Comment by Andoryuuta | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Andoryuuta | Hacker News Reader

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"... it's not like it's difficult to make a chat program."

A chat program? Easy. A chat program with 270 million monthly active users? Slightly harder, but sure, still easy. A chat program with 270 million monthly active users that has to integrate the entire Microsoft ecosystem [sharepoint, outlook mail + calendar + contacts, yammer, O365 groups, etc] because that is what their enterprise customers demand? Slightly less easy. A chat program with 270 million monthly active users that really isn't just a chat program but rather an entire chat + teleconferencing + screen sharing + MS O365 app platform which has to deal with B2B AAD authentication cross organization, legacy on-premise Exchange servers setup in a hybrid environment, excessive levels of enterprise-controlled configuration and policies, compliance (Purview, IB, retention policies, etc), legal requirements needed to allow Teams to be used as part of the Microsoft 365 Government offering, and many many more niche requirements/features? I suspect it's hard.

I don't particularly like the software (and had many issues with it myself at my prior job) but MS Teams is not realistically _just_ a "chat program" that is easy to build. If you are a company just looking for a good chat experience, I have no idea why you would not use Slack. However, if you are one of the countless companies who have already bought into the entire Microsoft O365+outlook+AAD+sharepoint ecosystem, Teams is probably a good choice, as it is very seamlessly integrated.

Daily Teams user and I agree with you. Maybe the scope is too broad. But the UI is the worst part. I have around 50 chats open and switching from one to another usually takes more than 10 seconds. Joining a large-ish meeting takes 30 seconds of hearing audio and no response from the UI.

Usually the day to day experience is really, really bad.

I wish they got rid of this js-on-the-desktop crap and rewrite it in a decent desktop language like C or C#.

Be careful what you wish for. I recall when Visual Studio switched to from native to managed (VS 2005?) and it was brutal. It was sluggish, crashy, with weird WPF UI bits thrown in here and there to support some oddball feature.

As for C, maybe you meant C++? Kicking out a modern, complex, desktop, web/network-centric application in C is just begging for trouble. Particularly given all the headline grabbing research MS has done into how error prone manual memory management has been in their organization [0][1]

Actually, it doesn't really seem like a language issue, does it? You can have a terrible app in C/C++/Rust/Go/JS, any language, you name it. Even electron seems a little like a scapegoat - e.g., VSCode and (previously) Atom are examples of "js-on-the-desktop crap" that are surprisingly solid.

It's not the language that's the problem, and it's not (arguably) the underlying framework. The app just sucks. If Teams were written from the ground up in C# or C and had the same functionality (or lack of functionality), it would still suck. Teams, as a product, is just sub par compared to other offerings. Even so, it's good enough for the majority of Microsoft's enterprisey and/or locked-in customer base since it's so well integrated into everything else they offer.

[0] https://msrc-blog.microsoft.com/2019/07/18/we-need-a-safer-s...

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-70-percent-of-all-se...

I don't think it "just sucks". Functionality is there and it is very well integrated in its ecosystem. For what I use it every day, it works and has never crashed on me or let me down. I just wish the UI was more responsive, which is a specific concern that can and will be addressed by its developers.

That said, JS still has no place on the desktop in my opinion, and the world is full of Electron applications that have horrible performance. You can hack up an UI in bash too. But should you?

For products that _vertically_ suck, well, try Cisco WebEx.

Thank you for the lesson, though.

The UI is so bad. The whole interface feels like some borderless desert. The list of channels is a jumble of bold and not-bold text, free-floating in space, with no icons or colors or meaningful sorting. And then 20 "hidden channels", which... why are they hidden, and why do I have to unhide them individually?? And why is the "Chats" window literally a jumble of random chats from random Teams and individuals??? Why are Teams and Chats the same content but in different panes?? Why is the "Feed" just a new view of the same Teams / Chats windows?

I feel like they had to try hard to make it this unintuitive and ugly.

I think you're right. Microsoft is doing /just enough/ to provide a "slack-like" experience that also happens to be very deeply integrated into the rest of their offerings. They can't go to wild or it'll probably alienate the suits and non-techies. The UI is a lowest-common-denominator knock-off of an already popular app the many users are already familiar with, so in that context Teams seems like a solid product. And, as you've said, given a company that's already invested in O365, Azure, and is basically an MS shop, Teams is a pretty solid choice. That doesn't excuse some of its shortcomings, but it does provide a little color to the conversation.

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