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Comment by BoysenberryPi | Hacker News Reader

Please don't do this. Microsoft chat services are the absolute worst. I've had to use Skype for years after Microsoft purchased it and it was bad. I have to use Teams for work and it's just abysmal. I don't know why but everything Microsoft touches in this space turns to absolute trash.

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God - skype went to hell - absolute garbage new interface etc. It's something maybe with their tech stack that does not handle realtime audio etc and then on design side it's all non-usable social network type stuff?

I honestly could not believe how badly they trashed skype - instead of it becoming WhatsApp it just imploded at least for my use case.

I use teams, while confusing it seems miles better than previous effort (zoom still by far the best for video).

Well that's probably at least in part because a major motivation for that acquisition was not to actually improve the underlying technology. To quote verbatim one of my favorite hn posts of all time (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18411779):

  A series of headlines:

  2009 - NSA offering 'billions' for Skype eavesdrop solution [1]
  2011 - Microsoft buys Skype for $8.5 billion. Why, exactly? [2]
  2012 - Skype replaces P2P supernodes with Linux boxes hosted by Microsoft [3]
  2013 - Microsoft handed the NSA access to encrypted messages. Subhead: Skype worked to enable Prism collection of video calls [4]
  
  1. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/12/nsa_offers_billions_for_skype_pwnage/
  2. https://www.wired.com/2011/05/microsoft-buys-skype-2/
  3. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/05/skype-replaces-p2p-supernodes-with-linux-boxes-hosted-by-microsoft/
  4. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-collaboration-user-data

Interesting. I did some work overseas in out of the way places - did supernodes used to be potentially very close to you if you had your own network that was limited back to larger internet?

Potentially yes: the supernodes were just other "regular users who had sufficient bandwidth" which could be quite efficient if you were all in, say a remote region with good local bandwidth but little connection back to the rest of the world. Obviously though, this P2P structure would make interception of message content by Skype corporate rather implausible! There's a pretty good figure and explanation in the ars article above.

Microsoft never really seemed to know what to do with Skype and I suspect because of that they never devoted the resources to build it out and make it better. It checked a box for them when selling to enterprise customers, but they failed to imagine what it could become.

And I agree-Microsoft Teams is solid, but could use a faster and better designed user interface. The video chat feature is also sub standard compared to Zoom, but it largely hits the good enough threshold.

Agreed - Teams is good enough, but a bit laggy and things like backgrounds lagged for users WFH.

I have had to move from Slack to Teams. Despite what everyone says about Slack, Teams is much, much worse because of the complex and incomprehensible integrations with Active Directory.

I have had invitations to meetings that I can click on and that don't trigger the Teams app. The "Join meeting" button doesn't show up in Firefox, and even in Chrome, I get sucked into a redirect hell.

I even have meetings created without the meeting invitation link - despite the meeting having been created within Teams itself. I have resorted to inviting people to Google meets just to get stuff clarified.

But it's still better than Azure DevOps.

The other thing that sucks about Azure AD and Teams is that if you invite someone from outside your tenant into a meeting and their IT admin has disabled guest login into other tenants (not uncommon in places like banks where they don’t want people leaving credentials everywhere, even if heavily scoped), they will get a cryptic error message and you will never know that they got an error unless they call you out of band and tell you, and by that point you’re probably 15 minutes into the meeting.

This was the reason the last place I worked switched to Zoom, since if you invited someone outside the org it just popped up a box asking them for a name.

Microsoft has bought Linkedin, Skype, Bungie, Bethesda, Github etc. Is this what tech has become? The titans are buying up everything and tech becomes 5 companies in the US and 3 or so in China? Feels better to have a wide breath of companies for healthy competition and innovation.

These companies can't live off VC cash forever. Getting acquired by Google / Microsoft is usually part of the business plan.

Then perhaps (SV startup?) companies should start thinking about creating profitable businesses in the first place instead of living on borrowed money?

Should. Don't.

Microsoft acquiring those companies doesn't really hurt competition.

Tech M&A (and particularly the list of examples you pick) is often driven by the desire to acquire talent, technology or capabilities that you don't already have, expanding the scope of the company. If you can integrate the acquired asset with your existing offerings, the theory goes, you will be able to create something greater than the sum of the parts.

It is also used by companies to acquire talent they used to have, but lost.

They have accumulated a cash war chest that is so big it's a liability... their way to deal with that is to acquire and offset costs and taxes which enables them to get bigger faster.

The system is working. but only really for the biggest.

As it turns out, all those dystopian novels and films set in the future with one or two mega corporations controlling everything were right all along.

Now they just need to buy arm manufacturer and biochem company and they will be proper cyberpunk zaibatsu.

Skype was always garbage software, even long before Microsoft bought it

The competitors were also pretty trash though. Skype never improved while the rest of the landscape did.

Pretty standard Microsoft strategy really. Once they decide they dominate a market they figure there's no reason to invest another cent into improving their product offering. See also: Internet Explorer

Hopefully, things are different under Satya, who wisely has kept GitHub at arms length. But it is hard to think of other US large cap companies with such a record of being a Destroyer of Acquisitions.

Hopefully. Minecraft is another example of something they didn’t abjectly fuck up. It’s possible for them to do the right thing.

From what I see over my spawn’s shoulders, Discord is substantially better than Slack. Hope they don’t kill Discord with enterpriseyness and keep it more on the gamer side.

