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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Teams is so horrific we banned it. If you force us to use teams you'll have to find another supplier. Seriously, it is incomprehensible that Microsoft would ship something so utterly broken. I know they don't have a reputation for writing good software but Teams is on another level, and I don't mean that in a positive way. I've really tried to get it to work but it is so messed up that I don't think it can be done. Meanwhile, even Zoom 'mostly works' (though we don't use that either). Eventually we standardized on Google 'meet', it works most of the time, we had a single issue in four years of intensive work and that was mostly related to a Google meet Chromebox auto-updating in the middle of a meeting (brilliant) and then never coming back up again. It serves well as a small PC now, we cancelled our subscription and just use laptops and desktops with webcams.

What really bothers me about all this: we had the basics of these setups working in 1995, and since then enough time has past that this should be a complete non-issue. But there is no interop between the various systems, everybody tries to push their own little walled garden and it breaks randomly for no apparent reason. If the phone system had been built like this we'd still be living in a disconnected world.

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It's so weird -- I use Teams all the time and I've never had a serious problem with it.

It's not the greatest software ever made but it's certainly functional. It's definitely getting a lot of work done to it.

Your definition of broken is likely different than the GP.

Broken means "doesn't work". I've used Teams for 2 years now for conferencing, chat, desktop sharing, etc. It works just fine.

I think a lot of Microsoft hate is clouding judgement here. People want Teams to suck.

I simply can not get it to work. Note that we are on Linux/Chromebooks depending on the person in the team and this alone seems to be a major barrier for something that should be a non-issue. Every two bit video chat site in the world seems to have this figured out.

>>I simply can not get it to work.

Seems like that is something you should have stated in the first comment.

>>Linux/Chromebooks depending on the person in the team and this alone seems to be a major barrier

Something like les than 1% of the world uses Linux on the desktop. Dont get me wrong I love Linux, I used it as my primary desktop from 2005 until around 2012 when I went back to Windows (windows 10)

But calling problems on linux a "major issue" seems to over state the usage of Linux Desktop

further depending on when you tried it, and what client you were using that is likely the root cause

The Linux Desktop client always sucked, so much is no longer a thing, 100% a web app now. The web App teams should work just fine.

1% of the world -> you are missing out on whole orgs that use Chromebooks.

I'm sure that if you use the whole Windows enchilada that it may work, but given that Microsoft has shipped a Linux desktop client[1] I would expect that thing to simply work.

It doesn't. Besides wanting to run all the time even when you're not in a teams meeting. Video conferencing is all about seamless integration, it should get out of the way as much as possible and as soon as the tool becomes the focal point of the meeting in my book you've failed to deliver.

[1] https://petri.com/microsoft-replace-teams-linux-client-progr...

And they retired it, apparently because they agreed with my assessment or it isn't worth their trouble.

> but given that Microsoft has shipped a Linux desktop client[1] I would expect that thing to simply work.

this is the entire Microsoft business model:

    1. identify a competitor's product
    2. clone it, but only spend enough engineering effort to make it sound plausible enough to tick the required boxes for evaluation by someone won't have to use it
    3. bundle it with your other products (so no need to compete on quality)

Weird, I've used teams on a chromebook before, no problem with the basic functionality we used (i.e. video call).

> I simply can not get it to work. Note that we are on Linux/Chromebooks

I'm sure Microsoft will get right on improving that

"DOS aint done 'til Lotus won't run"

I'm using it on my cheap Acer laptop with Ubuntu and Wayland daily, and the website works as intended (the Linux app is horrible).

My broken is fixing something all the time in order to get it to work correctly.

Why does Teams occasionally load up with the usual icons showing the broken image icon? Why did my organization create a special “Fix Teams” utility?

My org does not use Teams at all. But I get invited to external Teams meetings sometimes.

As a result, Teams is on my computer, adds itself to the startup items, then opens up to a login window every time I turn on my computer. The X button does not work to close the window. I have to open Task Manager and kill it every time. I can disable it in startup items, but it puts itself back there, next time I join a Teams meeting.

Also, if I am using my computer in the closed position, it still chooses the integrated webcam and microphone every time, even sometimes switching to them randomly during a meeting.

Of course, I am running on an unusual setup that I'm sure Microsoft didn't think to test: I am running Microsoft Teams on Microsoft Windows 10 on a Microsoft Surface Pro computer.

You can use Teams from your browser, no need to install it.

I will try that next time. I don't think that occurred to me because the Zoom app experience is very good. What I have been doing instead is joining from the Teams app on my phone unless I must share content.

>I think a lot of Microsoft hate is clouding judgement here. People want Teams to suck.

Agreed. It's as bandwagon as I've seen anything else. FFS, I half expect to see M$ written about.

It works fine, have your meeting and get back to work. What is it that people are trying to do in Teams?

I actually like a lot of microsoft products, even though I own several thousand dollars worth of Apple hardware.

I happily use windows 10 for most personal computing (I haven't upgraded, so no comment on 11), VScode, github, word, excel, whatever...

