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Comment by donkarma | Hacker News Reader

Considering the state of Teams they really needed Discord for their amazing technology of actually being semi responsive

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Maybe...

Teams is utter garbage in my opinion, but I don't think acquiring Discord would solve that. Skype seems like a similar acquisition, and look how that turned out.

Microsoft has trouble with UI design and it only got worse. Think about the "help" buttons that are on win system preferences, instead of directing you to the option they send you to google or bing. It's ridiculous.

UI design? Teams has no UI design, but haphazardly aranged buttons that are hard to spot.

I can't describe how bad of experience it is to use.

How does a corp that actively pushes their users/clients into using Teams makes no UX effort.

The whole Settings app also feels like something thrown together in a really primitive GUI scripting language that doesn't support anything besides text and its alignment.

This is the old disk management utility: https://i.imgur.com/AqhYewC.jpg

This is the new one: https://i.imgur.com/DNb0qJl.jpg

While the old was far from perfect, it at least gave visual hints to how partitions relate to disks. The new """design""" is just plain text, some of which is clickable and will reveal "Properties" button. It's up to you to find the hidden clickspots.

I can't believe they are releasing such garbage. Sometimes I wonder: does Satya Nadella use Windows? How is he not raging every time he opens the Settings app?

That's one painful side-by-side

“Just throw it in a webview and let’s grab an early lunch.”

Decision makers are pretty forgiving of an application that comes bundled with something else they had to buy anyway. And it is "good enough", despite being worse than competitors, for things like hosting video meetings.

I hoped that getting vaccinated would make me love microsoft more, but the teams UI is just so bad.

Not to mention the pain that is moving between office 365 apps.

My Org went from Skype for Business to Teams.

Teams is 1000x better.

The part I like is how it integrates with outlook. My workflow is pretty email oriented so being able to send an email meeting request and have that meeting seamlessly show up in teams app is really nice.

Same thing when you receive an email from someone you can click their name and dial them via teams (you could do this with skype to but it was dodgy).

Group calls, screen sharing etc. is miles better than Skype.

Copying text works randomly...

IF you want a really ridicilous example of Microsoft's inability to deal with UX, try changing literally anything that has to do with sound in Windows, and tell me how many separate sound-related configuration applications there are, and what are the paths to opening them.

Then, ask someone who never used Windows XP to explain to you what each of those configuration applications is responsible for. (So they won't be able to lean on the crutch of "Oh, this one is the exact same thing as the sound application in Windows 98...")

One of the reasons of course is that every driver feels the need to add their great pane to the control panel applet, so now Microsoft can’t change anything to the applet or all the drivers break.

3 of those settings panes are baked directly into Windows 10 and have nothing to do with any 3rd-party drivers.

If the sound isn't enough, the power management is even worse. I count at least 5 different panes to configure different subsets of screen saver, sleep, hibernate and power on/off behavior, all from Windows itself with no 3rd-party software involved.

I believe (but can't confirm, because I don't own enough wierd audio equipment) that third-party drivers can embed controls into one of those settings panes.

But yes, your point still stands. There's no good reason for this mess, and Microsoft needs to put someone who cares in charge of Windows UX.

> I believe (but can't confirm, because I don't own enough wierd audio equipment) that third-party drivers can embed controls into one of those settings panes.

That would be an improvement on the current status quo, where each third-party device adds its own new settings pane.

Or just use Outlook. I don't know what they did but it's like all the various panes are coded independently and don't talk to each other.

Multiple times a day I'll see a number next to 'unread' which won't go away, because I've read all my emails but it hasn't realised yet. And my calendar sometimes takes 5-10 seconds to load over VPN, it doesn't seem to be cached anymore. Made a mistake of going to lunch with an 'empty' calendar once! I miss 2016.

Its not only the sound thing. Its so weird to me how i still am able to find most options on a modern Windows computer even thought i stopped back with XP. And not because its so intuitive, but because it never really changed at all, just added more layers over layers.

If you think Teams is garbage, try dealing with the admin side of Teams. UX nightmare.

Been using Teams for school for two years now and have zero complaints.

Been using Teams for work for two years and I have so many complaints.

Great points here.

Have you used other software like Discord though to have a frame of reference?

Sometimes you need to be a "power user" to encounter all a product's flaws. I've been using it professionally for 3.5 years, and I touch pretty much every feature. I had high hopes because I loved a lot of the decisions they were making, so I started maintaining a list of issues/bugs. I reported them when I had time to describe them well. After a year, it got into the hundreds, with some that were pretty dramatic, and I stopped caring enough to continue, because it was clearly not going to be the product I was hoping it could be. Since then, the most obvious problem that has happened is slowdown. It takes full seconds to do most navigation/loading in our (large) team. The whole affair made me truly sad, frustrated, and angry.

I think my biggest pet peive is the existence of Files/Wikis per/channel... when most of the time, you kind of one one set per team. Or the proliferation of Team groups themselves.

Goes from pretty simple/useful to crazy bloated.

Another irksome thing is you can tether the wiki along with files to onedrive via the sharepoint backend links... but the format of the wiki is in a proprietary format, and even if you did get it, it doesn't sync the other way, read only local.

