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Comment by foepys | Hacker News Reader

That's exactly the authors point. MS Teams doesn't have to be good. People don't want to think about their tools and as long as they work reasonably well, people will use what they were given by their company. Since Microsoft included Teams in Office 365, companies decided to use Teams instead of paying extra for Slack.

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That's part of it. There are lots of workers who do care about their tools though.

There is just one little problem. They are often not the people who get to decide on where the company spends its money.

We are a Microsoft shop by and large. A lot of workers used slack, but management decided it had no compelling features compared to teams. We already got the licenses for teams, so slack was just costing us. So slack got ditched and now we all use teams.

Except we don't, not really. Not like we used slack. Somehow, teams feels like work and slack feels like community. A lot of people use teams chat like they do email: not for fun but to get things done. A lot of people used slack like how they would chat in person.

It's different, teams killed most of the joy of connecting with each other at the workplace through chat. Not for all I think, but in general I feel we lost a certain sense of community that slack brought to our company.

I don't meant to be a complete bean counter but if all Slack can point to as a benefit is a "certain sense of community" even among a group that cares a lot about tools then it isn't it a great spot.

Is your revenue down since switching to Teams? Sales volume? Number of bugs fixed per release? Onboarding new hires slower? Time to fix critical incidents up?

Those are the kind of things I would have expected you to mention if there were actually a massive difference between Teams and Slack.

If the team is less engaged then that will show up in all of those metrics over time, and losing a sense of community seems like it would trigger that for some team members.

How much better does it need to be to justify its $6/user/month? If it makes employees even 0.1% more productive, then it's net positive. It takes you 5 seconds instead of 7 seconds to look something up and you do 5 times a day? Congratulations, you've made up your $6.

Yep, and from a bean counter but also "someone who likes to do work while at work" Point of view having a chat tool that feels like work at work rather than a typical social media time sink is a GOOD THING. Slack has been an absolute productivity killer everywhere I've used it because it contains all the usual Skinner box tricks to keep users engaged with it rather than doing actual work. Workplaces shouldn't be about "the joy if connecting with each other". shudder

I'm actually curious, how is Slack a time sink? I muted most of my channels and just check for DMs, thread replies and @channels from important channels. It's at most 30 minutes a day, roughly the same as email.

Maybe parts of the answer lies in that you had to do something: mute the channels.

Maybe others just accept the defaults

True, but in every chat app ever that I've used, nothing is muted by default.

And the reasoning is quite simple, for the average user who doesn't change any default value, a by-default-muted chat app is useless. There would be no messaging as far as a regular user would be concerned. What good is a chat app where you can't chat? :-)

You know, I’ve been thinking on this. You’re right. My office chair is way too comfortable—I need the backache to keep me motivated to leave work at work. /s

> There is just one little problem. They are often not the people who get to decide on where the company spends its money.

Super common in businesses. They prioritize what managers want, not what the employees need.

Example:

We switched to NextCloud's Mail app for our webmail. It's terrible and barely has any of the features you'd consider it for any size company much less ours (~$1 billion & 3500 employees).

We brought it up to our VP of IT before we rolled it out and "we like that its integrated into NextCloud and we can pay them or develop features ourselves!".

Rollout went as predicted. Our users hate it because it has tons of problems and barely works. So we brought up that we can switch to something like RoundCube and same thing: "We like that its integrated". Even after we brought up that its a terrible experience for users. VP: "I don't care about that". There was a nice awkward silence after that.

Teams has high numbers, but I wonder how much of that is actually eating into the Slack use case. Most of it seems to be awkward KPI gaming by forcing people to click into it to read docs and make calls.

Same is true, at least in personal experience, for Zoom.

We pay for and use Zoom, as in not just the free account. But lately have started using MS Team a lot for smaller meetings. It integrates well with Outlook and works well.

Interestingly, we've never used Team as a Slack replacement.

As someone who's used both this year - Teams with one company, Slack with two - I feel like Teams is the 'meeting' product and Slack the 'chat' one. I think both products have flaws, but Slack is far easier to understand and use.

Teams proves that working reasonably well is not actually required.

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