Teams, though, is one MS product that genuinely never worked for me. Last company I was at used it, and they had to upgrade my work machine since teams needed more CPU (old machine was an i5 macbook with 8gb). Google/zoom was fine, but running teams would regularly overheat my computer.

Pretty sure the GP definition of broke is not really what broke means. I know it is all the rage these days to just redefine terms to make them often mean the exact opposite of what the rest of the planet understands them to mean

But we have to have shared definitions for words or communications just breaks down

It can not be "your definition of broke is different from mine" if that is the case then language is just noise and we need to stop communicating

Do you realize I'm the idiot that came up with live video in the browser to begin with?

When I say it is broken I'm pretty serious about it: we spent a full day because there was one customer that positively insisted that we had to use their Teams setup rather than what we normally use and in the end we just gave up, it isn't worth the stress to me if there is a viable alternative (or even several). But of course if you think that I'm redefining the meaning of the word 'broken' just for the heck of it then you're free to continue to do so.

>> we spent a full day because there was one customer that positively insisted that we had to use their Teams setup rather

So you tried it once, as a guest and then banned the entire things with out understand the permissions systems or any other possible causes?

Understand that as a Admin I have the power to block Guests from Joining, Block some features from Guest, and so alot of things that is not commonly possible under other platforms. Often these security settings are aggressive by default, for example we had an issue with one client needing to connect to one of our teams room, teams and the room worked fine but because the security settings the Guest could not connect, everyone else could but the guest could not

This is not something that can be fixed by the guest, nor it is problem with teams as a technology, it is the security controls built into the platform

>Do you realize I'm the idiot that came up with live video in the browser to begin with?

and I am a guy that wrote PHP code in the 90's and love it... so....

> So you tried it once, as a guest and then banned the entire things with out understand the permissions systems or any other possible causes?

That's not what I wrote. I wrote that because someone insisted we said, ok, fine let's invest a bunch of time and solve this and we could not.

Before then we had tried multiple times and even now every now and then we get a teams invitation but I just point blank refuse them. Enough time wasted.

Check TFA: this is a Microsoft subsidiary that needs to be forced to use the solution provided by the mothership. That push really wouldn't be necessary if the people at GitHub believed that Teams served their needs well.

> Do you realize I’m the idiot who came up with live video in the browser to begin with

Ok - that really surprised me and from anyone else I would’ve dismissed it as hyperbole… after some digging I ended up reading this incredible story —

https://jacquesmattheij.com/story-behind-wwcom-camaradescom/

Amazing adventure!

> Pretty sure the GP definition of broke is not really what broke means. I know it is all the rage these days to just redefine terms to make them often mean the exact opposite of what the rest of the planet understands them to mean

After they explained to you it was broken in their official client for their officially supported operating system, you moved the goal post to it's only broken in the client, try the web app instead:

> The Linux Desktop client always sucked, so much is no longer a thing, 100% a web app now. The web App teams should work just fine.

Just stop.

I had to restart Windows because Teams will not join meetings. If that is not broken than what ? (killing it with process explorer did not help)

Likewise, I don’t particularly like it but it’s fine. My biggest gripe is nonexistent official Linux support - I hate having to use a package maintained by one person on GitHub to get a desktop application for Linux, when this application is so critical for my day to day. But besides that it works fine.

I use Teams in Chrome a lot. Given that it's an electron app, I'm not sure it matters that much that it's "native" vs. "web app".

you do get the benefit of the app author's knowledge of how to tweak the chromium env to run it reasonably well. And of course the community support.

The Linux app doesn't even support screen sharing when you're using Wayland. I was forced to try out the browser based variant (meeting link opened the web variant instantly instead of giving me the choice to use the app instead) and can now finally share my screen (even single windows!). Also I can now use backgrounds, which the app didn't support.

> Wayland

Don't blame Teams for the fact that Linux can't sort out its Desktop GUI situation.

Yes, the second graphical API that Linux supports in 30 years, definitely Linux's problem.

The fact that screenshots and the security around them is still a flaming ball of garbage on Linux is not Teams' fault.

The fact that Wayland still sucks after 15+ years is not Teams' fault.

The fact that nobody unpaid want to work on X11, Wayland, and Linux GUI stuff is not Teams' fault.

That may well be true, but other providers of similar services seem to have this working just fine.

Linux ‘sorted out’ its display server protocol years ago, it’s Wayland. Fedora has been on Wayland by default since 31. Ubuntu has been on Wayland by default since 21.4. Debian has been on Wayland by default since 11. Distributions that don’t have an implementation of Wayland enabled by default are hold-outs at this point.

It’s somewhat understandable that developers for Microsoft might not be fully across the status of display servers and their respective implementations in Linux, but it’s a reasonable rule of thumb to assume that Wayland is the way to go for any new projects since 2021 at the very latest. If you build your app for X today it’s probably going to be running under XWayland anyway.

