Hacker News Reader

Comment by m4tthumphrey | Hacker News Reader

My team were using HipChat and had to find an alternative when they sold off to Slack. They actually offered a really good discount to move over. But as the company already recently moved to O365 and Teams is free within that, I thought I'd give it a try. My team hated it, I tolerated it. Until one day I'd just had enough of the UX that Teams brings. The biggest issue was the threading; it truly beggars belief. We ended up using multi user IM messages instead of channels. Moving (and paying) for Slack was the best decision I made.

That being said, the Teams UX will slowly and steadily improve. It will be interesting to see where we are in a few years. I hope to see both Teams and Slack support SIP, they surely must already be working on it.

View on HN

> That being said, the Teams UX will slowly and steadily improve.

That's not the Microsoft way. It'll accumulate features without ever deprecating bad features, not fundamentally improve. Look at Outlook. That terrible threading has its roots there. There'll be _someone_ out there who loves it, so it'll never go away.

They've changed. Now they routinely redesign stuff. Add stuff that no one wants and cripple or remove those they want. And then make it slower.

Outlook web is a perfect example. It's 10x slower since the last redesign and their exclusive killer feature - SWEEP no longer works for me.

Have you sent feedback?

Having lived through Windows phone's saga, Windows 8, 8.1, 10 and the first set of outlook.com redesigns, I know one this - their feedback tool is a placebo button, a self therapy session to get stuff off one's chest.

Microsoft doesn't listen to feedback through their official channels. They might step back temporarily when there's overwhelming negative outcry from the news but they'll definitely attempt it again after a while.

> That being said, the Teams UX will slowly and steadily improve

You think that they people who brought us "The Word Ribbon" and Metro UI are going to make things better?

That's not how M$FT rolls. Their customer base is deathly allergic to change. They lose their minds if things change perceptibly from what they looked like when they bought the system.

I don't know. The word ribbon was miserable to begin with but it has reached a point, thanks to a bunch of UI improvements, where it's far preferable to the classic menu for many people (at least the majority of people I've met).

The word ribbon is definitely an example to follow.

Metro isn't, because , wtf. They can't make up their mind.

The Office Ribbon is ESPECIALLY useful on OS X where there's a menu system as well with the builtin Help -> search in menus box. With that, one doesn't ever need to even look at that abomination of a ribbon.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com