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Comment by tw04 | Hacker News Reader

I'd be curious if it's remotely sustainable. We started on Slack ~3 years ago. We're now moving (albeit slowly) to Teams. 18 months from now Slack will be gone entirely. I can't believe we're the only ones. And unlike Dropbox vs. Ondrive, Slack isn't markedly better in any area than Teams from my testing.

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Oh no, turn back while you still can. My team is in full revolt due to a company-wide migration from Slack to Teams. Teams is worse in almost every way. We're seeing lots of missing functionality, bizarre UI bugs, random crashes, extremely slow sync, you name it. Teams is in no way a viable replacement for Slack unless your use case is one or two plaintext messages per day.

I don’t know your use case but my team of 20 moved from Slack to Teams and has been very very happy with it.

Video chats and screen sharing are better (Screenhero is all that was around on Slack and it stunk). Video recordings save right to OneDrive for important meetings...

Oh and if you use Office 365 it’s a no brainer, everything is integrated!

I would agree. Teams is pretty half baked. It sort of works but the main reason for using it as that it’s cheap if you have office 365 already.

It's a gamble: stay with Slack and potentially be forced into an "Our Incredible Journey" migration in the future, or migrate now and shamble along until 40+ year old and profitable enterprise juggernaut Microsoft figures out how to make their product work right. Neither option is great.

Microsoft will never make Teams great, it will be just good enough that corporate bean counters won't let you pay for a competitor when you already get Teams "free".

Teams is truly mediocre, other than when it rises to irritating. I have no idea how anyone using it could prefer it to Slack.

It is imposed on people whose organizations have Office 365 subscriptions, it is not chosen.

Yeah, Teams is fine when it works, but it definitely has a lot of syncing issues that seem to last for hours and then magically resolve.

As a drop-in replacement for Slack (or our dearly departed friend Hipchat), Teams is a poor choice. It makes more sense when used organization-wide -- for meetings, sharing/accessing documents, and so on. The chat portion works usually but it's probably its weakest point.

The bugs do need mentioned though. It constantly crashes for me, constantly loses sync, will just straight-up freeze for no discernible reason, will decide it doesn't really feel like actually sending my messages, and so on. It does not at all feel like a mature product.

Our team dropped HipChat and has moved to Teams along with the rest of the org. Our dev team (of 7) had used HipChat as a simple persistent chat app, sandboxed away from the rest of the company. Now we are on Teams with not only Ops guys, but also HR, marketing, and so on. It's fine at being sort of an organizational tool, but we dearly miss having our own private chat-only app that we can make use of as we want/need. Partly this is contextual to our organization, but the way we use Teams now feels far more formalized, and not in a good way.

The cost of migrating away from something like slack for an enterprise org is enormous compared to what it costs.

Teams might have parity in a vacuum, but everyone already knows what slack is and how to use it, including people you might hire in the future.

Two years ago a company we were at had Slack and it was used vigorously. They hit a user limit and couldn't get the CEO to pony up whatever it cost to extend Slack. (This company was the kind of company that had unlimited budgets for conferences and sales calls, but could hardly ever get a CC# for a dev team need...)

They switched to MS Teams, but at least two years ago, it felt unusable. Or, the team's Slackness couldn't translate. No one used it.

Neither Slack nor MS made money in this exchange.

Maybe Teams has gotten better and more usable, but I wonder if Teams is taking off in business environments, whereas Slack definitely is more common in tech environments?

Your example demonstrates my point. Your CEO made a terrible decision in making you switch. Your co spent much more paying people to migrate to something worse than it would have spent just ponying up for the license.

Agreed. But if Teams comes with Office365, Slack may have trouble getting CEOs to pay more per-user monthly fees.

And I pay for both Office365 and G Suite at my business, and Google just invited me to Currents. I know better than to dump something like Slack for any new (like, first 3 years) Google product, but... Slack's getting some real competition.

This is the first I heard of Currents, but Google naming their Yammer-clone replacement for G+ after an already-failed Google product is really setting themselves up for success.

That’s fair and I agree that’s their biggest competitive threat. But investment wise that downside is mitigated by the possibility of being acquired

Anecdotally did your team's productivity or quality of work suffer to a large extent after moving to Teams?

I would guess that the choice of chat tool has almost no impact on productivity or quality.

That is mostly my thought as well, meaning that the parent's boss made the right move in saving money with no loss in productivity.

To be blunt: if someone who knows slack can't figure out teams, we won't be hiring them. It's a chat app, not a new programming language.

Teams is super buggy and I hated using it. We are now back at Slack (and actually happy paying customers).

Same - we used Teams for 2-3 weeks before switching back. The syncing was horrendous, the mobile apps were terrible, and a litany of other things I've forgotten.

> Slack isn't markedly better in any area than Teams from my testing.

Is it markedly worse in any area? Seems like for any business that's already entrenched in slack there isn't much incentive to move off. I'm assuming in your case there must have been some large benefits in order to spend a multi-month effort forcing a migration.

That's what people said when they were on Hipchat. And every other chat before Slack. Chat is commoditized software at this point.

HipChat was utter crap. At some point things are good enough.

IRC was fine. Really. And the clients didn't chew ram.

IRC’s main issue is not working well with phones or multiple devices I think? (Yes, IRCCloud is a thing but if you’re going with a SaaS already, you may very well just go with a proprietary solution).

>Chat is commoditized software at this point.

I don't think I follow your logic. Why would this lead to Hipchat being completely shutdown?

An Office 365 subscription includes Teams, email hosting, the Office suite, and 1TB storage per user for less than the price of Slack alone. So I would call that markedly worse pricing.

Sure for companies already using Slack there's probably not a whole lot of reason to move off. But Slack seems to be relying on continued huge growth numbers to become profitable.

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