As a casual Teams user I can say it's crap software, I don't understand why so many companies choose to use it.
Its also the best new piece of big software out there. In the days before teams, remote working together in an entire company was hell. Either you were on skype for business, or each team had their own thing that was different and not official.
With teams, everyone is on there. The other microsoft things are integrated, not seamlessly because of bugs, but easily good enough for most things. The chat is available and used, and a nice alternative to e-mail for smaller things.
Teams works well enough for most people, and is very easy to get started with. So most people actually use it, and you get a network effect.
- account setup - sharepoint integration - 'gamer' reputation - (I think) no on-prem solution to keep things off external servers - ease of sending an outlook invite (from native outlook) that immediately comes with a video meeting link.
Teams is a pile of bad software development practices. But it has the correct features to actually be adopted by enterprise. Sadly a large part of those features come from microsoft lock-in and are very hard for competitors to match.
What I found quite notable about Teams is that for all its flaws and issues, the core functionality is very, very solid! Calls never drop, noise suppression is quite good, it’s slow but rarely freezes/crashes etc.
They know very well what would actually disqualify them with people who decide over its usage.
They must have some (in this area very good) project management philosophy the other teams don’t have, as I haven’t seen such a focus on core functionality in any other Microsoft product - bugs in other apps vary randomly in severity, often enough losing you a lot of time or data.
That's funny, because it is exactly the opposite of my experience. Every day I have random issues with MS Teams: Call drops, microphone suddenly "does not work", which can be fixed by rejoining a call, so it cannot have been the microphone, noisy output from other call participants, cannot call anyone who is calling you at the same time, not showing that and not establishing a call when two individuals call each other, not showing any notification about anyone calling when being in a call already and the list probably goes on, as this is just what comes to mind right now.
> They know very well what would actually disqualify them with people who decide over its usage.
In my mind they are long disqualified and if I had a say, I would not even use it at all. So actually they do not seem to know what would disqualify them.
There is an official deb package for Ubuntu. I installed it without paying for Office 365. Never actually used it so far though. Will it ask me to pay when I try to?
It’d be very cool if they could!
p.s. IMHO Slack integrations is the worst thing ever - usually abused to death and never remotely useful.
That's a massive understatement. I'd go as far and say that even if people would try to design a worse chat (and calls) application they'd fail spectacularly.
Because it's a) "free" and b) comes with the right enterprise security/isolation features by default. (For example, there's really no such thing as a "corporate Telegram account".)
Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft: chapter N+1.
If you're already paying them money, it's just there and is somewhat integrated with the rest of the apps, but I doubt there's a lot of orgs out there purchasing Office 365 specifically because of Teams.
Man do I hate that guy. He is a thick as dogshit and about as capable at making a decision as one too. 5 minutes before that Teams conversation I had to explain the difference between a satellite and a ground station. Man is that guy stupid.
So no, I don’t buy that people who’ve used worse are more likely to put up. It’s jaded people who have lost interest in technology who are the ones who settle. The rest of us keep on pushing for something better.