Ask HN: Does Microsoft use Teams for internal comm? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Does Microsoft use Teams for internal comm?

18 pointsnittanymount21 comments

could some Microsoft folk tell, if Microsoft uses Teams for internal communication? the UX ! :-) or anyone feels it is pretty good ?

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I sometimes wonder how many technology companies don't end up using their own products like this.

A company I worked for produced, among many other products, performance monitoring software for alerting on poor perf of internal apps/databases and could tell you where/why it was slow. Yet, our engineering group mostly depended on users telling us when our internal apps were slow because the company didn't actually roll out its own product internally.

I used to work for Microsoft and our team's morning rant (on Whatsapp) would start with MS Teams not working. Often meetings would be stopped because Teams hung up for the person who was presenting. And the Teams/Skype Infra team were the slowest in the world to respond to any requests!

I had more or less the same experience, but TBH MS uses internally the latest unreleased version of applications so those problems are partially to be expected and act as dog fooding/user testing

haha, this explains. somehow the Teams team does not care, or the product/ops team is organized in a rigid way, hard to make some changes even the dev feels the inconvenience.

I work at Microsoft and yup we use Teams internally.

Wouldn't it be in Microsoft's interest to develop a much better app than Teams just for internal use?

Yes, it’s mind boggling. Complaining about Teams is a daily ritual. We all hate it, and we don’t understand why we can’t have something better.

Unfortunately the source code is unavailable as well as the APIs, otherwise many of us would have already re-skinned it.

But we don’t use the chat as much as you would in slack, because it’s totally broken. We mostly just take lots of videos calls and share notes with an internal pastebin/gist tool.

It'd be in Microsoft's interest to make the product they sell good enough for their internal use rather than make a second product and sell an even less improved Teams. Dogfooding at its most basic. The exception would be if they were planning on changing direction with what they offered customers, in which case it doesn't make sense to dogfood the existing product anymore.

thanks confirming,

saw the discussion in another thread for softwares used in medical, not easy to use, one reason someone mentioned is that the purchaser does not use it much, the real users(doctors/nurses)' voice are probably not heard enough.

wondered about some ux inconveniences in teams, if MS use it internally, should have improved it... :-)

It is not like they are not working on improving things. I will even go as far that getting control of electron was a big motivating behind purchasing GitHub. Moving to Chromium based browser if also part of the plans to get access to and being able to improve Teams. Teams is such a central piece of software to Microsoft and many other Microsoft products and services evolves around teams but to replace the Electron part of teams with something better is apparently not an easy task. Teams for private people, that ships with Windows 11, does not use Electron (uses a webview instead) is part of this mission. I haven't used it as I also hate Teams and have zero desire to use anything teams outside of work, but from what I understand it should be much more performant and useless resources than the Teams for Work Electron app.

slack is built with electron, cannot blame electron much.

probably not fair to compare Teams and slack, as you said, MS has more things to consider for Teams than slack... while seems even some minor things, it is kind of annoying, can be easily fixed, but stay like that for long time... thinking if the Teams product team folks use the product and care, they should have fixed/improved...

seems this is common for MS products, powerful, many functions, but do not care enough for UX..., and one of things makes it different to apple :-)

I'd love to know if Google uses Google Chat internally, so many missing features that I'd bet that hardly any Google staff would want to use it

I'm pretty sure they use that internally (when I was there Hangouts was used). However, Google work culture is (or at least was till fairly recently) centered around shared docs and email (automations send email with action buttons for example vs. hip companies were such things are fed into Slack). Hangouts was mostly used as a lightweight 1:1 or small group communication and resolving an issue. I imagine post-COVID the Slack-style Chat has gotten more use, but I'd bet Gmail is still at the center, not Chat.

while google chat seems not for enterprise use, right?

Just a tip for making Teams useable. Every time it doesnt work/wont allow you to join a call/ you cannot answer call etc which happens multiple times a day just run this powershell Taskkill /IM Teams.exe /F and start Teams again. And here you go, you can again answer calls and join meetings:)

I have this script saved on my Desktop under name useteams.ps1 and I have to run it sometimes multiple times a day.

Same but with Google and Chat/Meet. It is just so horrible I cannot believe the devs at Google can dog food it effectively.

Related: When I've looked at finance jobs at Apple, you must be proficient in Excel. To my knowledge, Numbers is not used because it is shite.

I like Pages and Numbers better than Word and Excel, but I write, and I got tired of converting documents so I could exchange with editors and peers. Though the conversion and interoperability is very good, it's not frictionless. So now I have a yearly subscription to Word, one of my least favorite writing platforms.

Finance at Apple probably uses Excel because the finance industry uses Excel.

I use Excel day in day out. I really want to like anything else, but there are quite a few things that don't really work for a power user.

That being said, I would imagine that for most applications, any speadsheet program is fine.

If you follow MS people on twitter, you can guess what the sentiment about Teams is, not unusable, but not perfect either

They are dogfooding it, wich is the way to go, however, the client is pretty poor quality, some people behind it left the company recently btw

Who are those people behind Teams? Teams is built on a lot of things, meetings are based on older Skype and Skype for Business tech and I know a few people that left from those areas but not necessarily due to low quality

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