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Comment by dmode | Hacker News Reader

I won't trust Microsoft to make the Mac version of this product as good as the Window's version. There is a long history of Office development that supports this conclusion. If you use Mac in your workplace, probably best to stay away from MS stack

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From what I can tell, it's written in Electron. I assume they did this so that they could share the code base between desktop (win/mac), ios/android/winphone, and web -- keeping the features sets the same on all platforms. VS Code is the same way and that works beautifully on Mac. I expect that same for this.

Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft (Azure) but have no relation to Office or Microsoft Teams.

It is not about the technology platform. You still have to dedicate resources to ensure feature parity across both OS systems. When MS starts selling Teams to huge enterprise customers (e.g., Walmart, Ford, GM etc.) that are on 99% Windows platform and the feature request and pressure starts building, where do you think the resources would go ? It is not MS fault, it is the nature of their business. Windows based enterprises are their bread and butter and that's what they will prioritize. I work for an enterprise Cloud company, and we prioritize IE because of this reason.

I don't think you know how Electron apps work.

http://electron.atom.io/

> It is not about the technology platform. You still have to dedicate resources to ensure feature parity across both OS systems

It is about the technology platform, because the amount of resources necessary to ensure feature parity is a function of the platfrom. Word for Windows and Word for Mac are probably two separate giant monsters of early-90's C++ and keeping them in sync is agony. Assuming Teams is written in Electron, the amount of work is nowhere near the same; not having feature parity across operating systems is probably harder than having it.

Word for Windows and Word for Mac are much closer together than you may realize. Pretty interesting talk about cross platform Office.

Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HROqnw-nf4 Part 2:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGMoRu5yrVc

Ah, interesting. I always just took it for granted that the old Office codebases were huge beasts, but maybe not. Thanks for the info!

Still, no matter how nice that codebase is, I assume they can't beat Electron for ease of X-platform compatibility.

Electron is complete shit, especially for long running processes. Might as well use the browser version.

seems to be working just fine for visual studio code

Perhaps it's just the people writing electron apps doing Abbas job, because some of them work fine

This isn't a given. Some of Microsoft's newer programs, like Visual Studio Code, run just as well on Macs (and Linux!) as on Windows. Especially when they said it was "web-based", which I assume means the desktop app is (like VSC) using Electron and cross-platform compatibility shouldn't be hard.

I have used Teams for a few months on Mac and Windows (most time spent on Mac), this is the exact same quality: thanks electron.

Nice, this is the message I was looking for. Was hoping it would get more love on Mac than Skype4B has.

Our small team within a giant org is using hipchat, but it's near impossible to get anyone else from the org on there for shared projects. Maybe they'll be more receptive to MS Team.

Slack and Microsoft Teams are both Electron apps. Web tech under the hood.

Have you used the latest office on a Mac? It's really, really well done.

I could have thought I saw that it web-based so it should work fine on any platform?

Historical data is not a guarantee for future performance.

No but it's often quite a good indicator.

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