Microsoft Teams; using one monopoly to aid another | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Teams; using one monopoly to aid another

blog.dijit.sh

74 pointsdijit43 comments

Here's another fun path I went down: I was wondering why contractions were always marked as misspellings. Wanted to edit the dictionary. Can't do that. Turns out, Microsoft Teams has an undocumented hard-coded link to the dictionary from Chromium builds and uses that for its dictionary. You can turn off spell check, but there's no custom dictionary, and there's no way to edit the dictionary.

I'm convinced that Micorosoft Teams was written by a bunch of interns in three months at the beginning of quarantine so that they could compete for all the work-from-home crowd.

Teams was available before the pandemic.

I was saying it tongue in cheek, but you're right. It just got more attention because of the pandemic, and it's only gotten worse over time.

Except Teams existed before things got all COVIDy. Back then I even defended Teams when we had just moved off Slack. I mean, it wasn't great and the Mac client blows goats, but it gets the job done.

And then we all started working from home, and using Teams for more than just a glorified chat app. That's when it became evident to me that my defense of Teams was way unwarranted.

Our company uses teams more or less as a glorified chat app and it does a good job at it.

Teams is also the default way we call each other (phone number syncing is hot garbage and everyone has unlimited data on their work phones), and video conferencing via teams is acceptable. It helps that we have a No Camera culture, so we don’t often deal with buggy video processing problems.

Anything important is to be put in an email chain, and anything more permanent in the wiki system.

Seriously though, hearing the travails of Slack culture causing headaches and time wasting + degrading documentation standards, I think a glorified chat app is not so bad.

Have you professionally used anything other than microsoft products for internal communication?

To be honest, I have not. Every company I have worked for or had extensive relations with were an Outlook oriented company.

No judgement at all.

I often find the people that actually enjoy teams have never really used anything other than Microsoft messaging solutions professionally.

I usually speculate that it’s because people have never seen anything better than what Microsoft can put out, but there’s the possibility that the way you think about things when that’s your entire ecosystem is different than the way I do.

What I’m saying is: I’m not saying that you’re wrong for liking it, I’m saying that we can be different; and the bigger annoyance is that these closed platforms do not permit client choice. Maybe.

When you rip it open you'll find Skype for a heart.

And same lead architect, incredible that both system suck so bad while having so many users.

Skype was pretty good before MS bought it.

Even MSN Messenger was pretty well-behaved in its earlier versions, and definitely far better with resource usage.

Skype resembled malware back in those times. No idea where you got the "pretty good" stuff?

you're whitewashing Skype's history. It's always been hot garbage even pre-MS

Except it's Skype for Business, which is actually not Skype at all.

That heart has been transplanted so many times from the client formerly known as Skype for Business, formerly known as Lync, formerly known as Microsoft Office Communicator, formerly known as Live Communications Server, formerly known as Exchange Conferencing.

Straightforward antitrust violation. This is exactly what they got in trouble w/ in the 1990's w.r.t. bundling IE w/ Windows. But they know exactly what they are doing. They aren't unaware of the fact that this a violation.

There is a lot of complaining on this site about various FAANG members' anticompetitive behavior (some of it uninformed!), but you all need to make room in your hearts for an M in that acronym when you're talking about antitrust issues, because this behavior is anticompetitive.

Why isn’t Microsoft counted in the FAANG? Isn’t Microsoft and Apple neck and neck for worlds most valuable companies?

because FAANG is originally a stock market term for (at the time) hot tech stocks, and Microsoft was already old and boring.

And ironically, in the last several years MSFT stock has outperformed nearly all of FAANG, the exception being Apple

And it's easy to see why. They're dominating nearly everything besides streaming, mobile and social media. Windows, WSL, VS Code, X-Box, Azure, Outlook, Office 365, Teams, etc.

It's pretty difficult to be a white collar working adult and not be forced to interact with at least one Microsoft product on a daily basis whether you enjoy it or not. Thier network effect in the corporate world is basically a black hole at this point. We tried at one gig to go all-in on Linux on our laptops but gave up after so many of our customers were using Office, SharePoint and Teams to colaborate and expected us to join in with the same tools. We lost the battle before it even began.

Too bad they royally fucked up the last mobile OS attempt many years ago. Ironically, I quite enjoyed the experience. The UX felt really polished and their mobile OS ran so buttery smooth even on HW that Android at the time wouldn't even dream of running.

The Teams Mac app is hot garbage. Every third or so meeting it will randomly hang, logout, hang up immediately, or even straight up crash when attempting to join a call. I’ve reinstalled it multiple times, cycled the sign in, all to no avail. And this has been happening for meetings throughout the entirety of last year!

Zoom has never given me a lick of trouble and I use it for at least 10x the meetings. I try to redirect people away from Teams whenever I have the option to do so.

Teams doesn’t work properly on Firefox - it doesn’t let you screen share or have any audio or video. Google Meet doesn’t have any problems - heck, Zoom’s web video call interface works great too. The only browser I can use Teams with properly is Chrome, and it’s literally the only site I ever find myself needing to use Chrome with.

