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The bad thing: Teams would never have gotten any success without malpractice. The product is an incredible horror show, all competition easily crushed Teams. They are smart and counted on lazy admins.

How are you going to compensate competitors? The problem is that over and over again, companies like MS have already accounted for the fine in their planning.

If we want to end this practice, regulators need to deal a crippling blow to MS. Forbid for the next 15 years to provide any solution in the realm of messaging. Hand out a fine so high that it breaks the company and will lead to executives being sued by shareholders.

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>The bad thing: Teams would never have gotten any success without malpractice.

Neither would have Chrome to be fair. I remember being a PC user in the late '00s and Chrome ads and downloads links where absolutely everywhere. On Google, on Youtube, on GMail, on any kind of SW installer for Windows would come with a pre-ticked checkbox that would shove Chrome down your throat and then also set itself as the default browser on your system, like ad/-spyware. Naughty-naughty.

It was impossible to escape Chrome not getting on your Windows machine back then, it was like a disease. Sure, it was also hip and cool back then, like all brand new products launched by Google back then that generated hype and curiosity getting people to talk about it and recommend it further, but it wouldn't have reached such insane popularity on pure merit and word of mouth alone.

But also when Chrome first came out, it was legitimately better than the competitors. FF at the time was horribly slow. Teams was never better than Slack.

Exactly. It's been a while and so a lot people either don't remember or were too young to really remember.

I was a Firefox user at the time (was using it when it was Firebird). People were already starting to shift away from IE towards Firefox at the time. A sequence of events where a person's computer was infect with malware, they asked a computer savvy friend for help, the friend "fixed" it, installed Firefox and told them to stop using IE is how most people switched browsers in those days. But Firefox was a slog and Chrome was a breath of fresh air when it was first released. So the sequence was tweaked to "install Chrome and tell you to stop using IE".

Chrome became what it is because Microsoft had tried to neuter the internet because they saw the web app potential and understood that it could undermine Windows market share. And when they realized that there was no stopping the internet, they spent several years incompetently trying to improve IE (and eventually Edge) before eventually going the "can't beat em, join em" route.

Chrome was faster and optimized for google services indeed.

However, Google was smart enough to know that being superior doesn't count. Firefox was not horribly slow, the leap from firefox over IE was massive. Chrome over firefox wasn't quite the same leap.

The average user has been pushed aggressively, they weren't going to do research on web browsers when they even didn't know what a web browser is. Google knew that.

Your pink glasses are showing. For the longest time before quantum firefox was generally very slow and straight up locking ui thread when it feels like it.

When a tab crashed or got heavy usage on Firefox, the whole browser locked up.

Chrome didn’t. It was noticeably faster and more reliable.

Switching browsers isn’t something that people generally do lightly. You lose them, you lose them for a decade+.

That and Mozilla behaviour hasn’t been great over the past several years; like, forced advertising extensions, crypto, more advertising to turn off on a fresh install than _google_…

Manifest v3 will probably be the straw that forces me to switch back again, but reluctantly.

How so? People with an already functioning browser that ships with their OS have to make a conscious decision to download and install Chrome. Most people would not do that if the default browser of their OS was serviceable.

Chrome gained traction because IE was really, really bad. Now it has mindshare and you might could argue that Google maintains this mindshare with malpractice.

firefox was already good when chrome was launched, chrome didn't gain traction because of IE

Chrome was much faster than FF at launch. FF only caught up recently.

Firefox was slowly chipping away at IE market share before Chrome because IE sucked.

But Chrome was just better than Firefox when it launched so it accelerated the IE decline.

I still remember fixing people's PCs who had Chrome installed, and they had no idea what Chrome was or how it got on their computers. I saw it hundreds and hundreds of times. People didn't give a shit that Chrome was slightly faster, most people had turd computers with not enough ram and didn't even know what browser tabs were and the speeds were indistinguishable for most people.

This feels exactly like the whole Mac M1 thing. Every techie person seems to think that the M1 was going to cause all sorts of people to switch to Macs. Guess what? Nobody gives a shit about a 5% faster processor except for power users.

Regular people don't care about Chrome being "better," either and that's not how it got market dominance.

