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MS Teams is... bad. Even if they were to solve the bugs and performance issues, and even if they actually implemented any of the features that the community has been asking for (push to talk comes to mind), the entire concept is flawed.

Two problems with information are duplication (too many copies around, all of them slightly different) and finding where it is. MS Teams makes it easy to store duplicate data and hard to find it later: did you upload the data as a file in the "development" channel, or as a link in the "updates" wiki? Nobody knows, not even the search function. And with each new project manager creating five channels per project, two of which will actually see any activity...

I think MS Teams wants to be everything for everyone and succeeds at neither.

> I think MS Teams wants to be everything for everyone and succeeds at neither.

Teams wants to be Slack killer and making sure people stay in MS ecosystem, and it is succeeding in it. You can call the concept flawed, but it is a response to strong demand in the market.

Obviously I don't speak for everyone, but the Fortune 500 company I worked for at the time was presented with two options: either migrate your Skype infrastructure to Teams, or... actually, no, you don't get to choose. Migrate or else.

I don't doubt that the plan is to keep people in the MS ecosystem and I don't dispute that it's working. But let's not claim that Teams' popularity has anything to do with its technology when it's clear that MS used it's dominant position to push it down everyone's throat.

isn't this what Micro$oft have always done. The big behemoth bully picking off the little guys with there "Too big to fail" approach to business. relying on the fact that large companies think and dream in grey than in color.

MS knows that their sales effort target and most important customer is the IT department, not the users.

You are absolutely right about the documentation aspect. We are about four years into Teams and no one can find anything. Massive numbers of dead channels. Files and things all over the place. Notification hell.

One particular bad aspect is people started recording meetings. No one has any idea where these things get put. There are links that are shared but where are the actual files.

I use a OneNote to keep track of links. It's craziness.

Miro has its own management issues as well once you start getting projects and things in the mix.

It's like every new app now is designed to work with maybe a handful of objects but beyond that it's a huge mess.

> We are about four years into Teams and no one can find anything. Massive numbers of dead channels. Files and things all over the place. Notification hell. (...) No one has any idea where these things get put. There are links that are shared but where are the actual files.

Isn't this what SharePoint is for? As in, Teams integrates with it, so all the recordings, and planning boards, and file uploads, and yes - chats too, end up being stored there - where it is indexed and searchable (subject to your IT dept. competence and company access policies).

I have a feeling that most of the complaints about Teams come from people using it standalone, vs. a small part of a whole suite of tools Microsoft sells to businesses. This of course doesn't excuse Teams being shitty in those cases - but perhaps explains why I, and some others, tend to have almost no negative experience with Teams.

To be fair, Slack also suffers from the "write-only medium" problem.

Teams is designed for a world where the problem that Slack solves is viewed as a feature. Looking at them as comparable instant messaging tools is to completely miss the point.

The underlying philosophy with Teams is top-down control: the assumption is that the organisation structure can adequately predict what communication patterns between its members should be allowed.

The underlying assumption with Slack is that the organisation members should be able to set up productive communication patterns without needing top-down control, and that having to impose that control is a bug.

The Slack approach requires discovery and working in the open, to a certain degree, so that what the research calls "weak links" can form between individuals in disconnected parts of the organisation. Teams (at least, wherever I've seen it) is actively hostile to this: you have to invite, to be invited, to already know who to speak to. Slack - when done right - radically changes how the organisation integrates with itself.

I have, of course, seen it done very wrong: if you come from a Teams world you'll likely want to lock Slack down so that it can't provide its main benefits; the instance I'm on right now blocks public channel creation, which is bonkers if you understand the problem area.

If your org is small enough and has enough of a mixing function outside the digital tooling that it doesn't need a helping hand, then there's not much in it, but past a certain size and it's not even close.

> the instance I'm on right now blocks public channel creation, which is bonkers if you understand the problem area.

If I was working with a team of tech savvy developers, I'd completely agree with you, and we'd probably be using Slack, or maybe Zulip. I'm not - I work at a bakery and I'm the only technical person at our company. Most people don't even own a laptop. Every day is a surprise to me as I get a tech support call about something so basic like not checking if something is plugged in. If you've ever watched The IT Crowd, and thought the tech support calls were satire - they are not.

Everything has to be locked down and simplified to the extreme, otherwise I will be called to fix or explain it over and over again. The thought of allowing everyone to create a channel whenever they want is giving me nightmares, honestly. It's already a daily frustration to get idea of channels across at all. Actually scratch that, even getting people to stop using Zalo (local version of Whatsapp) was a struggle and I'm pretty sure it's still happening behind our backs.

Thinking about allowing everyone to create channels ad-hoc. It wouldn't work, it would turn our communications into a mess. We have total of about six channels and already get complaints that it's too confusing.

Arguably, those differences come from size of the core/target market. Slack targeted small companies and startup. Teams targets corporations.

A lot of its design decisions make sense in this context: for example, the reason "you have to invite, to be invited, to already know who to speak to" in Teams is that because you can't exactly fit 10 000 employees and an unbounded number of contractors and external parties in a vertical list, and tell the users to scroll through it. At this size, you need some discovery / matching process to even figure out who to write.

This also drives many of the "barriers" in Teams - you can't expose everyone to everyone else by default, because the CPU (and the notification counter) would have trouble keeping up. Instead, with everything being need-to-know by default, a new employee is going to start in a small, cozy team space, and gradually expand their list of contacts and team memberships. However, they're not actually isolated - the megacorp is still there, thousands of teams, tens of thousands of people, all accessible through that unassuming search bar at the top.

> all accessible through that unassuming search bar at the top.

And there's the problem. Slack also has that search bar, but it also has public activity so you have a chance of knowing what to search for. The discovery process is the public conversations.

> This also drives many of the "barriers" in Teams - you can't expose everyone to everyone else by default, because the CPU (and the notification counter) would have trouble keeping up.

This is just not a problem. If you've got notifications on by default for busy public channels, you're going to have a bad time.

I find bugs or annoyances with Teams every single day. At minimum it has horrible latency for basic UI actions, but also awful file management experiences and an abysmal search feature (seriously, Discord manages to have a dramatically better search feature and that was never targeted at serious business users). Not to mention countless random bugs. Have they made having multiple organisations actually work properly yet with real time message notifications or does it still silo them and you get an email 8 hours after a message if you're lucky? Does the desktop app still destroy battery doing god knows what?

For video conferences I agree, Teams works pretty well for that. I also don't find the client any slower than any other Electron Apps, they are all equally bad. Its the group chats that I find severely lacking compared to Slack. So much wasted whitespace and incredibly inconvenient UX.

Teams - Quite sluggish even on high end machines, annoying bugs such as notifications not showing consistently, messages not being sent, pictures not loading...

Loop - Super beta product with very few features compared to Notion. In particular, I've enabled it in our tenant and it has a showstopping bug for many users in which none of their work is saved. This bug exists from day 1 and still not fixed.

> MS 365 wins by being "just good enough" at _loads_ of things, and way cheaper than the competition.

Agreed!

> I think MS Teams gets a bad rap that is doesn't deserve.

No, it entirely deserves it.