shadow of it, and by most points worse than the Google suite, and that's the problem. As for font rendering, I am sure that Apple is ahead, it has always been their strength. Microsoft may be the king of the office, but when it comes to art and creative work, Apple has always been on top.
• tremon 6mo ago
  It's a bit baffling to me that people are talking about Microsoft "losing their way" as if they ever operated differently. They have always been user-hostile if it increased next quarter's outlook. There's a clear continuing thread from the Halloween files in the 90s via antitrust probes in the 00s, the handling of Skype and Teams in the 10s, and now Copilot -- and that's ignoring all the mishandling on the business side of things (e.g. forcing Dynamics cloud migrations, Power Platform in a permanent state of unworthiness, the customary rug pulling via user license changes, constantly renaming products). Microsoft being good to their customers is the anomaly, not the other way around.
  • bell-cot 6mo ago
    I'd read "Microsoft lost their way" as a description of how the speaker's worldview has changed, as they've gained experience and perspective. Microsoft is often good to their customers. Generally in situations where badness has a poor RoI, or they're trying to lure you deeper into their clutches.
  • philistine 6mo ago
    Microsoft has indeed lost their way with Microsoft, but not in the sense that they became evil ghouls. They've always been evil ghouls. No, what's happened is that Windows became a minor part of Microsoft's profits. The whole company is not focused on Windows the way Apple is with the iPhone. The higher ups no longer care about Windows as a product itself. They only care about Windows as a storefront to their other efforts (OneDrive, Office, Copilot, etc.)
  • tombert 6mo ago
    I mean, at least their software used to be pretty good. The Windows NT kernel is arguably a better design than Linux. I complain about NTFS now, but thirty years ago it was better than most other filesystems. And Windows NT at least didn't jam a billion ads down your throat. Granted, MS has always been a pretty evil anti-competitive company, so I'm not trying to sanitize them much here.
• HexPhantom 6mo ago
  Even if gov adoption dropped, I suspect the incentives wouldn't change much unless there were genuinely viable, low-friction alternatives.
• bluescrn 6mo ago
  Windows has historically oscillated between pretty awful and pretty decent. XP was good, Vista was bad, Win7 was good, Win8 was a disaster, Win10 was decent again. Now we're in a low part of the cycle with Win11. Maybe there's another 'good Windows' on the way. But I'm sceptical this time, being in the era of enshittification and the AI slop bubble, where everything is user-hostile by design, where if something seems like a good deal, you know it's a bait+switch.
  • aleph_minus_one 6mo ago
    > XP was good, Vista was bad, Win7 was good, Win8 was a disaster, Win10 was decent again. Now we're in a low part of the cycle with Win11. The cycle is more complicated: * 2000: exceptional * XP: bad (the original XP was indeed bad) * XP SP2 (from a technological perspective basically a new OS): decent * Vista: bad * 7: good * 8: awful (it was so bad that soon 8.1 was introduced) * 8.1: bad * 10: controversial (some say it's "decent"; some say it's "bad" because of the magnitude of telemetry (spying) that Windows 10 introduced) * 11: awful So, in my opinion it's rather a general downward trend with some overlaid cycle.
    • kawsper 6mo ago
      Even earlier than that: Win98: bad Win98 SE: good
    • kakacik 6mo ago
      Completely agree with your timeline and rating, 2000 was the first windows one could use the word 'stable' with, before it was such a bad shitshow that MS-DOS 6.22 seemed like coming from another planet. Hated 10, was forced to it basically only due to gaming, a common assholish trick MS uses whenever it can. But when looking from 11 perspective, 10 was fine compared to that heap of disorganized badly designed crap. Yet again time to be ashamed to work for MS, this time its sticking around like tar spit on a white shirt.
      • aleph_minus_one 6mo ago
        > 2000 was the first windows one could use the word 'stable' with Windows NT4 was also very stable (once you installed the Service Packs), but had a lot less convenience and modern features than Windows 2000.
• duped 6mo ago
  > Yes, but did you try Microsoft Teams? People seem to forget Teams is the unloved child of a forced marriage between acquisitions, it was never going to turn out successful.
• dartharva 6mo ago
  What % of Microsoft's revenue comes from government contracts? I'd be very surprised if it's more than 2-3%