>People with an already functioning browser that ships with their OS have to make a conscious decision to download and install Chrome. Most people would not do that if the default browser of their OS was serviceable.

We live in the 1950's, I work for Maddison Street and build a massive ad campaign putting ads everywhere you look about smoking, saying how it's so cool and beneficial for your health and how all people should do it if they wanna be cool and healthy. After a while, consumers already happy with breathable atmospheric air become smokers en-masses, voluntarily, putting toxic fumes in their lungs to look cool as advertised.

Who's responsible here?

Clearly the atmosphere's marketing team failed to effectively market their special blend of oxygen, nitrogen and spices.

Really it's just market forces at work and the cigarette manufacturers developed a superior product and should be rewarded for it.

That's not malpractice. Chrome's main competitors (except Firefox) literally ship their browsers with their OS and put in place hoops to make changing the OS default browser harder. If anything the ads just help neutralize the massive built in advantage that Microsoft and Apple have.

Yeah, GP is forgetting what the browser landscape looked like in 2008.

IE was awful, and Firefox was…perfectly cromulent. Chrome was so much better than any of the competition.

Average joe did not do research. Forget it.

- They found the internet had gotten a new icon and had no idea how it got there. (bundling with popular software)

- They were instructed by google.

That is how chrome came to top. See other comments for more context.

I mean, what would you expect?

The fact is, browsers aren't a product, they're a platform feature. Users have zero incentive to ever switch from whatever their OS came bundled with, unless you make a massive advertising push. The fact that Google managed to get people to switch to a non-platform browser at all is a shocking achievement.

Done by tricking people, and sneakily bundling itself with everything. Sleezey, scumbag achievement.

I agree that some of their tactics were questionable, but they were up against IE, and Microsoft's bundling of it.

Would you rather everyone still be using IE? Because that's exactly what would have happened otherwise.

Wrong, it was bundled with software for instance. The average joe found that the launch icon of the original browser had been removed and learned that the internet had gotten a new icon. Google pushed it also via google results.

Btw, the EU has fined Google in the past for promoting their products over competitors in their search results. That was already the hint that google has gotten too big to be not in conflict of interest anymore.

The damage was done, people learned to "download the internet" from google first. And if they forgot, all Google services kept pushing them till they did.

What software was Chrome bundled with? I don't recall ever seeing that.

Alost everything mainstream that was popular on Windows back then: PDF readers, picture viewers, Mp3 players, video players, codec packs, CD/DVD burning SW, anti-virus SW, firewalls, torrent clients, downloads managers, system drivers, etc.

They all had checkboxes for Chrome and other ad-ware. If you didn't pay attention to unchecked them during installation you'd find your default browser changed and other crap. Those who did "tech-support" for family members remember.

Exactly this. You had to be really vigilant during install.

Average joe: next next next done.

Don't ever fantasize about average users back then doing research if there would be a better web browser and then going ahead to download and install chrome on their own.

"What is a web browser?"

I remember third party IE toolbars being bundled (and that practice pre-dated Chrome, IIRC). But I don't remember the full Chrome browser being bundled (I do remember the Google Toolbar). I was a Chrome user from basically the day it was released because I found it to be superior so I may have been blind to the practice since I was already using Chrome.

The Google Toolbar adware installer component itself (the "Google Updater" or something like that) that you remember in installers eventually silently upgraded to a Chrome installer. Almost every installer that ever installed Google Toolbar was automatically a Chrome auto-installer, "thanks" to software as a service. If you didn't uncheck hidden "Google Toolbar" checkboxes, that would also auto-install Chrome. (That added to how hard it felt to keep Chrome from ever being installed on a machine, because sometimes you'd overlook the "Google Toolbar" in older installers as yet another trojan horse for Chrome.)

Eventually the Google Toolbar itself would just auto-upgrade to Chrome as well.

Anecdotally, my father liked the Google toolbar for giving a separate search box in IE, but disliked Chrome and was confused when Chrome auto-installed and the Google Toolbar partly became a big ad for "congrats, you can use Chrome now", and that was one of his reasons to (finally) switch to Firefox for good (he used both IE and Firefox for a long time prior).