GitHub had some value as an independent concern though.

Discord doesn't. Either it has to start monetising so it doesn't lose money (which it could do regardless of Microsoft so the acquisition doesn't add much value) or Microsoft justifies the acquisition by integrating it with it's other services (probably gaming) and taking advantage of the user base.

So it doesn't feel like the same can apply.

I couldn’t even log into Skype after the acquisition!

You didn’t miss anything. I had the same troubles but managed to do it after a few hoops.

I too use Teams at work and I think it's fine. What do you dislike about it more specifically?

The 3 biggest problems I have with it are search, history, and stability. Scrolling back in time past a few weeks will frequently just crash Teams for me. The search Teams has is beyond basic and genuinely unhelpful most of the time, and I frequently just don't get my alerts despite being available and someone directly @ing me. Then there are tons of small problems like Teams automatically setting me as away if I don't touch my mouse for 15 minutes or sometimes I'll have Teams on a second monitor while working in a primary monitor and Teams will have set me as away for no reason. Also Teams threads are literally the worst UX I have ever had. I am not exaggerating

Teams have the ugliest ux of any chat app

I find teams to be buggy, confusing, and unresponsive. It also enables fairly undiscoverable and frustrating experiences like those sites within tabs. Then there's the notification overload and strange threading/discussions. I've gotten used to slack, hip chat, and old skype for business, but I have not yet got used to teams even after years is usage.

Not GP, but Teams on Windows 10 is a great example of how Electron apps can be terrible. It is sluggish, uses a lot of RAM and causes other Chromium based apps to run out of memory, crashes every so often, has serious issues with logging in after a password change, is not really feature rich, its User Voice forum for voting on issues and feature requests has many that have been asked for years by a lot of people but not prioritized and so on.

I have reinstalled MS Teams many times, cleared all its cache folders many times, removed all Office and other credentials from Credential Manager many times, made registry changes, logged out explicitly and logged in many times. These are routine activities I have to do just to use it because my organization has a subscription and won’t use any other tool (Skype for Business was abandoned after it reached some amount of stability over several years).

In summary, MS Teams is a dysfunctional tool that reflects the dysfunctional organization behind it. I can’t think of any other reason why it should be so badly maintained.

Every time I think of Windows and other MS applications like Teams, I can’t help but wonder what big productivity and time suckers these are. They seem to be the lowest common denominator in the IT world.

> using electron app for something available as a web service

lol wut

They also made a change recently so the X button does not close the app so when it goes funny I have to open the task manager to restart the thing. If I wanted to minimize the program I would have hit the - instead.

Skype, OneDrive, .. also behave the same with the X button...

It doesn't even, as far as I can tell, show when I'm not logged in in the taskbar. I've worked a few hours before and had to ask a question and then realised I wasn't even signed in. At least Lync and Skype for Business made this obvious.

Plus full screen isn't. I have to ask people to zoom in when they screen share.

The UI is so ugly. The use of contrast between elements is so half-assed that it’s hard to find basic buttons like send, attach, end call.

They mess with the Windows audio driver somehow, so even though I have an audio interface that works with Windows for Ableton and Zoom browser calls, Teams will not permit it to be used in calls. It will start the call and then every time you speak say “This microphone isn’t compatible with Teams”, so it is detecting sound and choosing not to pass it. There’s no reason for the application to do anything other than refer to the default audio device but for some reason it doesn’t do that.

It just doesn't work? I've tried multiple times on various projects, but "using" Teams on Linux or Mac is a sure way to loose contact with your team. Skype works much better (or at all I guess for me).

I use Teams for education. I spend a lot of time spelunking through online resources. Unlike file browsers or browsers where you can open documents in new windows or tabs, Teams can only do one thing at a time. The back button is not predictable. Together this makes it several steps behind poking through a public ftp server.

On MacOS there’s some phantom window object that gets created so that you cannot CTLR-<TAB> back to the Teams app. I believe the MacOS window bar indicates it’s “Teams Notifications” or some such thing. Basically these Electron apps are just incredibly poorly integrated in the OS.

Then there’s the painful markup capabilities when messaging. Oh if I paste in an IP address or something and then I want to style it as code, the backticks are ineffective since and pasted text somehow carries its own styling which apparently cannot be overridden. So the backticks just show up as literals.

Pasting large console output generally sucks as well. Out teams tends to switch over to Slack to paste big text dumps.

Teams uses their own terrible notification system (that's the purpose of the invisible window - it is actually the notification and becomes visible when needed). It's not even an Electron thing - Slack successfully uses macOS system notifications despite being an Electron app too.

Teams isn't that bad haha, it works fine.

Teams is so much better than Slack and WebEx. Are you on Mac OS? Heard more complaints on that platform.

To be fair Macos is full of bugs. Even first party apps are buggy and laggy. So it is not hard to believe that third party stuff is less supportive.

> Teams for work and it's just abysmal

Teams is a 7 star resort with free beer and wine, when compared to google chat.

That is like saying a crack den is better than living in an open grave. I mean yes, but why compare them even?

Because my company's response to asking for Teams/Slack is "why do you need it when we have google chat/meet?" Google has positioned gchat as an alternative to Slack/Team.

https://media.tenor.com/images/43009a72264654dcca101de9bc5cb...

I guess clueless company is clueless.

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