Microsoft Teams breaks daily record with 2.7B meeting minutes, tops high by 200%
venturebeat.com
venturebeat.com
That's the whole problem with Teams, because they get to ride O365's coattails they don't really /try/. The fact it is better than Skype for Business is more an indictment of how bad S4B was, not an actual defense of Teams as a stand-alone product/app.
Let's look at the popular things they haven't done:
- Show video for all people in Video meeting: Created 2016. 37K votes. "In the backlog."
- Multi-window for chats and more: Created 2016. 17K votes. "Internal testing."
- Compact mode: Created 2016. 16K votes. "Not even in the backlog, we cannot figure it out" (in spite of multiple third party CSS hacks that accomplish it convincingly).
- Move a project (channel) from one team to another: Created 2016. 15K votes. "In the backlog."
But don't take my word for it, review what they have actually accomplished from their own UserVoice here:
https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public
But it is popular because it is free and bundled with something successful, so the Teams team can sit around for four years with little to show for it.
When will Teams actually be good when measured against the market rather than the [worse] thing it replaced?
For instance you can't break out individual chat windows to take up less space. Dial-in numbers for meetings aren't there by default either, you need individual licenses - which is probably why it's 'free'.
I've seen so many UI bugs and weirdness in this software. The only thing that reliably worked so far is calling.
It's getting harder and harder to tell if those are genuine news or a PR firm at work, but "MS breaks a records in meeting minutes" feels even more like advertising than "Azur is getting 10 times more traffic".
If this is advertising, is there a way to prevent them from staying on the front page?
People who post things to HN, independent of being shills for any given company, like to post intellectually gratifying things. Sometimes those things happen to also be PR pieces. I don’t think the people who post these things really think about them as being PR pieces; or, if they do, they post them despite that, because in the balance, the piece still works out to be worth reading (in their opinion) even after giving it a demerit for being PR.
I’m not denying that there are shills on HN, mind you. I’m sure there are many of them. But I would say that even those shills probably have some sort of “standards”—only posting the PR pieces available to them if they think they’ll do well here (which means, only posting the pieces someone else who wasn’t a shill would have posted anyway.) To do otherwise might get them banned as spammers (which I do believe does happen—mods want to chime in on that?)
And then we still have the filter of some amount of upvoting being required to get things to the front page, plus (I assume) some sort of behind-the-scenes voting-ring detection. So the upvote signal is likely to express genuine community interest, and therefore to signal that the piece does have value independent of its PR-power.
Just because it is well done does not mean it has good value as news.
Indeed, even if it's an ok read, it's giving a lot of attention to a company just because it has the money to attract said attention, no matter the quality of their service. Since the reader's time and energy is limited, it's taking the place of another possible read.
In the same way, by allowing this to happen, this lets a company create a fantastic image of itself, that is independent from it's real quality, just because it has the budget to do it. Cumulatively, this can, after years, end up rewriting history, and lead even educated people to make altered judgements and decisions in the future.
I'm not saying that as an anti-microsoft attack, I dislike the concept of such powerful PR in general, MS is just here a potential example for this.
As an HN reader, I wish there would be a policy about this. But I have no idea what it would look like, or how one could enforce it.
So maybe I'm just making a lot of noise for nothing.
From the guidelines: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter."
Hell, HN is the organ of a startup incubator -- I'd argue that it exists to explicitly flog certain technical firms. That other companies are able to get their marketing teams on here too is may be a bug or a feature.
Anybody who upvoted this, why? It feels very weird to be on the front page with 27 votes so far.
I’m guessing people are hoping there’ll be interesting tangential discussion in the comments re: the infrastructural challenges imposed on IT departments (and especially cloud vendors) due to WFH. People expecting the title to have high “comment potential” seems to be a theme where “trivial” things being upvoted are concerned.
• Has any Slack-based org tried actually using Slack’s now-integrated video calling for your meetings?
• Has anyone tried using Discord for meetings? It seems to have the required infrastructure...
• Is anyone here at an org that’s skipping integrated video chat, where they’re just doing regular company-PBX audio-only conference-call dial-in? (I’ve always thought there’d be nothing lost by just emailing everyone a link to a presentation, and then looking at it together over a conference-call via “now turn to page 3”-like instructions. Maybe together with a freely-editable Google Doc that serves as a “whiteboard” for the people in the conversation.)
• Is anyone here having synchronous meetings as regular group-chat text exchanges, where everyone is supposed to “synchronously” attend? (I’ve always felt like this would be the best approach for enabling accessibility to differently-abled employees; and, coincidentally, would enable machine-searchability later without anyone needing to transcribe anything.)
Most of my work's teams use slack for their daily calls. Seems OK in testing with up to 10 people. Anything bigger usually moves to GoToMeeting.
> Has anyone tried Discord for meetings?
I use Discord for my team, since it allows you drop in & out of voice chat during the day so peeps can float in & out of chat as they go to other meetings/lunch etc. Lot more convenient than doing a call, and results in the entire team closely collaborating for most of the day.
The voice chat latency & screen sharing quality is also equal or better to other options due to Discord's gaming-focused optimisations.
I'd note that it isn't really suitable for the wider business as mass-meetings with webcams would require a manually created, private DM group (rather than just a an invite link as with zoom/goto).
I think that Teams is better than most at most of what it does... That's kind of hard to quantify, but like most things from MS Office, it's not that it's the best at any given one thing.. it's that it does many things good enough and things the competition doesn't.
Microsoft products are sometimes loved by IT departments because they have lots of configuration options; Microsoft is just really bad about leaving tons of footguns lying around in those configuration options, and IT departments apparently love footguns.
What I do hate is that I can dump the wiki via onedrive, it's a goofy format, rather than simple markdown, and you can't update via onedrive (it doesn't go back to the wiki).
Again, I don't think it's the best at anything... just a pretty good combination of things.
There are bits and pieces better in other apps, but it does all of these things good enough, and as a whole, I find it better as a collaboration suite.
I feel like I'm on a lower end of this with 2h 43m of my time this week, 36m 58s of which were yesterday.