Those per channel features are useful for others. Sometimes people don't get to run their own team, but at least they still get all the benefit in their little fiefdom.

6 to 1..

And using the wiki is pointless if you're using OneNote right.

The wiki is integrated in the box. Unless onenote works in the box.

Been using Teams for 6 months, it's awful.

Being asked to log into another Teams instance, for example, results in baffling issues; I had to switch to the web version and that only works sometimes.

Turn off a VPN? Be prepared to suddenly, without warning, have a 10-15 minute period where people are messaging you and you don't get any of them. (I am talking about Teams instances that do not depend on you being behind a VPN, more on THOSE after)

Video conferences are terrible. I keep getting invites without the Teams URL attached because of UI issues, and worse, there are situations where I can't even access the URL I am given.

Low quality Enterprise security teams often ruin Teams installs. For some customers I work with, I am not even able to upload an image to a group chat. (Not a meme mind you; screen shots). "Sure that's the price of a locked down / professional service" you may say, but for some obscene reason, I am able to use Giphy in these chats.

And many other miscellaneous issues (degraded experience on Firefox, authentication headaches w/ AD Azure, etc..)

As far as I am concerned, this is MSFT's fault since they sold a product that can be configured into complete uselessness for its purpose (sharing information).

(Disclaimer: I own MSFT stock and generally like their direction but the execution for this and Azure DevOps is seriously lacking)

Try using Teams for school and work with different user accounts - and contrast that with the experience on e.g. Slack where different places managed by different organizations just work.

This is where some of the alternative electron wrappers become useful. I agree that it's pretty bad. Not fun at all when you accidentally join an external chat under your work account.

My workplace switched from Slack to Teams a year ago and it was a complete disaster. In addition to numerous flaws that would be repeated by others, some users including me couldn't sign in with cooperate accounts at all---every time I put the email address it skips passwords and always ends up with a clueless generic error message with a non-functional "retry" button.

I have since found a workaround which requires reinstallation per each launch, because the installer installs an older version that will soon be automatically updated to a newer version, and that older version can retry on the failure with an alternative login prompt that actually works. So Microsoft has at least two login prompts, only one of which is working for me but unsupported by some versions of Teams so that I can barely work around. Brilliant.

What is your IdP? Do you integrate with Azure AD? Bringing your own provider? Using Microsoft accounts? Does your org use M365 at all? Or are you just using teams out of the suite?

I don't know the exact provider. I think it's Azure AD with a hybrid identity (since login forms doesn't leave Microsoft at all), but it's a mere guess.

As an M365 admin for a district with 65,000 students and 11,000 staff: thank you for saying as much. Teams gets a lot of hate here, but honestly.. it does a lot right. I do admit the Teams client is a bit of a pig.

I really wished this deal could have been reached, but then again, competing products will do each other well.

Teams is basically Discord for business. It's as if the development team were big fans of Discord. It shows!

But the main problem with Teams is its low-performance GUI (Electron-based). And from what I hear about Discord, it's the same there.

There's other minor problems like insane chat latency, but I can work with that. Voice and Video generally works fine.

That is absolutely not "the main problem" with Teams. It's UI is not very well thought out at all and notifications work with the reliability of a rooster on ketamine.

The only three value propositions Teams has over Discord are:

* Support for threads - albeit again very inelegantly.

* The ability to embed web apps as tabs in a Teams page - this is my favourite feature

* Integration with Office 365

MS already owned Skype for over half a decade before they made Teams and Teams voice/video chat is still vastly inferior than Skype. How would owning a bunch more IP that they‘re ignoring help?

Not just that, but you can no longer sign up for a Skype (even "for business") account if your organization has Teams through Office 365, but Teams doesn't interoperate well with Skype so if you, for business reasons, need to communicate with a Skype user without using a personal Skype account, you're SOL.

Teams definitely feels like it was rushed to market to take advantage of the pandemic. I'm really sad our company moved us from Slack to Teams. It's so much worse, especially on Linux

Teams has been rushed to market 4 years ago..

And it was still better than the dumpster fire that was Skype for Business. I loved how it would push a message to the device that it thought you were active on, but that there wasn't a centralized storage of messages. Messages sent to Device 1 didn't exist on Device 2.

That was so bad... you'd reply to a message at lunch on your way back, get to your desktop, and couldn't get messages at all... even if you sent one out.

That was the absolute most frustrating thing.

Teams was present long before the pandemic.

I wonder whether the near universal unpleasant experiences mentioned in this thread aren't caused by bad ports of MS Teams to Mac/Linux/Android. I use Teams solely on Windows, and the calls/video are flawless, recording just works, captions and audio transcripts are fairly accurate. The chat portion has minor warts, but it does get the job done. Markdown syntax works for most of the message formatting needs. Webhooks are easy to implement.

Discord doesn't have particularly amazing technology, what do you mean?

They combined a lot of things others were doing well too and combined it into a resource hungry piece of software. I too am not really impressed

Correcting for you, into one resource hungry piece of software.

Thanks :) a / an / one / ... still gets me sometimes.

It's not that they didn't do it well or anything, and they've clearly scaled up to this insane load but they aren't afaik using crazy algorithms or something special like that. They just did the obvious "we'll have a hosted app that does this AND this"

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