I can't remember the names, too long ago. I thought even portableapps.com did do that, but I am not sure. The practice of bundling had become really common then: https://superuser.com/questions/850766/downloading-software-...

I remember that I had to specifically uncheck this during installation of freeware back then. People I helped with their computer had no idea where chrome came from, the internet changed on a sudden day. They believably told they didn't download it. Most likely it came with some freeware they did download. For some it could be that they __did download it__ in fact by being tricked into it by weasel wording from google. There was a real strong push, I remember the chrome ads and links to chrome where pushed everywhere in google's services.

Aside, ask a friend what the internet is and they point to chrome. We keep overestimating the average Joe. Young people are not necessarily any wiser, to the contrary I would say.

Everything with an installer basically

Adobe software from rough memory. So, at least Flash Player and Acrobat Reader I think.

I remember the Java updater, which basically anyone using a computer had to occasionally update.

> Chrome gained traction because IE was really, really bad. Now it has mindshare and you might could argue that Google maintains this mindshare with malpractice.

Chrome copied lots of stuff from Opera, and Opera had 2.5% of marketshare. Firefox (who I personally didn't enjoy as much as Opera) had benefited from a grasroots campaign had taken years to get 35% of marketshare. Both were nobrainers compared to how broken IE was, and they were on the market years before chrome.

So.. Yeah. Chrome was a good product. But competitors had showed that being a good browser without insane advertising was never going to be enough.

As far as i know Opera and Firefox are doing fine. Kind of ironic in a thread about antitrust people still peddle this idea of needing full market dominance to be considered successful.

The Opera GP was talking about is dead, it is now just a skin on top of Chromium. And Firefox, the only alternative to the WebKit/Blink monopoly today, has a tiny market share compared to its peak. They are definitely not doing fine.

Opera was a _great_ browser back in its day. They had tabbed browsing before anyone (as far as I remember). The Presto engine was fast and lightweight. Overall it was a pleasure to use. I was real sad when they decided to abandon Presto and adopted chromium.

Even before that, it was really sad when it got acquired by a shady corporation transforming it into, essentially, a malware. Back then, I moved to Firefox, and with Opera's popular features becoming the de-facto UX standard for browsers, I never moved back to Vivaldi.

Chrome's issue was that you needed a computer with more RAM than normal home users had at the time.

It definitely wasn't better or faster after it forced your system to start heavily using a swap file on spinning rust storage.

My recollection may be a bit off, but I recall the Google Toolbar got bundled with everything. People were regularly installing it and not realizing it because it got added to installers for a whole bunch of unrelated things (accounting software, music players, archiving utilities, etc.). Then that toolbar and Google's search page kept spamming people to install Chrome, promising it to be a better Google experience. Which, I believe it was, because Google was doing proprietary things that only their web properties could take advantage of (a precursor to SPDY, I believe). Many others had it installed for them by tech support family members.

That's not to say IE was better than Chrome. I just don't think it appearing on the desktop was a deliberate decision for many. I'd be surprised if many even realized they had installed it.

My recollection is Chrome was legitimately better than anything else on Windows, even Firefox.

One especially awesome feature was a built in pdf creator. You did not have to download cutePDF or whatever.

It was also more reliable and crashed less, and probably other things I forget.

For the first couple of years Chrome crashed pretty regularly for me. I hated its automatic updates because it would completely break with more-than-acceptable frequency. I got pretty tired of the glib "Aw, snap!" page. To their credit, I didn't have to wait for an OS system pack to get a fix.

Upon its release it also predictably had compatibility problems, leading Google to implement a wrapper around the IE engine. Firefox had compatibility issues as well. I'm not trying to say one was better than the other. I think people tend to forget the environment Chrome was released into.

Do while IE wasn't great, it was far more stable for me. I favored Firefox, but it was in a bit of tumult at the time. I'm sure Chrome was a better experience for others. I think at the time Google was still basking in its adulation from tech enthusiasts, papering over Chrome's flaws. That was back when people got excited for new Google products and trusted them to not be evil.