And then there’s the famous bug where Teams disabled emergency calling on Android…

I mean, I know Microsoft doesn’t always prioritize non-Windows platforms, but they could at least pretend to try, right?

Yes teams sucks, but zoom web fails for me as well. After 10 minutes or so, my audio is disconnected with no way to turn it back on other than reloading the page.

Don't worry, it's trash on Windows too. From weird bugs like the Play/Pause media keys stopping/resuming the Teams call tune (even after meetings), to crap like clicking on images requiring a reload.

At least it's not webex.

I used webex only for conferences but, unlike Teams it could do full screen display of the shared screen. In teams it is very important that a rectangle with the initials of your conference partner occupies half the screen. It's almost hilarious that Microsoft things that auto hiding things in Word or excel is ok (scrollbar, ribbon) but in Teams you are literarly forced to see every crap without the possibility to hide it (a big title/ menu bar, big rectangles with initials of conference participants). Teams is the worst screen sharing program i have ever seen.

On searching for “How to remove teams via GPO Windows 11” I was greeted with a lovely well instructed page which basically says: “You need to make a scheduled task that removes teams every day”

Better to use the security features of the system against itself. Deny permissions to the files to everyone (even yourself --- you can create a separate account and assign ownership of the files to it, so it's the only one which can reassign ownership/change permissions) and it'll probably stop. However, I agree that when you need to fight with a system that tries to behave against your will through malware-ish means, it definitely puts into light the question of who it thinks is the real owner.

I wonder what would need to happen to convince the management that actually they could run on Linux? I mean, 3 years ago the belief was we couldn't work from home because that would harm productivity.

To do what? Corporate endpoints? I like linux but they can't. Servers? Already do and should. But 2022 will be the year of the Linux desktop.

The year of the Linux desktop in what way? I find it hard to believe Linux desktop will have any kind of massive growth this year.

You're right. 2023 will be the year of the Linux desktop.

It is inevitable.

It's a running joke. http://yotld.com/

Emoji being taboo here makes it harder to convey sarcasm.

Teams runs on Linux. I had a couple of Teams meetings today and I joined from Manjaro. Or is that not what you meant?

We have a number of staff who use little ultrabooks for what is essentially a chrome kiosk(for documentation) and frequently discuss moving them over to Linux or Raspberry Pi because they would barely notice the change.

Is it possible that Microsoft is processing the content of messages in Teams and using it to enhance targeting (by salespeople and recruiters) of the conversation participants on LinkedIn?

I expect ridicule, but I've seen some peculiar coincidences recently.

Agreed. Microsofts enterprise penetration is ever growing and teams is a new hub in the spoke. If you enroll a mac, its auto-installed.

Worst parts for me is its shitty keyboard hijacking and its uncanny ability to eaves-drop on me with its buggy phone / bluetooth integration (often teams will hijack the input signals and turn on the mic without prompting)

It's crazy that pasting code in teams doesn't work. You can prepend code with "``` "to get monospace font. But leading whitespace will be magically eaten

Worst is: if you type some comment, then the ```, then some code and ``` to close it off, it shows an empty code block below the closing backticks.

MS Teams is pushed by people who have never used or known anything better and are only using it because they already have it installed. And are network-effect pushing in on everyone else. I absolutely hate it.

btw. the funniest thing is. they found a way to sync calendar entries and creating automatic teams meetings, but syncing phone contacts with outlook and teams is garbage.

I mean what the fuck? you sell office 365 and can't have a contact management solution in two of your apps? and why the fuck can't you always correctly show the contact name instead of the phone number especially with call queues?

No company hates their users as much as microsoft.

Honestly though, I have little sympathy for people that choose to deal with this stuff. This has been Microsoft's MO for 30 years. If you are bringing their software into your org you know what you are signing up for. You are pretty much consenting to whatever shit they choose to give you.

It's simple. Keep Microsoft out from front to back and you won't have these issues.

To me it's a question I ask when I'm interviewing, and it's one of the biggest signs of a broken culture if a place has heavy microsoft integrations. I'll turn down those offers.

you can change the default meeting behavior, it isn't really a vendor lock in type situation, teams is included with office365 you don't have to use it if you don't want to but you need to set it up properly, company i'm at just started allowing teams meetings as we are transitioning away from webex due to costs, until the change was made it didn't matter what changes were made to gpo, you could restrict the addin sure, to a degree, which you should have a whitelist for office addins already, but if you got the addin loaded say were in a non covered ou for that gpo, then you could only do some things, and was quite manual not at all automatic, plus you had to have permission in o365 admin center to use it, so its controllable.

Hi there.

Please tell me how because my 5 man IT department apparently can’t find the button and googling is failing me too.

Apart from copying Slack, they also copied Notion: https://www.fastcompany.com/90692715/microsoft-loop-notion-c...

Copying the innovation of smaller players and bundling it with existing subscriptions is a pretty despicable practice and so obviously anti competitive. I can only assume politicians look the other way since they rely on MS PAC donations.

As for the anti competitive UI dark patterns in this article - it is just very incredibly sleezy and people need to go to jail for it.

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