Microsoft brutalised Slack with a C grade app that was “bundled for free”. For 80% of people, teams is just fine.
Younger people have only ever used bloated laggy stuff like teams and don't know any better.
I miss the days of just having a dedicated desk phone - it rings, you answer, and talk instantly.
Teams in comparison pops up a call dialogue box, have to navigate the mouse to answer (because the answer hotkey doesn't work most of the time), wait for it to connect, fuck around fixing your audio devices which have changed for some reason, then finally get to start talking.
Yes teams is better if you are moving around a lot, but if you just work from home or office in a fixed location its a regression in usability.
I don't really. It tied me to my desk. Now my extension is wherever I want to work, not just at my desk. Its on my cell phone, its on my work laptop, its wherever I am.
Loads of desk phones didn't have any Bluetooth support so using a headset meant getting a probably expensive maybe proprietary thing with EHS support (or a mechanical handset lifter!!!).
When I want to call someone about an email they sent me, I just click the Call button and it connects me. I don't have to then think about "what was their extension?", context change to an entirely different physical device, and then dial that extension. And then if that call connected on Teams, I'm ready to share video or have the chat pulled up to easily send them additional context right away. With a desk phone, we'd have to context change to yet another platform to then share a screen.
I do get some nostalgia for desk phones. I did our office's deployment of SIP phones and continued to be the manager of the PBX until our migration to Teams. Working on that phone hardware was honestly fun and interesting. But looking at my experience today, having it on my work machine and on my cell phone is just better.
FWIW, my Thinkpad has a call answer and decline/hangup keys on the function row which works with Teams. Makes it pretty easy. But I still don't necessarily have a hard time answering a call with the keyboard/mouse when I'm not in front of my laptop keyboard.
I had an pre-voip Avaya phone with 24 speed dials - for each contact it had a red/green LED next to the speed dial button that showed if they were busy. If it was green you could just press it and call. It had a proper headset port so no ghetto lifter :)
Teams has available status also, but I find its pretty much useless as people either fake their status to avoid being hassled, or its synced to their outlook calendar that has so much junk in it that they show as busy all day.
Roaming around wasn't much of an issue either, I just had forward to cell phone if it wasn't answered after a certain number of rings.
We also had integration with windows so tel: links and dialling from contacts worked as expected.
In the end I've learnt to live with teams, I made a small "chat" script that uses a teams url [0] to open a chat with a person from the command line vs hunting through the awful laggy ui, another AHK script to make a global mute hotkey based on a library I found on github, and another script I wrote to fix the audio device.
Having more speed dial buttons would have made the desk phone a bit nicer to have. Some people in the office which used the phone a 10 speed dial buttons but a lot of the phones just had four buttons which one showed your cureent status.
Forward to cell is fine but it's only half the full feature of having your extension actually on your phone. You can receive calls, but placing them and having it show up as your office number is trickier. Our VoIP system eventually came out with halfway decent phone apps but it was a bit clunky how it actually worked internally migrating the presence from the desk phone or soft phone to the phone app.
Admittedly, Teams uses a lot more RAM, but I have a lot of RAM. I would never know this unless I checked it.
It's borderline unusable on Linux, and I've reverted to using it on my android tablet where it is only marginally better and still has issues constantly with audio, as well as crashing when starting up, or "updating" and somehow running two simultaneous instances of the app with only one visible. Also the notifications for when someone calls has never once worked on the tablet, while simultaneously I'll get nonstop repeating notifications for meeting chat messages from a week ago.
I'm sure for many people it works just fine, but for many others that aren't exactly on the Microsoft happy path, it's a nightmare.
Meanwhile I bought a personal computer for myself with none of my work stuff on it, and I got one with 4GB of RAM because for me that's plenty.