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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

After failed Sears and Roebucks, I think Microsoft is the #2 company of all time for "the right hand doesn't know what the left is doing."

It's notorious that they have a hard time replicating products that competitors make look simple: look how the Steam store really works for for games, or how Dropbox works so much better than Onedrive.

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Yes, I can't wrap my head around the fact that VS Code and Teams came out of the same company. That the same people who thought "it's a good idea to use CS theory to add a type system to Javascript" are the same people who thought "it's a good idea to put ads in the start menu".

> That the same people who thought "it's a good idea to use CS theory to add a type system to Javascript" are the same people who thought "it's a good idea to put ads in the start menu".

The secret is that they aren't the same people.

They aren't even aimed at the same customers.

I use Windows 11 Enterprise and I've never seen ads in the start menu, because corporate customers wouldn't put up with that.

They both work for and represent/is represented by the same company though.

The company is the same, but the people are not. There's a lot of people working at Microsoft. Different departments, even different teams, can have completely different approaches.

Sure, but I would still feel angry towards people who work for unethical companies even though they "just" work in the accounting department.

Same here, just because you work in a different team doesn't mean people won't associate you with the rest of the crap the very same company puts out.

Which was the point of the left hand/right hand analogy.

VS Code's selling point is that it's a middle-ground between (relatively) lightweight performance of a text editor, and power of an IDE. People are keeping an eye on performance, and they'll stop using it if it just becomes a bloated, master-of-none IDE.

Teams' bread and butter is being "good enough" for enterprise. And they're also locked into a lot of bad early decisions they made since they don't want to break compatibility for huge, paying customers of theirs. I feel like they have to be incredibly careful making changes to not step on toes in that regard, making development a slow-moving behemoth.

What do people not like about Teams? I just started using it with a contract customer and it seems fine. Does what it says on the proverbial tin.

Teams, unlike pretty much every competing solution, is horrible when working with multiple different identities. If you have an account with an employer, a university and multiple clients, switching them is a pain (compare and contrast, for example, Slack). If you want to get a meeting in your Teams organization and invite a few people who are currently logged in their own organization, it is a pain to do so, and may involve them signing off of all kinds of other key MS tools they need to use during the meeting. If you want to use your phone to be in 'chats' of three different Teams organizations (e.g. three different consulting customers) at the same time, without switching between them but just monitoring all of them at the same time, I'm not sure if it can be reasonably done, and that IMHO is a relatively simple need and one which everyone else somehow manages to do better.

I have to use Google Hangouts or Meet or whatever it’s called now, Zoom, Teams and Slack Huddles. Teams consistently screws up audio, video or both! Then we end up back in Slack.

For the last couple of months, I occasionally don't get notifications if the app is not focused. And it's not just me, several team members are experiencing the same issue. Imagine-- a messaging app that doesn't deliver notifications when running in the background.

No notifications (which honestly I’m fairly happy about, my team’s important communications happen in Slack), the frequent rejection of mouse clicks (literally took me 30+ clicks to share my screen today), the bizarre window behavior as you switch monitors, windows vanishing as you switch apps… it’s just a nightmare.

The UI is pretty awful in a bunch of ways. The performance is hit-or-miss at best. It's a resource hog. These are my top-line irritations with Teams. If I weren't forced to use it by my employer, I'd happily never touch it again.

The UI isn't smooth. Notifications will appear & then the message won't show up for a few seconds. Scrolling back through history can start flickering all over the place. It takes up a lot of memory

You running 64GB or 128Gb of ram?

Admittedly I'm using a fast machine they configured and issued to me (i7-12850HX with 64 GB), and with a decent (50 Mb/10 Mb) broadband connection. Haven't had to do much with Teams yet, but it hasn't actively pissed me off.

I have 128Gb RAM, it's not enough to make ms teams remotely close to acceptable because the UX is still like a parodical mashup of every bad idea microsoft has ever had.

Isn't that just because it's an unfathomably huge company with a very broad range of products

Yep, literally the size of a city and over a dozen billion-dollar ARR products. VSCode and Teams are basically different companies where it's easier to transfer to and from.

Sometimes I wonder if there is some kind of upside down "virtue signalling" going on.

Ads in the Start Menu might not make a lot of money but investors might be impressed that Microsoft is at least trying to make a few more cents here and there.

I wonder if Amazon treats employees so poorly not because this is good for business but because it helps Wall Street accept Amazon's loss-making habits (at least they aren't being generous with the help) and maybe convinces a few customers that Amazon is trying really hard to serve them well.

So "vice signalling", maybe?

I would love for society to return to using "virtue-signaling" and "vice-signaling" in their original meaning, instead of this contemporary linguistic hell where the former is a derogatory synonym for political correctness.

That's not going to happen. Now, I take them as a different sort of signal. Someone who uses those terms are more likely than not coming from a certain worldview, and so it tips me off about the context in which to take their comments.

since in contemporary western society we don't have commonly agreed-upon ideas of "good", "good" becomes an individualized, emotionally-driven thing about agreeability. in the absence of a standard, "the virtues" are replaced with the much more malleable concept of singular "virtue". so today "virtuous" just means "good" and "good" means "agreeable to my worldview", and since we've collectively conflated worldview with politics, having acceptable politics is, quite literally, signaling virtue.

point is that while it's disappointing for the west to lack a clear moral sensibility, the linguistics are perfectly coherent

In order to smash the patriarchy completely, we'll need to abolish the term "virtuous" because it literally means "manly".

So, even a "virtuous woman" possesses "manly" good qualities. Repugnant, isn't it?

Won't happen.

3000 years from now conservatives will be reading from their "Old Testament" about the evils of political correctness even if they are hazy about the details as if Stanford was on the East Coast or the West Coast.

There was a blog post that got flagged this morning where somebody was complaining about those "In those house we believe signs..." which I haven't seen around for a year or so.

That needs to be a thing.

Might have to do with how the company is organised: https://www.businessinsider.com/big-tech-org-charts-2011-6

that the same people who made windows <version> made windows <version>

When OneDrive works it is nice. Problem is that when it doesn't work, you can be in for a hell of a ride trying to get it working.

I just finished spending more hours than I want to count trying to clean my dad's PC of all licensing and account connections to his former employer's use of Office and OneDrive and onto his personal account and license. In hindsight I wish I had just nuked and paved it, or bought him an iPad with keyboard and mouse.

No, literally every large company with a wide variety of products is like that.

It's a fundamental problem of organizations operating across a wide variety of domains, because communication doesn't scale.

has dropbox not been on life support for a good 5 years now?

Might look like so for consumers, Dropbox is focusing on enterprise, like the traditional startup path of "scrappy startup for consumers -> some new features for companies -> everything is for enterprise".

If you want your stock value to increase, profits has to too, so targeting the segment the most money is exchanged makes sense. But argh so boring.

The gun meme always seemed kind of fitting.

https://i.insider.com/4e0b3416cadcbb0d37010000?width=400&for...

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