As a bonus fun fact, Chrome created a massive headache for Selenium because Firefox's internals where called "Chrome" and "chrome://" was a URL scheme. Selenium used those URLs and got stuck with loads of support requests from the ensuing confusion. Everyone thought Chrome was just an internal project name and that Google would surely pick something that didn't conflict with another browser.

I remember when it was fairly common practice (as reported on forums like Reddit at the time) that more tech aware family members would replace the Chrome icon with the IE one most of the time nobody noticed. People felt so passionately about getting off IE they'd do tricks like this (and others) to escape it.

One big driver for Chrome installation was that it was bundled with the popular free antivirus programs of the time when malware on the internet first exploded,

Google paid vendors so that Chrome installed and made itself the default without users even knowing what had happened.

Also, GMail would display a prominent banner about it working better with Chrome, at the same time as it would purposely mis-function on non-Chrome browsers.

The "purposely mis-function" thing isn't a mis-characterisation either. It became fairly well documented over time.

What? Chrome was so far ahead of everyone else, it wasn’t even funny. I remember telling everyone I knew to use Chrome instead of whatever they used because it was so much better.

> but it wouldn't have reached such insane popularity on pure merit and word of mouth alone.

It was just soooo much better than the competition. I mean, Firefox was better than IE6, but that was not a high bar to pass in the first place. The thing that won over developers IMO was the developer tools: Firebug was slow as molasses and an utter memory hog. And that didn't change for many years - but by the time Firefox caught up, it was too late.

You are exaggerating here.

While there was for sure a long period of time where Chrome was significantly faster than Firefox, there was never a time where Firefox was particularly bad. Firefox always oscillated between "really good" and "totally ok".

I’ll agree with you that Chrome really changed the web development experience with incredible tooling compared to what you could get back then but this had no impact on most users experience.

I totally remember Chrome being the fastest/snappiest browser, especially the first versions but Firefox has never been slow.

> I’ll agree with you that Chrome really changed the web development experience with incredible tooling compared to what you could get back then but this had no impact on most users experience.

Yes, but guess what the developers started pushing onto their friends who asked for a browser? The one they were personally using.

Word-of-mouth is insanely powerful and FF alienated way too many of the key people.

Ads and download promotions are not bundling and it is an error to conflate them.

Aggressive marketing is not malpractice.

Chrome was better and faster than Firefox when it came out...

No. Chrome was much faster than Firefox when it came out, which was in turn much faster than IE.

> The bad thing: Teams would never have gotten any success without malpractice. The product is an incredible horror show, all competition easily crushed Teams. They are smart and counted on lazy admins.

Huh what? IME, it's many MANY miles better in user experience than Cisco Webex and Skype for Business, these were absolute clusterfucks, unlike Zoom it doesn't do very weird hacks in the installer that led to security issues [1], and unlike Slack it has absolutely zero problems scaling to hundreds-of-users videocalls. Haven't experienced using landline telephony gateways with it yet, but I'll be glad to get rid of Cisco Jabber as well. Sorry to say it but Cisco's stuff is stuck many years in the past, their focus was on insanely expensive telephony systems and fancy conference room setups for too long. If there's one company that deserves disruption, it's them.

The point that competitors can rightfully complain about is the seamless integration with the rest of Office 365 products (create/provision Teams meetings from Outlook directly, and streaming Powerpoint presentations directly to clients as files instead of screengrabbing)... but hey, again, the UX is so much better.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/16/users-of-...

Huh what? Doesn’t do any weird hacks? Where do I even start…ok try and turn off the updater on macOS using the systemctl command…all that does is prevent the auto updater from running…what happens after that is Teams will crash every 5 minutes after launching. You want more weird privacy breaking dark patterns? Try initiating a Teams call from your phone without giving it access to your local network. You can’t. If I, the user, decide I’d rather not allow Teams to nmap my local network, or decide there aren’t any conferencing devices, Microsoft doesn’t care. Expose your local network or you can’t make any calls to anyone.

And you want to talk about user experience…if you go afk, you stop receiving all new messages…that is until you move your mouse again. Dark mode can’t be synced to the system on Mac. Native notifications weren’t a thing on Mac until like a year ago. Performance is horrid. Click anything, change channels, press any button and you’re waiting hundreds of milliseconds if not seconds! The only cure for that is using a souped up M1/2 processor. The list goes on. Teams might be better than webex or Skype but that bar is loooooooow.

