Microsoft Teams is now officially bigger than Slack | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Teams is now officially bigger than Slack

arstechnica.com

48 pointsSgt_Apone19 comments

The Microsoft Teams client on the Mac is the worst program I have to deal with on a routine basis. While Teams + 365 + SharePoint, overall is a good set of functionality brought together as a product... I frequently find those pieces of functionality that belong to Teams, have been assembled in a way that I find totally incomprehensible.

Like how the Mac desktop client implemented their own pop up notifications windows. They don’t correctly pop to the foreground, they don’t work when your in a full screen app, and to add insult to injury, the presence of the “window” that shows notifications frequently breaks the ability to command-tab over into the Teams application because it will have taken focus to ostensibly show a popup, but not returned it so when I’m eventually asked to check something in Teams I have to head to the dock to manually pick the real Teams client window.

The only thing worse is Skype for Business on the Mac. It's the worst business software that I need to use.

And the only thing worse than that is throwing interop/coexistence mode[1][2] into the mix. It's basically a force multiplier on the hell of using Skype for Business with a Mac.

It takes the already gimped Skype for Business on the Mac, and adds a multiplier effect.

[1] Interop mode is designed for a progressive rollout/migration from Skype for Business to Teams. On an all-Windows deployment it generally works well enough to get by with a few annoying UX-related hassles getting passed between the two apps. But throw Mac machines into the mix, with already gimped client functionality, and interop mode just sort of breaks you to the point of having an aversion to any work that involves calls/meetings/chats with coworkers.

[2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/MicrosoftTeams/coexistence-...

It is similarly horrible on Windows. I utterly boggles my mind how a team of people can write software with such a terrible UI, you'd think someone would notice.

I don’t work there but have heard from people who used to be there... that team is full of program managers who call themselves designers and live in delusion that Steve Jobs have possessed them. This is why you see funcky UX which pretends to be minimal, different and at the same time horrible to use. To complement these deluded people, there are highly paid architects (“partner” levels) who can’t code but make stupid decisions on how someone should code. Top brass there are usual managers/VPs who can’t code, can’t design and rarely depends on their own products. This is how bad software is made. Teams is perfect antithesis of old Microsoft which used to be full of brilliant wiz kids that can pull miracles and where PMs were kept to minimum and instructed to stay out of their way.

Relevant: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/11/21/choices-headaches/

> It plans to roll out channel moderation and priority notifications, which will ping a recipient every two minutes until a response is made.

Oh my god

I’m usually pretty staunchly against the seemingly vocal majority of HN on topics like this (in this case, shitting on Teams a ton. And shitting on Slack a good amt too). But that priority notification is ridiculous and hilarious.

Priority notifications aren't rolled out? I have it on my company computer install, no one uses it though.

HR should have a policy that beating up anyone who uses priority notifications is perfectly reasonable.

Which means the number of people who will complain loudly and pull shadow-IT setups of Slack will skyrocket. Last year my employer MANDATED we switch from free Slack to a full-featured trial of Teams... and within 72 hours that mandate was dropped because __executives__ were not getting messages that they knew had been sent. Slack, on the other hand, Just Works.

I think we need to differentiate between just works and barely works. With Slack I think someone decided to go full dot-com and throw away everything known about human communication so they could learn it again by trial and error. You can’t mute bots, you can’t mute plugins, can’t add someone to a private conversation, anyone can auto-join you to any channel, api is full of typemorphic elements that encode their type within themselves, don’t get me started about Slack threads.

When using Slack I was always impressed by how clunky and buggy the post editor was. Had to reload it a time or two almost every time I used it, and their method for making sure your changes weren't lost was to tell you to copy and paste it.

I notice this also with Teams. If I have it open locally and on a VM, only one of the instances will get the message.

In other news, Microsoft makes the Teams app a mandatory extra install as part of their most recent software update ballooning their userbase to a couple of billion users.

I would love to know what they classify as a daily active user. My expectation would be someone who sends or receives a message, but I would never have expected the numbers to be so high. Maybe they're counting everyone who signs into their O365 account who has a Teams subscription.

More likely anyone who have an active O365 subscription that includes teams even if they only have that subscription because thats the only way MS is selling access to the traditional desktop office application that they need for some decade old workflow.

While the press have been blinded by MS's nonsense "we L..... Linux" campaign nobody seams to have noticed that their office department is playing the same dirty games MS got fined over a decade ago in forcing every office user to obtain a O365 subscription and putting a tremendeous amount a presure on their SME customers to obtain the full O365 stack which include teams(which MS insists is replacing skype for business).

Remember also that MS marketing is almost 110% tailored to the now aging set of SME admins that entered the market doing the transition from big iron to winNT networks in the 90ies and who depend on MS Certified courses and books for all of their formal IT training and that SME market where those Teams deployments comes from, if you have an Teams subscription and a "i only know the MS stack" mindset you are not going to deploy stack no matter how much more your users prefer it to Teams.

And the "We love linux on Azure" marketing is exactly that narrow, the same day it was announced MS killed of any feature they ever had that made it easier to integrate Linux* into wintel networks, making it clear to all but the clueless that it's only about headless linux guest running comodity web frameworks running inside azure or hyperV then any change in MS attitude towards competitors and that was forced on them by the fact that the webdev market was/is dominated by OSX clients and linux servers.

*SFU and RFC2307 support was dropped along with the teams/skype clients for linux the same week they started raving about linux CLI's being usable from windows clients.

Is this about as interesting as the fact that calc.exe is bigger than slack in terms of installs?

The second sentence of the article says that this is comparing active users, not installs.

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