That always frustrated me, even more-so considering how that volunteer-built package I mentioned (https://github.com/IsmaelMartinez/teams-for-linux - an Electron build of the web app, nothing flashy but does the job just fine) does support screen sharing. I haven’t checked whether it supports backgrounds as I only use voice when on calls, but I’m guessing it does if the browser variant does.

What do you mean?

MS puts out debs and rpms for teams: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/download-app

Those were EOLed last year. Microsoft's current guidance is to use the PWA in Chrome or Edge.

https://office365itpros.com/2022/09/19/teams-pwa-linux-clien...

It's easy to miss, because it was only posted to the Office365 Message Center, and not announced anywhere else. Discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32678839

Huh, didn't know that. Although the old client still works well, and I actually like the meeting screen better, since it allows me to set the incoming video to full screen, which works great for screen sharing.

Teams is minimally usable, but its pretty much worst-in-class for…everything it does. It’s two compelling selling points seem to be (1) that “nobody every got fired for buying IBM” now applies to Microsoft more than IBM, and (2) moreover, users don’t actually buy Teams qua Teams, they get a Microsoft 365 subscriptions for some of the things where Microsoft has not-worst-in-class solutions, and Teams comes along for the ride, and its hard (for decisionmakers who do meetings–which, perhaps for this reason, are the least inadequate feature of teams–and have underlings to do most of the hands-on work) to justify paying to get something good when you have something you’re already paying for that fills the same 30,000’ bullet-point description.

And #1 is probably an even more compelling selling point if your company is a subsidiary of Microsoft.

What does it mean to be worst-in-class for text chat or video conferencing. Video conferences look and sound great. Text chat is text chat. What am I missing here that's so awful?

I've been wondering the sam thing for a while, while I dont like teams much, I like it better than all of the direct alternatives.

For me the ability to seamlessly start a meeting, pull in 10 participants from different organizations by just sharing a URL and be off to the races a few minutes later is what makes the difference. If I have to spend even a couple of minutes debugging audio/video issues, dealing with people that can't seem to join, people that are trying to install a client that they then can't get to work, people that need to make IDs for some proprietary system and so on then it's a non-starter for me.

I'm fine with asking the meeting organizer to have an account but the participants should just be able to use the web client with a minimum of hassle.

I've never had a problem sharing a URL to get outside people in a meeting with Teams and, of course, it works in the browser. Are you sure this is still a problem?

Teams has never worked reliably for me when sent a link from orgs that use Teams. Half the time we end up in my Zoom call and the people on the call always gripe about having to use Teams for the first few minutes.

The issues sometimes aren't about teams but microsoft authentication. You are sometimes forced to use incognito mode or cannot join.

Plus it doesn't work on any browser, even if said browser has capability to run it, or on mobile, unless you install their app.

This has been such a problem that, going to a significant scientific conference that was online during the pandemic, and had organizers who insisted on using Teams, the organizers asked everyone to provide a personal email address in addition to their academic one, because they had had too many problems in the past with people being unable to log in to their Teams system if their email address was associated with another university's Office 365 system.

They proceeded to primarily use Teams as a chatroom to let people know when the Zoom meetings were starting.

> the ability to seamlessly start a meeting

Must be nice. For me it simply refuses to start or join any meeting, gives a useless error message about trying again later.

The fact that there's almost never a dialin for Teams meetings makes me hate it. I want to be able to dial in with my desk phone.

For chats, it is embarrassingly slow at rendering. Seemingly only maintains the last ~two dozen messages in memory, if you scroll back in history, you have to painfully wait for it to retrieve the text and then render it. Weird rendering bugs frequently.

Meanwhile, I remember reading full ebooks on my Pentium which were rendered as a single HTML file with zero lag.

I have the same problem with Slack, unsure why Microsoft needed to copy the pitiful performance. That the Slack mobile apps mirror the non-existent reliability of the desktop clients is actually pretty amazing.

> For chats, it is embarrassingly slow at rendering

To be fair, despite all the other ways that Slack runs rings around Teams, rendering speed isn’t one of them.

But, yeah, you’d think this would be an easy opportunity for a big win for Teams.

Switching from Teams to Slack the first thing I noticed was the crazy good rendering speed of Slack. Teams you just lost your sense of where you were in your history it took so long. Slack slams it on the screen almost instantly.

> Switching from Teams to Slack the first thing I noticed was the crazy good rendering speed of Slack.

Huh, going the other way, I didn’t notice it get much worse; Slack seemed slow, and so did Teams, but not overwhelmingly slower. Might not have been “rendering” proper, could have been network topology of our orgs installations of each and more latency to Slack than Teams, or something like that.

Search is horrendous. There are strings that I am guaranteed to have written and it is unable to find them, nevermind the ui for it is absolutely unusable.

Search is easily the worst. Video performance was pretty Terrible pre-covid but seems to have improved to the point of not usually a problem.

Going backwards in Teams is bad. Searching is a special case of going backwards and it sucks even worse.

