Business chats in general are just completely incongruent with what users are expecting from end-user chats like Telegram or WhatsApp or Messages. Even Google has fallen far behind with regards to Hangouts, and Allo is not a good answer either. From a business perspective, I get why businesses choose Teams or Allo, but the actual products have usability as an incidental feature. With both major players, the chats are just there to ensure that Slack cannot/will not grow, same with other programs such as Discord. It's a revenue stream that is yet untapped, and soon Microsoft and Google will come calling for their payment from Businesses.
1) It constantly minimizes for seemingly no reason (at least once a week).
2) The "Teams" and "Chat" menus are separate. They're in the same window in Slack, and that just makes sense.
2.1) The "Teams" menu won't list more than 4 channels per Team by default. If you want to open a channel there you have to open the menu or favorite everything. I know this can be fixed by good sanitation by Team admins but Slack's way of doing it encourages it automatically.
3) Can't invite outside users like you can with Slack.
4) The chat history is so short it has to load after maybe 10 lines when scrolling up.
5) The "thumbs up"/message menu covers the message when hovering over it so it's impossible to highlight a message to copy/paste starting from the right to the left. You can go the other way but I never have until Teams.
6) Updates take forever to release! I've googled issues that MS staff note as "on the docket" for adding but months later it's still not added.
7) I frequently don't see the toast/popup notifications for some reason. I don't know what's going on there and it could be me but I don't remember it happening when I used Slack at work.
8) When it updates it shuts down without notification.
9) This might be the Android "work profile" in play but if I get a call or sometimes even a message the Android notification will not go away until I restart my phone.
I mean, Slack isn't perfect but I didn't have any complaints about it except that the call functionality would disconnect randomly.
Bookmarking exists, but you can't link to public bookmarked chats.
5 is a surprisingly frustrating one for us as the exact way it occurs is simple: Someone messages you, then right away attaches a ticket number, for example, which appears on the second line. The context menu will obscure this number completely, and only if there is enough whitespace on the line to double click to "Select All" can you select it.
Teams gives incredibly limited access to the calendar, insomuch that you can only go a few days back and forth, not a week for example, and you can't block out your time via Teams (i.e., add just an appointment time for yourself, since you need to add someone else to the meeting)
The mobile client seems to be absolutely the only application that decides there is a low internet condition, despite every other application on my phone fetching content happily and freely (Outlook on Android likes to do this too and refuse to fetch message content, frequently requiring a force quit of the Application to recover from and the Application becomes completely unresponsive)
Back to the Desktop app, it's also quite slow just in general, moving between Team Chats is very sluggish whereas other chat programs handle this in a snappy and graceful manner. File uploads are very awkward, and the fact that dragging and dropping a picture from a browser uploads it as Sharepoint content instead of as just inline (like other messaging clients) do is just a bit asinine. To have to first drag it to the desktop, then attach the file is just another annoyance.
All in all, for me it's just comparing what Teams offers to what something like Telegram offers, and it's night and day between the two. Most of the time in our org, as soon as you're past the acquaintance stage with someone after discussing an issue on Teams, you ask to be allowed to talk with them on Telegram instead.
For the actual chatting part of a chat program, it's really bad. For internal video/calls, it's not too bad (though our experience trying to use the Web-version to make a video call was an exercise in Microsoft frustration, as we found out that we basically had to use Edge if we wanted to use the Web Version to do it, and even then it didn't work). Nevermind that a Safari Version has been promised from months at this point without any delivery.
To me Teams feels like Microsoft saw that there was revenue in locking clients into their chat eco-system, but didn't have a product ready, so they decided to release Teams and just get everyone onboard. My cynical take is that soon they realized they didn't have to compete if they bundled Teams with their Office packages and called it a Slack Competitor; suddenly, the decision was pay for something like Slack, or a "Slack Competitor" you already bought.
I will give Teams this thought, their bot integration is very nice. I think Telegram does it a bit better, but we do make very good use of the chat bots for basic automated updating and information distribution.
Similarly, I personally find the bundling->anticompetitive argument very unconvincing, especially given G-suite and other players in the cloud office space, especially in this context as atlassian's business model "rhymes" pretty heavily.
(As always disclaimer all opinions are my own, etc etc)
I haven't tried Teams yet, but I struggle to imagine how anything could be worse than the current state of Skype for Business and still function even minimally.
I've used Slack for 2+ years, hipchat for ~1 year, Discord for gaming for years, and now Teams for ~1 year. For work, I like Teams best.
In my mind the most significant, perhaps the only significant, difference between Teams and the rest is the threaded-by-default approach. It was hard to get used to at first, but this make it so much easier to keep track of different conversations that would otherwise overlap. In my mind, it's the best of both chat and email. Slack kind of does this but it's not nearly as seamless. You have to hover over the small reply icon and most of the time people don't do this. In Teams, you are forced to use threads and I think it is a good thing. Teams definitely has its quirks but with the velocity of improvements I've seen, most have already been fixed and I'm optimistic the rest will all be ironed out before long.
I don't even include Skype for Business in this comparison because in my mind Skype for Business is in a completely different category. It doesn't do the same things. And I can't think of another software product I dislike as much as Skype for Business / Lync.
Edit: Original made it sound like I was suggesting the companies were merging, which isn't the case.
I don't think Slack is worried about looking anti-competitive in that crowd.
Dividing those who aren't diehard Microsoft fans won't help.
How is anything aside from legal infiltration going to make the playing field any less competitive? If we're all still playing by the same rules, there is still competition.
That's a sensible business move that lets them allocate resources to their strengths. To believe it's some kind of secret or illegal deal is pretty naïve. It's obviously not a mistake either - Hipchat is technologically behind other products on the market, and Atlassian has other core products that are doing really well (JIRA, for example).
Anticompetitive practices aren't illegal though. They are only illegal if a company has a monopoly or has significant market power.
Now, the question we have to ask is is Slack a near monopoly in it's marketspace? Maybe. I could see the argument go either way.
> Slack will pay an undisclosed amount over the next three years to acquire Atlassian’s HipChat and Stride products
They are immediately deprecated. It doesn't appear that Slack has any real interest in Hipchat/Stride tech (I know I don't).
The end-of-life dates for each products are below:
Stride: February 15th, 2019
Hipchat Cloud: February 15th, 2019
Hipchat Data Center (v3.0): June 22nd, 2019
Hipchat Data Center (v3.1): September 26th, 2019
Hipchat Server (v2.1): December 8th, 2018
Hipchat Server(v2.2): May 30th, 2019
Hipchat Server (v2.4): June 30th, 2020Like if my neighbors and coworkers and friends use Slack, I'm not sure if they're a proxy of the entire market.
The reason I say that is because there are other apps that do similar things that hail from Microsoft, Google and Facebook.
Then the retort goes: well they don't do integrations and aren't as developer focused as Slack and Hipchat.
Then, naturally, wouldn't that incentivize those other apps already in the market to build out those features, and do it better?
Jokes aside, how is this anti-competitive other than trivially reducing the number of total competitors? If 4th place wants to give up in the race, should all of their work be in vain? AFAIK a product like Slack doesn't require tons of up-front legislation preventing new entrants in the race. Competition in this domain is very much alive, regardless of what a few big kahunas decide to do.