> And you want to talk about user experience…if you go afk, you stop receiving all new messages…that is until you move your mouse again.

Which... makes sense? Nothing worse than a colleague going for lunch and not setting afk/dnd, so a constant "bleep" notification sound.

> Dark mode can’t be synced to the system on Mac. Native notifications weren’t a thing on Mac until like a year ago.

Valid points, although I did like the separate notifications - I used Focus Mode of macOS to silence everything else but still Teams notifications got through.

> Click anything, change channels, press any button and you’re waiting hundreds of milliseconds if not seconds! The only cure for that is using a souped up M1/2 processor.

Common problem for Electron apps, an issue it shares with Slack, or most modern web apps in general (if I were to guess, I'd blame ReactJS for that trend with all its encapsulation)... both keep zero local state it seems and request the actual content from scratch every time you change the current view or its scope. Damn annoying.

> Which... makes sense? Nothing worse than a colleague going for lunch and not setting afk/dnd, so a constant "bleep" notification sound.

Makes absolutely zero sense. You set yourself away, or the system sets you as away and messages come in silently. In its current state, you get ZERO messages, even if your screen is open to the Teams chat where the messages are coming in. Moving your mouse after any period when you're away makes your computer look like a VCR fast forwarding through a movie. That's stupid. AND it was added within the last 6-9 months. To save bandwidth? Probably to monitor workers.

> Common problem for Electron apps, an issue it shares with Slack, or most modern web apps in general (if I were to guess, I'd blame ReactJS for that trend with all its encapsulation)... both keep zero local state it seems and request the actual content from scratch every time you change the current view or its scope. Damn annoying.

Slack, discord, matrix clients (I use element and neochat) are a dream in comparison. I realize I'm probably in the minority but I feel those milliseconds hard and it's a tough pill to swallow when one of the most responsive electron based apps happens to be made by the same corporation...If I could use Teams chat in vscode lol...of course I'm being facetious but god damn Microsoft could use some cross-pollination right now.

> Makes absolutely zero sense. You set yourself away, or the system sets you as away and messages come in silently.

The latter option needs a time threshold and risks either annoyed coworkers or the system going off unintentionally while watching a youtube video. For the former, I'm one of those people who constantly forget to remove AFK when they are back from whatever. I'm rarely looking at the small blip in the top right corner of Teams to notice that.

> To save bandwidth? Probably to monitor workers.

Employers these days have far better tools to monitor their slaves.

> of course I'm being facetious but god damn Microsoft could use some cross-pollination right now.

You're not alone. It seems the only ones getting this somewhat right are AWS and Apple. Everyone else is just working in silos - and even though Apple is infamous for that, they still manage to deliver seamlessly integrated solutions and uniform design/UX.

Actually, the whole away / notification thing is a dumpster fire. I sometimes use two PCs, a Windows one with Teams and all that crapware, and a Linux one where I get my work done. So the Windows pc will often be in screensaver mode. It will still go "bling" from time to time when I get a Teams message. Teams is set to use Windows notifications instead of its own, but it ignores the Windows setting to disable sounds. It will also show its specific notification when I'm invited to join a call.

I've also not found an option to only enable the sound for people calling while disabling it for random chat messages.

As to the away thing, I've noticed that it will set itself to away if the pc session is locked. Not sure if it's the locking itself that triggers it, or just a timeout. But when I get back on the PC, it'll stay in away mode as long as I don't interact with the Teams app.

Also, the whole indicator thing is an absolute joke. I've been multiple times on calls with people who appeared as offline for the entire duration of the call.

...while were talking about user experience, have you seen the file sharing?

Shared files are added to a team directory, which is okay I guess. If you upload a second file with the same name, it asks you if you want to create a copy (temp(1).txt). If you do it again, you'll get 2 popups (temp.txt already exists, then temp(1).txt already exists). If you do it again, you get three.

... like, I get that it can make sense to integrate long term storage, but can you maybe not break the entire use-case for why we were using an ephemeral chat the first place?

