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Comment by Ecstatify | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft are killing it in enterprise. Our company is moving hundreds of servers to the cloud (Azure). Our company owns it's own datacenter, has a strategic partnership with another cloud provider (CEO supports the cloud provider publicly) but we're still moving to Azure. Since the start of the pandemic we have thousands of users moving from Skype for Business(on premise) to Microsoft Teams(subscription). Microsoft Teams has more users than Slack now. Once you're on the Microsoft train it's hard to get off. New Xbox coming out I believe at the end of the year. I think companies that don't have the necessary skills(my company) need to move to cloud our they will die, our core business isn't maintaining servers. Microsoft have really turned it around with developers, embraced open source, built great developer tools.

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to be fair, teams has more users than slack because they effectively give away teams with o365, and then claim all the people who have o365 use teams. Lots of companies use o365 (so get counted for teams) then, use slack as there actual chat app.

With that said, our company recently switched from slack to teams, and its been a fairly annoying change. Teams is miles behind slack in terms of usability.

Yeah slack is definitely the superior product, I think it was a great strategy by Microsoft to give the free 1 year subscription. Gives them some time to catch up to slack.

Since coronavirus Microsoft has the NHS (~1.7M employees) on teams.

I use both Teams and Slack and almost did a spit take at the idea of "switching" from Slack to Teams. I had noticed that Teams has more chat functionality than a meeting tool really needs, but I didn't imagine that it was intended to be usable as a company's primary chat system.

> Microsoft have really turned it around with developers, embraced open source, built great developer tools.

I'm still taking these changes with a grain of salt. If devs are still getting the same treatment in say, 5 or 10 years, I'll believe that Microsoft has changed. But to me the whole thing smells of "Use our open-source programs that just so happen to work really well with our paid-for closed-source software! Why not just switch to Windows and grab our Office 365 subscription while you're at it?"

That might well be true, but right now it's great for many of us. If in a decade VSCode becomes a subscription-only thing, or it requires usage of sharepoint, or something similarly horrible, it'll still have been a wonderful editor to me at this moment in time.

But yeah, considering Microsoft's history it's probably good to stay vigilant.

I have used both Office365 (previous job) and Google apps (current job).

Office365 is lightyears ahead for pretty much everything, from a business perspective.

From a nerd persepective, outlook mail is a bit uncomfortable to use and Teams has usability problems (slack is still better in that regard).

However you get Teams basically for free with an office 365 subscription, and you would have to buy the office suite anyway, so...

The Office apps are better but everything else is significantly worse. All the systems are glommed together. The administration of everything is a nightmare. Try to setup things like OneDrive is a travesty. My girlfriend has O365 for her small business. She has the original account. She was trying to do something relatively simple with Teams the other day and it wouldn't let her. It said she wasn't an admin and she should contact hers. There is no one else, she IS the admin. So she signed up for a different service instead. I have nothing but trouble using the broad MS online ecosystem. But so many people are locked into and only know Windows and Office that switching cost is too much for most people.

> The administration of everything is a nightmare.

That's possible, I wouldn't know. I was writing about my experience as an user.

And this is the problem which MS creates for itself by sticking everything together into one huge gluey lump for you to get stuck onto, quite intentionally, but lack of quality plus emergent problems get you. MS has never been reliable throughout, and never will be until it gives up on complexity, and it won't do that because it's addicted to complexity.

A company with as many products as Microsoft can afford to be crap at so many things they do. Even a product they do well today, maybe corporate strategy changes tomorrow and condemns it to permanent neglect. It makes much more sense to use a solution from a company whose future is pinned to that one product.

I imagine it's easier and cheaper for Moft to throw customer support at these types of problems than to solve them. Which, honestly, is probably better than offering better products with no support at all (Google, where even the products aren't necessarily better)

Yeah, let's talk about MS' customer support... it's soooo good.

Teams main competitor is Zoom, not Slack. Take a look at the new features they just announced for it: https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/8/21317526/microsoft-teams-t...

It's all video call related.

But are there any ways I can convert my swiss knife 4€ per month vps (1vcore, 2g, 20g) to something azure (either a vps or a virtual distro) ? (genuine question)

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