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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

> And now this. It makes me loathe Teams even more.

Yet, feature-wise, nothing comes even remotely close. Nothing Cisco offers (Webex is a trash dumpster fire), Skype for consumers is garbage, Skype for Business marginally better, and the FOSS crowd... Mattermost is a decent Slack alternative but no video calls, Jitsi is flattened against the video call capabilities of Teams and Asterisk can't even get a multi-party video call done. Zoom is video calls only, and appear.in/whereby too (plus Whereby tops out at 12 participants).

Hate to admit it but MS Teams is so far away the others might just call it quits, the only thing it would need to completely ditch Webex and S4B at my employer would be an easy way to invite totally random guests to video conferences and support for dial-in via telephone as fallback.

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If you look at Microsoft features in isolation they are often really bad. But taken together they add up to something that is difficult to compete with. On the surface you get chat/video calls/and live streamed events. But you also get Sharepoint, Onedrive and integrations with all the other Microsoft products. You may be able to think of products that do one of those things better, but it is tough to replicate the entire ecosystem.

Judging from the Office Wars of the '90s and '00s, this is a general microsoft product "personality trait"...

Teams UX sucks so bad. It's *&£+ing infuriatingly hard to create a simple meeting link.

Discord would tick all the boxes I care about, they'd have to pivot their marketing and "theme" a bit though. Or just release a separate corporate focused product that's still Discord under the hood.

I don't see a direct comparison with Slack anywhere, so maybe you are tacitly conceding that Slack, by far, is the best collab tool

> Slack, by far, is the best collab tool

I don't think any of them can be designated the best collab tool because they all (Skype, Zoom, Teams, Slack) have their strengths and weaknesses. I think Teams handles calls and video conferencing better than Slack, but Slack has a more intuitive and feature-rich experience for text-based communication and water-cooler style casual channels. Teams performs better on my machine. Slack has a much more reliable mobile tier. Zoom (not taking privacy issues into consideration) is unbeatable IMO for video reliability, I've used it for years across two major corporations now and it's yet to fail. I think Microsoft is aiming to make Teams unify the best of all these worlds.

Yeah Teams may be the best "do it all", but Zoom and Slack are far better at their focus. Slack makes it very well known they don't use the calling built into Slack, they use Zoom.

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