It rolls back to the past, but lags, so it ends up showing you the wrong part of the history, rolling back to the present or a indeterminate past all while not showing what you searched for.

Scrolling through history of a chat is masochistic. You get a web scrollbar and finding individual messages, even if you know where they are is a lottery.

Compared to Slack, it has much worse responsiveness, message editing, and search. It feels like there is 500ms latency on every click. I have a bunch of individual, detailed gripes with the message editing. And I'm generally not pleased with the quality of the search results.

> What does it mean to be worst-in-class for text chat

Poor discoverability of, basically, everything, paste doesn’t support standard options like pasting text only without formatting, so cutting and pasting from format documents takes either manual format correction or using a third app to paste without formatting and the cut again to avoid the ransom-note look. Formatting that supports Markdown entry (kind of), but only Word-style WYSIWIG editing. Teams text chat is a major let down coming from, say, Slack.

What platform are you on? Doesn’t CTRL+SHIFT+V work for you?

Nope. Most Microsoft apps don't support this standard. I think for teams you have to add alt or something or other. I think this is macs only. Cmd shift opt v https://businesstechplanet.com/how-to-paste-without-formatti...

Word has some ribbon bullshit: https://www.howtogeek.com/679956/how-to-paste-text-without-f...

Ctrl-shift-V definitely does something different to Ctrl-V but it will still “helpfully” autoformat your input (mostly adjust indentation - removing white space for example) which kinda defeats the purpose in almost all circumstances beyond pasting a single line of english.

Those don't really come across as deal breakers though, just preferences.

It may not be to your liking but isn't it a bit dramatic to say "worst-in-class" without including the "for me" caveat?

Try sending some bot message to a text chat. Or a bot message in general.

I could integrate with my Slack channel in a few hours. I’ve made multiple attempts with teams but it’s just impenetrable (and as far as I’ve found you just cannot integrate with chat at all).

Teams regularly randomly gets worse in many metrics. I will start work one day and something will randomly work differently, with no warning.

One good example is that teams now tries harder to autoformat code. It will refuse to treat something copied from an IDE as just text, automatically put it into some random quote style box, and the process of getting your cursor out of that box to continue writing your message changes and is inconsistent over time. If the recipient of that message then tries to copy and paste that code, the formatting and raw text content will have been changed in unexpected ways, and you have to manually fix it. This is such a stupidly simple and expected use for a chat app in software development workspaces yet it probably isn't an allowed use case at microsoft. Microsoft fired their QA department, so any code path in any app not regularly used by Microsoft staff internally is pretty much garanteed to wander, be inconsistent, randomly break, and change in unnecessary ways.

Pasting code in teams requires 4 clicks and there is no keyboard shortcut. How is this expected to be used by developers is beyond me.

Also try to right click on an open image and click copy. Then paste in another application (even a Microsoft one). Comes out as a base64 string. This been broken for years.

> What does it mean to be worst-in-class for text chat

I expect a chat program to show me all messages the have been sent in a chat, in so far the other party intends me to view them (have no been deleted etc.). That is not an expectation Teams manages to fulfill.

I expect an edit (mine or someone elses) to be reflected on all my devices. That is not an expectation Teams manages to fulfill.

I expect to do the same series of keystrokes in a blank "chat input" field and get the same result. That is not an expectation Teams manages to fulfill.

I expect the text that I see as have been sent to appear the same (for a reasonable value of "same") on the other persons screen. That is not an expectation Teams manages to fulfill.

I expect that if I scroll to the bottom, I will be able to make the last message intended to be visible, become readable and copyable. That is not an expectation Teams manages to fulfill.

I expect that when I select a text and press "ctrl-c" or the local equivalent, the text now in my clipboard is always predictable. That is not an expectation Teams manages to fulfill.

And yes, I have personally seen and experienced each and every one of this things.

I also expect to get notified of incoming messages - it was not infrequent that I would restart Teams and get 3-5 notifications of messages all at once, timestamped over the previous several hours.

As best I could tell, my client would simply lose connection to the server entirely silently. Normally I would find out when trying to send a message to someone, and noticing the delivery animation/indicator was not appearing. Restart Teams and boom, here's a little pile of messages I'd missed.

Me too… it makes me so sad.

I see it getting pushed a lot by companies using 365 and in particular all of Microsoft’s security setup stuff (like Authenticator wanting to own your phone), so you have to confine your communications to within the walled garden.

I think higher ups like the fact that it integrates with their outlook calendar (although the teams calendar itself fails to meet expectations for a calendar for the same reasons above - that is, like chat, I expect to see the latest updates to the calendar but they do not appear without an explicit refresh… like it’s still 1999 or something).

Admittedly, I haven't been at a company that uses Teams since 2021: but I had to request an upgrade from an otherwise working computer since teams would max out the CPU so hard that it would throttle and occasionally shutdown. It was an older computer (2015 macbook) but was otherwise fine for dev tasks, and other videoconferencing.

