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Comment by dwrtz | Hacker News Reader

Sorry to hear you stopped working on your tool. My cofounder and I are working on a similar product (teraphone.app). We're focusing specifically on making a discord-like product for microsoft shops. I agree it's partly a culture thing. There's also an awareness issue. A lot of people don't know that pop-in style communication tools exist, especially outside the tech industry.

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Interesting, do you think you have a chance at competing against Microsoft's own tools, like Teams?

Regardless how crappy Teams is at certain things, the people that decide "we're using Teams" often barely use it themselves.

Look at Microsoft buying sunrise, even though the server based calendar outlook feature was arguably fully fledged. There’s always space:

Yeah we decided to integrate with Teams because I had that exact experience in the past. I was at a company that decided "we're using Teams". We weren't allowed to install alternatives like Discord or Slack.

Teams itself has some limitations that are easy to improve upon. They have no way of doing a huddle/pop-in-style room. They screw up the presence signaling in a way that discourages pop-ins: if you join a call with someone your and the other participants' status is set to busy/unavailable. From other peoples' perspective this isn't very inviting, and doesn't indicate that the conversation is public. Teams also limits who can share screens to only 1 person at a time.

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