>IME, it's many MANY miles better in user experience than ... Skype for Business

It is the Skype For Business, but just rebranded. You can still see some cruft where certain dialog boxes still refer to it as Skype for Business.

That an interesting point. Is there some way to definitely show that happening?

Yes, initiate a call, and look at what the teams controlled audio sinks are named. They are named "skype". This was 4 months ago.

Ahhh. I meant more like "is there a video of it happening?". :)

Skype 4 Business itself is just Lync rebranded, as it had nothing to do with Skype beyond a half-hearted bridge at one point. And you can still see references to lync in the domain names teams sets up.

I'm curious, why does it have to be a video? Is that a better proof in any way? Wouldn't you then say "oh we can't know if the video is actually authentic"?

Because it's easy to see for people that don't have the software (like me), and is something approaching evidence.

So it's better than two options almost no one uses, and worse than two that are somewhat popular. Seems to me like it's bad.

Webex is incredibly popular.

I'm not doubting you, but I've only ever seen it once and don't know anyone that says they use it regularly.

Was incredibly popular a decade ago. Very few organisations still use it, and almost exclusively it's for legacy reasons. Nobody buys it today.

Probably they work(ed) with extremely large organizations or anything government, Cisco is very popular for telephony there and when you're already using their hardware gear you might just as well go and use Webex because it perfectly interfaces with their phone and conference room system.

>the UX is so much better.

Meh:

Typing anything complicated is a weird mix of WYSIWYG and knock-off markdown, which causes confusion and frustration. Codeblocks and snippets in particular.

Random delays in getting rid of an indicator as there are weird, in-built checks and timers, forcing more clicks.

Bugs out messages, not able to send or receive (anecdotally only colleagues had this).

The weird split between Teams and Chats tab, which has practically no similarity to its competitors. The Teams tab feels clunky as a result compared to the Chats tab.

The Teams tab was randomly decided to scroll bottom-to-top, while the Chats tab is still top-to-bottom.

..and more. Making something better than Skype, Cisco and other stuff isn't that difficult given the underlying tech has drastically improved. Even so Teams routinely messes up trivial things over weird business decisions, and tries to shoehorn features that have been solved since the times of Teamspeak/Ventrilo/etc.

It's not terrible, but it's apparent Teams isn't that great and routinely emphasizes the wishes of management types over the wishes of end-users. No self-respecting developer would encourage one-click calls without the ability to turn it off. Voice channels solved that issue decades ago.

I agree. Microsoft quickly iterated on Teams when the pandemic hit. The strategy seemed (seems) to be:

- Every idea is worth implementing

- Get it into the hands of people ASAP

- Hopefully we can make it performant later

So all in all a typical Microsoft product. But not bad by any stretch of the imagination.

And yeah…it’s bundled with Office 365 “for free”…Apple also bundles a lot of free stuff with your Mac purchase…is that abusing your market penetration or just reaping the benefits of it?

I don't use Skype, but Webex is methodical, slow, cumbersome but never fails me. Teams randomly locks up, sometimes I can't log in. There's no "guest mode" that I can find on Teams. It's a mess.

Zoom just works better for me than either, but I'd prefer Webex to Teams. My last Teams meeting with a customer I had to apologize 3 times then send a zoom because Teams simply refused to authenticate me or when it let me in, my video was not working.

As a piece of video conferencing tech, I find it to be one of the best. I think it is the best for team calls. A few are better for really large all hands.

But I find Teams much better than Google Meet, Webex, Zoom, and many of the other usual competitors.

It's stable, the video and audio quality is good, it has very good virtual background support that works well, it can easily record calls, etc.

What Teams is very bad at is being a Slack competitor. My last employer used Teams for video calls and Slack for workplace chatting.

Same. We use both. Slack for chat. Mostly Teams for video.

100% agree with your take. It's long overdue. Same goes to Facebook and Amazon.

There are much to be done on that front. Divest Facebook into different entities (ig, WhatsApp, Facebook, Oculus), Amazon (AWS, marketplace, Twitch, whole foods, etc...), Microsoft (azure, office, teams, etc..).

This will foster competition and fairness. They have too much power now.

