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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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