Somehow Microsoft have managed to recreate the analogue, circuit-switched telephone network phenomenon of a "bad line" in the digital, packet-switched world of MS Teams. Occasionally I'll connect to a meeting and my audio will be just be unusably bad; quit the meeting and rejoin and it'll be fine...

Here’s an example:

Let’s say there’s a chat message with a sentence or two I want to copy/paste elsewhere. I highlight just the text I want and hit copy, and then when I go to paste, Teams has ‘helpfully’ copied not just the highlighted text but also the rest of the message and the metadata such as who wrote the message and the time stamp.

Every day using teams I encounter things like this that frustrate and annoy me.

It’s also one of the few tools I answer customer surveys on so I can share the annoyances back with Microsoft - and at least some of them seem to slowly get fixed (eg clicking show message from the search results now takes you to the message in context whereas previously it would just show the message by itself in the center of the screen with no way to see the surrounding conversation).

Anyway, yes, in my experience Teams is definitely worst-in-class.

I just tested this in Teams right now and it only copies the text I highlighted. I tried it both on the native client and in Chrome. If you select multiple messages, it will copy the whole message with one line of meta data but that seems pretty reasonable to me as that is also highlighted.

The desktop app is crap.

I dare you to scroll up in a chat with links, images, or gifs. It's so yanky, it's impossible to find anything.

Or search for a message you know is in a specific context. You will not be able to open the message in its context, only the message itself. Useless.

Or call somebody and then try to use the media keys on your keyboard. They won't work and instead play the Teams ringtone twice (or sometimes infinitely).

Or check the online status of your contacts. Spoiler: they are accurate only 50% of the time, sometimes showing a different status of a person on the same screen (e.g. contact list and chat).

Or try to switch chats quickly. It is so unnervingly slow.

Or try to react to a new message with an emoji with 125% scaling on. You cannot do it because the selection popup is like 30 pixels high because it opens downwards, not upwards.

Or try to share a 2560x1440 or higher screen with more than 0.5 fps over a gigabit connection.

Or try to remotely control another PC over Teams screen share and press Ctrl+, or Ctrl+Shift+Space or simply Tab. All those are getting caught by Teams, sometimes they are forwarded, sometimes not, but they always call a function in Teams and open various menus. All those are integral shortcuts in Microsoft Visual Studio, by the way.

Or try to copy text of a message you got, you will always have the name of the sender and timestamp in the clipboard, which requires me to paste it into a text editor first to copy and paste only the text into e.g. a single line search bar.

Or try to compile and just use Teams at the same time. MSN was more performant on a 450 MHz PC 20 years ago.

If you go Away, it stops bothering to show you new incoming messages. It gets especially confused on Mac with Universal Control.

>> but its pretty much worst-in-class for…everything it does

It has good outlook calendar integration; joining from a single click in my calendar view is much nicer than having to open the occurrence & find the zoom link.

Zoom and WebEx both have this if you install the plugins, as well.

Don't know about zoom, but webex meetings get a "join" button in my outlook web client. I don't have any kind of plugin installed, and I even run this on Firefox on Linux.

Yeah, “seamless integration with other Microsoft products” is a pretty big exception, I will admit.

But Zoom sends calendar invites that Google Workspace understands, so they automatically appear on my calendar and have this feature. And I don't even think either party did anything to facilitate it. It's just how iCalendar invites work.

Ha! "Joining from a single click in my calendar view" has a 50/50 chance of working, seemingly dependant on if MS' SSO is correctly sync'd behind the scenes when I click.

This works fine for me with Webex links from outlook, they send me to the right URL when I click join.

But What trips me up is that we have a sister company, which also uses Teams. For some reason, when they send invites, I have to open the meeting details and click on the link to join. This happens in both Outlook and Teams' calendar module.

> It has good outlook calendar integration;

It has enforced outlook calendar integration; by default you create a Teams meeting whenever you create a meeting, choosing to implement the meeting in a competing product is annoying at best.

Webex is worse. Sharepoint & powerpoint integration, large scale broadcast (300+?people uses different techniques) and transcripts are helpful. Haven’t used the chat much, but it seems not good.

It works mostly fine. It doesn't have the prettiest interface, for example message editing is not great, and search is not great (though it got better than 1 year ago that was unusable). Anther stupid thing is that handling multiple organizations (for example if you are added as external collaborator to another company Teams) is basically broken, you don't receive messages from one if you don't switch to it most of the time.

Sure there are systems that work probably better but Teams is fine, also the alternatives either don't have all the features of Teams or they are difficult to use/setup. A pro of Teams is that if you already have Office365 is mostly well integrated with the other tools (mail, calendar, Office, AzureAD authentication) and you have to manage accounts only in one tool (I can from the horrible AzureAD administration console create a user and it has a mail, Teams, Office, and can login into the company computers).

To me the reason to have Teams is just that you don't have to introduce another tool, have another account, etc. Of course if you decided to use GSuite instead of Microsoft one makes perfectly sense to use Google Meet, but GSuite doesn't yet have all the feature of Office365 and it's more expensive, and like it or not you have to deal with .docx documents when interfacing with other companies.

