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Comment by millimeterman | Hacker News Reader

I think the boring but true answer is simply that no one cares.

Users don't care because Teams still basically functions and the performance problems are at most a minor inconvenience. As a result, organizations don't care because Teams is cheap and does everything they need it to. As a result, Microsoft doesn't care because dedicating dev resources to something which neither saves them money nor attracts more customers is a waste.

Microsoft employs many smart people and I'm sure Teams' performance could be improved by orders of magnitude if they wanted to. But why would they want to?

(And to reinforce my point, when the performance _did_ get so bad that people apparently actually started caring, Microsoft not only improved it but made a video advertising it. It's just that there's no incentive to optimize any further than is necessary.)

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Anxiously, I would almost say "No one important cares"?

In my experience, the further up the org chart you are, the less likely you are to use Slack directly, instead deferring to assistants or at least only posting announcements periodically.

Ditto goes for Internal IT who I've commonly found never use these chat platforms instead deferring (correctly) to ticketing systems.

Those two groups are both the ones who would probably advocate for adopting these platforms yet they never use it in any regular sense so they don't feel the sharp edges

I know of mid-size organizations where everyone up to the very top complains at length about Teams being slow and buggy. But they still use it, because it's cheap and doesn't actively hinder work getting done. I don't think it's simply a matter of bean counters being out of touch.

> Users don't care because Teams still basically functions

People definitely care. If you actually listen to them. They will tell you what a hot pile of slow garbage it is.

Talk is cheap - actions are what reveal true preferences. The fact that Teams is so widely used despite it being slow garbage indicates that people actually don't care (enough to overcome whatever benefits they see in Teams).

That's part of it, but also, they just published a whole marketing video to advertise a performance improvement

Sorry, I imagine you posted this before my edit. I don't think this marketing video contradicts my point at all. For Microsoft to commit a large amount of dev time to rewriting Teams and improving its performance, there must have been an actual business reason. That's not something you do because some nerds on HN think your app is too slow.

Presumably, Teams was so unbelievably slow that it crossed over to being an actual problem for customers and not just a mild nuisance. So Microsoft improved performance just enough to stop affecting sales. Is the performance _good_? No, it's still comically slow. But there's simply no incentive to improve the performance further.

I agree that this became an exception because it was so bad that it crossed into mainstream awareness

But:

> there's simply no incentive to improve the performance further

The breakdown here (https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-blog/...) indicates this was a monumental rewrite, almost green-field, with the singular goal of fixing performance. I don't think they slumped on effort this time

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