> The product is an incredible horror show, all competition easily crushed Teams.

Yes, except that it has a killer feature: absolute integration with office365. Whether that's a good thing or not is up to you, but for companies that is a very big factor.

Correct the collaboration and integrations are far better. Our collaboration on documents has improved heavily just by Office365 alone, the Teams integrations to documents and dashboards makes for awesome project-based channels. Slack didn't do anything but cause distraction and people responding with terrible custom emojis (a feature I will never miss).

Anecdotally, when I get calendar events for random conference services, I'll get a join button in the event which sends me to that service. Ditto for Teams invites from my organization. But teams invites from other organizations don't have the join button, neither in Outlook nor in Teams itself. I have to open the event and click the link. If I do it in Teams, I'll have to click the expand button to see the link.

I don't have any conferencing app installed aside from Teams. I join the others in the browser.

If admins are ‘lazy’, wouldn’t they regret a choice they made that increased their work (it being a horror show and all that) and instead go back to the smart choice of not-Teams?

Do we have data on loss of productivity for companies that migrated away from Teams? If it’s so bad how are consumer companies of Teams making it justifiable for loss of productivity to shareholders?

What I’m getting at is that it’s a more complex equation than just laziness being a parameter. Cost and ROI are the other two (among more likely).

Shareholders will never know if skype for business got replaced by teams.

> Do we have data on loss of productivity for companies that migrated away from Teams?

   "We have no time for that. MS recommends Teams and it comes for free"

----

I will tell you a dirty secret. Most company os images only ship with the default MS browser. I had colleagues using Internet Explorer or later Edge when Firefox and Chrome had already run out of sight. Had to help them over Skype or Teams.

"just laziness being a parameter." Competence is an other one indeed. Many sysadmins will follow MS like it is a cult. If MS blesses Skype for business, it will be Skype for business. If MS bundles Teams, it will be Teams.

Where is this hate coming from? Teams is amazing, and I much prefer it to things like slack for company comms, even more so for its integration with Outlook and AD. MS is doing an amazing job and they deserve to be rewarded for this amazing product, not punished because you guys want competition and weirdly like SASS products that promote a fragmented ecosystem.

And I say this as someone that runs Linux at home and doesn't touch MS dev tooling or languages. Including VS code.

The chat experience is horrible on team, read recepit work half of the time, notifications are super weird in how they get handled, reactions cound as a notification separated from the chat, and so on...

> Teams would never have gotten any success without malpractice. The product is an incredible horror show..."

And yet no one sees enough value in Slack to pay for it. I type this on a mac, which has built in notes, but I pay for my own notes solution. My company uses Zoom DESPITE paying for gsuite. If Slack offered enough value people would pay for it. Unfortunately Slack's just not that good.

Employee of $5bn company that exclusively uses Slack, here.

I LOVE Slack. Great integrations, fast, solid apps, UX. it makes Teams look third rate by comparison.

We’ve nearly completely done away with email, thanks to Slack. Most of our suppliers use it, so we can chat live to them in Slack rather than email.

I agree so long as they go after Apple for FaceTime, iCloud and any other bundled software you get with apple devices that gives them unfair advantages over other developers.

If its just Microsoft, though, then no, because everyone else is bundling software but they’re only chasing Microsoft.

> They are smart and counted on lazy admins.

We aren't lazy, its just a hard sell to buy/manage an additional product when this fully integrated one is essentially free with 365.

Your welcome to come speak to my C's instead if you want?

So other companies get to charge me for their messaging app and ms should be prevented from providing theirs for free? I thought these laws were there to protect consumers not competitors. The whole premise of the argument here is that everyone is too stupid and or lazy to try alternative products. Teams works, there is no monopoly here, other messaging apps are free to disrupt with their superior products.

Is it really about lazy admins? Or does Microsoft just make it more convenient for companies that are already heavily invested in the Microsoft ecosystem?

>They are smart and counted on lazy admins.

Cheap admins, not lazy.

IT Admins often have their hands tied by corporate bureaucracy that makes a DMV jealous.

> Teams would never have gotten any success without malpractice.

Maybe so but I think Slack is still hot garbage.

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