It works mostly fine. It’s also the application I use basically every minute of the day. ‘Mostly fine’ just doesn’t cut it.

When we’re talking about an IDE I can just bring my own, but for chat it doesn’t work like that.

That's a fair point. I think if I had to be on a chat/video app every minute of the day, I'd hang myself. For the average use that I have, it's fine. If I had to use it ceaselessly, I might have a different opinion.

Well, fortunately I don't use Teams every minute of my day. When I need it it works mostly fine.

Of course if you use Windows, on other platforms Teams works completely unreliably or doesn't work at all. But that is another issue. I gave up using Linux at work on bare metal and started using a VM (not only for Teams). On macOS it works but not as good as Windows (I have some coworkers that has a mac, they loose notifications a lot)

On a Mac, I got stuck in some sort of loop that prevented me from joining any calls, and even uninstalling the Teams app didn’t fix it. I had to use my iPhone for every Teams call, and sometimes the Teams web app.

Same issues here on M1 MacBook Pro. Most of my company is Windows-based so I don’t think they endure as much pain.

We also use it every day.

That said, I feel like I know a lot of devs who think there are a lot of things that are unusable (or the equivalent). Everything from Visual Studio to the display on their iPhone to modern cinema and science fiction in general to In-and-Out burgers. As a general rule, I discount their take on pretty much anything.

Is Teams great? No. Its better than what I used before it though, and its probably gotten better faster than just about any other piece of software I've used. I struggle to generate any outrage at all about it one way or another.

> Is Teams great? No. Its better than what I used before it though

dare I ask what you used before?

We went from HipChat to Teams and Teams is much better.

Yeah, we also went HipChat + Skype -> Teams, and once one gets used to it, it's fine (and certainly better than XMPP hell). Teams' search was always problematic, but for our organizational use case (moderately long-lived chat rooms for the duration or sales or projects, with lots of conference calls), it was actually more usable than Slack or Zoom. Conversely, Slack seems much more effective for coordinating in-house tech teams handling ephemeral discussions. Horses for courses and all that.

What on earth have you used before?! I struggle to think of anything worse than Teams, maybe Amazon chime but pretty much everything I've used over the years is a good step up from Teams.

We used Webex, LogMeIn, GoToMeeting, and Zoom.

I have yet to have a major complaint about Teams. It works, I have my meeting and I close it. I don't know what some of you want in a video conferencing app.

> It works, I have my meeting and I close it.

I wish that was true. Good for you. Not good for people expected to be "online" in it for longer.

Skype for business? Teams is way better than that.

I mean its not great but I feel like on Windows at least (idk about Mac or Linux) it's just distinctly average.

The only thing about teams that drove me crazy in the years of having to suffer it its search function and how the mobile app puts the logout action into settings (I lost my mind once trying to find it).

Nah skype for business was the bomb. It worked exactly like 2005 MSN messenger, was simple, efficient, and screen sharing and video calling was hard so people wouldn't start a damn video call or ask me to join a video call for things that should be a damn email.

Except that keeping track of chats was as much of a pain as it is in teams. Things that were absolutely not a problem in MSN messenger in 2004

Every single chat I had in skype for business caused a transcript to be emailed to me.

Like I want more emails. Why did Skype start a blank chat every time I talked to someone? Close the chat? Bam, go find that transcript

Did you use skype ?

If I get a message on Teams and bring the window forward, the text box isn't active so if I start typing a reply nothing happens. Now I need to use the cursor to select the box. So fuck me if I tab to Teams to reply to a message.

When joining a video/audio meeting, even though the "Join" button is colored like it's active, hitting enter will pull up some part of the audio or video config instead of joining the meeting.

Messages will remain "unread" until a tab is selected and then clicked in. I have to interact with the fucking tab with the cursor before it will recognize I read a stupid message.

These UI issues are amateur hour shit. I run into them dozens of times a day because my fingers are on the keyboard and I like to use keyboard shortcuts. Using Teams requires not just a mental context switch but a physical adjustment to simply send a reply or just mark a message as read.

This is all besides Teams spinning up my fans with 300% CPU usage for reasons.

> When joining a video/audio meeting, even though the "Join" button is colored like it's active, hitting enter will pull up some part of the audio or video config instead of joining the meeting.

This gets me every time. Even more so recently when, for some reason, it started to take its sweet time actually joining meetings.

Someone will invite me to join, I'd click join in the popup and go about my business. Since it's slow, I'm not too bothered if I don't hear anything right away. Then the person will message me along the lines of "so... are you joining or what?

Welcome to the new UX/UI/Web x.0 whatever.

Why, in the name of ... , when only 1 (one) input field is displayed on the screen, why it is not active ? 20 years ago this was the standard. What happened ?

"I added the .active class to the div! What more do you want?!"

This comment and the grandparent both ring true for my and my experience. When using Teams as basically an IRC replacement it worked fine and didn't have any serious issues, when folks started using it to try to host meetings across sites and share interactivity it really struggled unsuccessfully.

