Microsoft Teams Premium: powered by OpenAI’s GPT-3.5

What do you mean? I sometimes use Teams on an AD-joined computer, and the multiple-account situation is beyond absurd. The whole freaking app has to restart when changing accounts, even though both are connected through the same exact AzureAD identity.

There is no difference whatsoever between the AD-joined Windows experience and the not-joined-to-anything Linux one.

In Teams, click your face top right to change profiles (accounts), like you would in Edge. It's basically the concept of personas or profiles from Firefox or Chrome, but in Teams.

Note that you shouldn't have to change personas unless you want to. Guests can be invited, and join as their original persona instead of having to have an inside the tent account.

As good as Teams is whithin and across orgs, as long as you stick to one single account, as much it sucks with multiple accounts on the same machine. That, and all the crap like opening files in Teams when Office is installed. But the SharePoint is opening files in the browser instead of the native apps...

Teams Outlook intergration is neat so.

I have built an alternative Teams client for smart glasses using only MS Graph and Azure Communication Services and it can already do most interactions related to chat/meetings/org etc.

I used to work in a big corporate, suddenly all teams has to change to MS team even the current software works just fine. I just decided to quit.

I'd be happy if they improved the responsiveness. Say to the level of MSN Messenger 20 years ago, even though I'm running 2022 hardware.

For actually good, collaboration isn't limited to video chat. In particular, live collaboration on content is key. In an office, for office workers, turns out that's mostly Word, Excel ...

Devs don't realize this, because Git. But in office land, that was not really a solved problem. Places have nasty "Drive G" NAS solutions, with nasty permissioning management (or office gives up and gives everyone permission to everything).

Teams "Files" tab converges that, as does the Share icon, to where you're not "presenting your screen" to collaborate on the content, you can actually launch everyone's native PowerPoint or Word or Excel, see everyone's icon and cursor, and genuinely collaborate in real time on the content. Permissions are managed by Team and Channel, which make sense to everyone. Behind the scenes, all content access and permissions changes are fully audited, so the experience is fully compliant.

These things make it "actually good" for role based access to regulated compliant collaboration.

Notepad is better and starts faster. At least the Win10 version.

I think Google has three choices: 1) reorient their business model to be about making money by providing direct value to the user, 2) pivot to be about ad-supported entertainment rather than productivity/information, or 3) cut costs, run as a cash cow, throw off as much profit as possible before obselesence.

Example question: What’s a covariance matrix?

BlenderBot: Principal component analysis is a popular technique for analyzing large datasets containing a high number of dimensions/features per observation, increasing the interpretability of data while preserving the maximum amount of information, and enabling the visualization of multidimensional data.

ChatGPT: A covariance matrix is a symmetric matrix that describes the covariance between multiple variables in a given dataset. The diagonal elements of the matrix represent the variance of each variable, and the off-diagonal elements represent the covariance between each pair of variables. The covariance matrix is used in multivariate statistics to understand the relationships between different variables and to perform statistical inference and hypothesis testing.

Do these companies fear their customers that much? Maybe that's the difference between Microsoft/OpenAI and Facebook/Google. Microsoft sells the LLM to the customer who will be more impressed by the product if it's useful. With Facebook/Google the product uses the LLM. The LLM may make them an unsuitable product if they don't click on an ad after using it.

These products form the Calling Pack (Microsoft) and the Voice Service (Telco) respectively, and then on top of that you need some kind of bridge (Telco) if you want to have a 13 or 18 number.

And if you want to have your outbound number recognisable as your inbound number, that’s another aspect of the Voice Service that needs to be configured.

Unfortunately the latter infrastructure doesn’t live at MS and it can be really unreliable if the telco hosting it is small. Our phone goes down for around an hour once a week or so.

It’s not even weird edge cases. The core features like calls just flat out don’t work in random ways.

Teams is not primarily a chat client, it's one of many front ends for Microsoft Office 365 (now M365). It's backed by SharePoint, you can share documents through Teams which are also available in Explorer through OneDrive, in the web through your Microsoft account login, on mobile through Microsoft apps, and you can edit them in the Office classic interface, in a web browser, or in the Teams interface, while other people are editing them.

Teams is backed by the Microsoft Graph which yes makes it so you can add chatbots to Teams channels, but also means you can add listeners and webhooks from events that happen in your company, e.g. when someone in Microsoft Planner makes a task it can update a Team channel, or when someone

Teams is a voice and video chat like Zoom but it's backed by the Active Directory permissions, and that means you can federate with other organisations and allow calls internal/outbound but only to linked organisations. It's tied to LinkedIn (which Microsoft own) for contact lookup and user directory seraching.

Teams is backed by Microsoft Azure features, even before this GPT announcement, for transcription and recording and upload.

Teams integrates with Office so that when your status changes, that shows up in Outlook for people trying to email you, or in Outlook you can make a 'new Teams meeting' from the same interface as making any other meeting, and Teams meetings show up on your calendar, but it's a calendar in M365 not on your desktop so you can go the other way and see your calendar in the Teams interface and join Teams calls from there.

From inside Teams' client, as well as searching chat history, the search finds people in your organisation and shows you organisation structure, who reports to whom.

Teams has a plugin architecture / app store inside it, for adding things like Wikipedia search.

Teams is scriptable through the same Azure / Graph API as all the other Microsoft Cloud systems, and manageable through the same web interface, with the ability to set permissions on which admin teams can enable/disable which Teams features.

And all of this has the UX that a company of non-tech people are used to - Microsoft Office, Windows - and that a large company with Microsoft offerings is already managing through web management.

Nobody is hooking Zoom up so that someone editing a spreadsheet in Excel on their desktop and someone editing a spreadsheet in Zoom chat are both collaboratively editing the same file at the same time live. Nobody is hooking IRC up so you can see sharepoint libraries in it. Is anybody hooking Slack up to be an app store that connects into your existing Microsoft ecosystem so departments can build workflows from PowerBI over SharePoint documents to Slack? So that the Microsoft Bing search that you get by default in Edge logged in with your company Microsoft account also searches your Slack chat history and surfaces results in the same window as the web results and search results for all other company documents you have permission to access?

Microsoft is building / has built the walled garden lockin of the next decade or more, and it's compelling despite parts of it being sub-par or having poor UX, because the user is the organization not the individual, and the benefit is more than the sum of its parts. The MS Office lockin is history, OpenOffice isn't even playing the same game.

Feels like Amazon took some inspiration from that.

All MSFT including Code would randomly crash because of the vpn...

The status quo is a joke. The threshold for considering behavior toxic is too high.

Now we have the technology to end the bullshit.

If you are interrupting, ignoring others, bluffing, lying, manipulating, gaslighting, being a sycophant, playing dirty... you are no longer playing the game. There are ways of achieving things that do not involve cheating.

If you disagree, then I have to ask you: are you really being collaborative and inclusive, working for a common goal, or you are simply being selectively inclusive and collaborative up to the point it's time to sabotage others?

There are people out there that get ahead by being irrational, selfish and overall horrible. Let's get them out of the way and let the best ideas win.