I agree with Jacques that all the pieces (except for high speed networking) were in place in the last century I expected this to develop more than it has.

Given the stuff that ML can do TODAY, it should totally be possible to give the "presenter" a view of the audience where you use a combination of the pre-computed model for people's faces, and a client doing pose estimation from the web cam. If I'm looking at the presentation on my screen, that information should allow the presenter's view to see me looking at them. If I'm looking away it could show me looking down or something. If I leave and go to the bathroom or something it could show my seat being empty. Similarly, raising a hand should present on the speakers screen as my raising my hand in the audience, calling on me with the mouse should unmute my microphone until the presenter moves the mouse/pointer off my face in the audience.

Early, EARLY, on in the Java group the idea had been worked on to provide a "visual environment" for doing things, and of course "Snowcrash" came out at the same time and everyone was doing their own "metaverse." I was looking at the problem and realized that to be successful we'd have to emulate some of the physics that keep us sane in group settings today. (like everyone can't hear everyone else talking in a room usually). David Rosenthal did a study for NIST, as I recall, on the network implications of something like the metaverse and concluded that it would take a terabit of network connectivity to "host" a live concert in the metaverse with the same "feel" as being there in person. (so everyone gets a view from their POV, voices travel 10 - 30' in a cone from the direction of the mouth, sound from the stage follows the acoustics of the modeled room etc. And then that analysis is followed by trimming things out to reduce bandwidth until you reach the "present day" bandwidth numbers and describing that reduced experience. He got back to Zoom like meetings with something like 1mbps/10gbps for the participant/network ratio.

So summarizing; Often people approach the problem without realizing the complexity of what they are trying to do, in part because meetups/communication in "real life" has so much of the complexity taken care of by physics and the fact that you learned what worked as a toddler before you could think so it just "is" in your brain. Stepping outside of that mindset requires deliberate effort. There are likely opportunities here that are not being exploited because of this mindset.

I tried hiding a channel once

that was it, there's apparently no way to ever get it back unless I can remember its exact name (which I can't)

I learnt my lesson

Uh what? Every "Team" I have on the left side of my teams window has a "X hidden channels" message that I can click and that shows every single channel in the teams, including archived ones.

this is what I have to go through: https://allthings.how/how-to-hide-and-unhide-chat-in-microso...

Oh hiding CHATS, not channels. Yeah that's probably stupid.

Teams has been fine enough for me. Video connects instantly, audio drop outs are rare and the "mute incoming video" setting is a god send (when your cat is kissing you its butthole is pointing at me).

I only use Teams on an iPhone or company-issued Windows laptop, and almost exclusively for calls within my organization. Maybe some of the issues crop up on Linux and/or reaching outside of your LAN/VPN?

The Linux version of Teams was very broken for ages, but instead of fixing it, they dropped it.

So much for the cross platform Microsoft.

If you're a company of 10 or 20 people, you won't notice the problems. It starts to break at medium-sized business scale (anything over, say, 100 employees). You start to notice limitations in the UI/UX but also just constant bugs in calling functionality, split meetings, super laggy large meetings, slow navigation, and broken search.

It just feels like it wasn't built for serious scale from the ground up, like some after-thought Todo List app that was thrown in with Office 365 to tick a checkbox.

I use it daily in an organization with >10k employees. Never really have any issues?

My team had a meeting with Github sales and product a few weeks back. After I secured a booking of the special Teams-capable meeting room and arrived 10 minutes early to make sure everything was set up in time, we spent the first 10 minutes of the 30 minute meeting with 2 people from Github unable to join. At that point I generated a Google meet link, put it in the email thread and we were up and running a minute later.

I've found Meet to just work about 98% of the time. My biggest complaint is the framerate. I'm not sure what it actually is but it feels like 15fps.

Ah good point, yes, framerate can be an issue, but I've long ago decided to not worry too much about the video but to concentrate on the audio instead, I have a much lower tolerance for audio drop-outs than for video issues.

> it is incomprehensible that Microsoft would ship something so utterly broken

Is it though? Heck Microsoft shipping a high quality product is the exception. The entire company runs on half-assed software being pushed by sales teams to CIOs and others high up on the corporate ladder who evaluate it on the basis of dollar amounts, kickbacks and marking checkboxes and not factors like usability and user experience.

I scanned the replies to see if this comment specifically had been made. Thank you.

You think Teams is horrific?

At a certain large company who's all-in on Google Cloud, they use Google Chat. Everbody wants to use Slack but management thinks it's too expensive while Google Chat is free and comes with G Suite which they already paid for.

You don't know what horrific means until you've used Google Chat. Teams is a delight compared to that.

I hate to say it, but, my experience with Google chat was better. It was around 2016 so maybe they haven 't implemented web 3.0 stuff yet.

What's the issue with zoom? I think it's one of the best software I have on my machine. It never ever stopped working since I have it installed, not even in meetings/webinars with 1000+ people. And the integration with Slack is really convenient, you can start a meeting in seconds anywhere you are.

On what operating system?

I used to use it (Zoom) constantly on Linux Mint, fwiw.

I switched to Mac only because I couldn't get parts for a new desktop at the time. I miss Linux, though :/

Neat, so at least for some people it works.

99% of the time: Mac.

From time to time: iPhone, iPad, android phone, android tablets, windows.

I hear from colleagues having Linux that the OS might indeed be an issue sometimes, they have to restart the system, etc.

Meet does not require a desktop client to work reliably (it does, however, require a Chromium browser).

Zoom really tries to bury the browser link. First it says the meeting has launched, which it won't have if you don't have the client installed, then it tries to prompt you to download the desktop client, and only then does it reveal the web join link.

Our security team has banned the installation of Zoom after some of their issues in 2020.

My supervisor and I once had a Teams meeting on the calendar that was created via Outlook. We both joined, and wound up in different meetings with the same id, wondering where the other person was...

We never scheduled a meeting for Teams again.

I love how IRC was the fundamental solution to the problem, and technology improved it over the following decade or so with XMPP, and then the same technology conspired to extend it and extinguish it. Slack did it, Google did it, Teams never supported it in the first place...

XMPP wasn't perfect but the solution to that has been walled gardens around real-time chat apps.

Everybody wants to share when they're the underdog but when success hits them, they roll the red carpet back.

How can the company who makes one of the best (if not the best) electron app (vscode), also ship one of the worst electron apps (Teams)?

Can’t they just set up a meeting and and take notes on how the other team did it?

They tried to setup a meeting to go over it but no one was able to join because Teams was broken

Part of the reason is that when Teams (or any Microsoft product) has issues, people blame Microsoft.

When any other product has issues, they blame whoever made the decision to use that product.

When IT people pick Microsoft, it's not an optimization for quality. It's an optimization for liability. Nobody was ever fired for picking Microsoft.

> Nobody was ever fired for picking Microsoft

This was about IBM. From what i know, IBM does some interesting things (from a HW perspective).

OTOH nothing MS does is interesting (except maybe as a challenge in network filtering)

their markdown code block formatting is mostly working this week. 2 weeks ago, it didn't handle new lines correctly, for about a month. a few weeks before that, it stripped any whitespace from the start of a line for a few weeks, and a few months before that, you couldn't only copy what was in a markdown code block, you had to copy the entire message, including sender and timestamp.

These 3 problems have resurfaced over and over for the last few years.

I agree, the user experience of Microsoft Teams is beyond bad. Thankfully I don't have to use Microsoft Teams on a regular basis. However, some times when I had to, it wouldn't show any audio or video devices to select and consequently audio and video didn't work.

Turns out that's the behavior Microsoft Teams exhibits under Linux when it can't add inotify watches for whatever reason.

There is no visible error message of any kind in this case, just an empty list of audio and video devices. How on earth do they expect users to debug and fix that?

Every time I have opened Teams, I have had a problem. I have a "not simple" webcam/audio setup with virtual webcams and audio sources and half the time, Teams will show black and audio will not work, and the sources won't show up in the list.

Not only that, every time I've gotten a Teams link for an interview, the desktop app tells me "this version is only for organizations" then the webapp refuses to load.

A huge pain when every other client I've used (Discord, Webex, Zoom, Google Meet) works with minor tinkering.

What makes me very angry about Google Meet is that you can't configure it so that guests can just join without asking.

This means if you have a meeting with a lot of people, you constantly have to babysit the "Someone is asking to join" box, as people come in late.

Also, this box has got to be the worst UI design I've seen in a while, since it even blocks yourself from muting/unmuting yourself and disabling the camera, until you make a decision about whether you want to admit the person.

Yes, agreed that is a nuisance. But fortunately that is just a click, it gets a bit frustrating when there are > 10 participants and when people join late.

Our teams have found that it gets things done with the basics, but has no advanced anything. Chat is OK, video is OK, Files is OK, Channels are OK. But they are all basic. Things like wikis or anything more advanced is very primitive.

Plus of course some things like File are a thin facade over the horror that is Sharepoint, and you occasionally have to drop down into that swamp.

So not a horror show to me, but feels like ten years out of date or more.

>"I know they don't have a reputation for writing good software"

I think they have a problem that regular person supposed to hate MS and Windows. I also think MS is quite capable of and does produce good software be it their own OS, Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, Word, Excel, Flight Simulator etc. etc.

> I also think MS is quite capable of and does produce good software be it their own OS, Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, Word, Excel, Flight Simulator etc. etc.

All i can say: good luck using it.

I did not have, any.

Been using it forever. No problems except skipping some windows versions like Vista and Win 8.

Seriously, it is incomprehensible that Microsoft would ship something so utterly broken

It has to be said, what on earth do you mean?! This is Microsoft, they are famous for broken.

Lack of interoperability in chat and video conferencing reminds me what a miracle it is that email has worked so reliably and consistently for 40 years.

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