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Comment by delecti | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious what people are using that makes Teams look so bad in comparison to the commenters complaining about it. It's the second most seamless video chat I've ever used, just behind Google Duo, which is only seamless because it's so light on features. Zoom isn't too far behind, but the UI still doesn't manage to work as well.

And to be clear, this isn't commenting on the merits of an antitrust investigation; I understand the rationale behind anti-bundling regulations. I'm just talking about the complaints about Teams itself. Are people prejudiced against it because Lync was so bad?

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Everything looks good compared to MS Teams. Some of my lowlights:

1. Attrocious linux support. I use linux at work and its just a pure shitshow. Teams is only offered as PWA with horrible performance. Its far snappier on windows. There is even a community version called teams-for-linux which at least shows notifications in the tray icon and dock icon on ubuntu unlike the official one.

2. Groups are trash. You just wanna call 3 people? Well we made a group for you. Everytime you call a bunch of people it creates a group and that group is now a contact in your chat window. By now I have a group for every constillation of the team I work in. Its beyond annoying.

3. The text input tries to be too smart. Wanna insert code? You get a popup with your cursor in the „title“ part so if you press the code button and paste it ends up in the title. Great, gotta click in the textbox first.

4. Video calls arent much better. You sit next to a colleague and just wanna mute him cause you can hear him outside of teams? Yeah nope, not possible. Same goes for the missing feature of changing the volume of individual participants.

Discord does all of the things and is free for users. How in gods name is multi billion M$ not able to create a decent communication platform.

Desktop version is also atrocious on Windows.

Its slow. It's a resource hog. And it seems someone added onClick=sleep(500ms) on every part of the interface.

There is this thing that the message box keeps flashing and either takes a while to load or doesn't load if you search or scroll up too much.

There is this supper annoying thing when sometimes you try to copy text and it brings up the whole message including metadata instead. Who the hell asked for that?

Windows? The Mac version is even worse. First is the bug where all of the Teams windows disappear, never to be seen again. The only way to get the main window back is to restart Teams. And this one is always fun in the middle of a meeting: buttons suddenly need a double-click to send the click message. Oh, wait, just a single-...no, fuck, now it's back to double-click. "Yes, I'm trying to unmute."

Just those two bugs alone infuriate me on a daily basis (and of course I have list of others as long as my arm). It's not just one Mac, it's the iMac and work MBP. It's not just Intel or Apple Silicon, I have both. It's just plain broke, and I'm continually amazed that it got shipped that way.

> 2. Groups are trash. You just wanna call 3 people? Well we made a group for you. Everytime you call a bunch of people it creates a group and that group is now a contact in your chat window. By now I have a group for every constillation of the team I work in. Its beyond annoying.

Funnily enough, one man's trash is another's treasure. For me groups is a killer feature. just being able to create ad hoc groups for different threads of conversations is what makes teams tick for me. Without the groups, I would have to use channels which for me pretty much useless.

In addition to other comments, from an academic perspective, Teams was at least in the pandemic era horrible for meetings and conferences with people from many different institutions: account handling across institutions/installations was atrocious. It seems like it simply was not designed for that use, but then seems to have been heavily marketed to university administrations. For the most part, it seemed very difficult to use an email for login on Teams run by one institution if it had been used for Office365 at any other institution anywhere.

Especially for things hosted by UK universities where it seems like everyone was forced to use Teams, I remember seeing absurd instructions for conference and workshop registrations, like "Please give us an personal email address to use as your login that is not your institutional email address, and that you have never used for any Teams-based conference in the past."

Then actually trying to run conferences on Teams always seemed to work horribly by comparison to other systems. One workshop on Teams I went to (with ~60 people if I recall), for example, couldn't figure out the access controls for screen sharing, and some users would accidentally share their desktops, which they then had trouble stopping. For larger conferences (eg, 100-400 people at a talk), I went to several where, since it seemed that they were already frustrated by Teams but seemed pushed into using it by their university administrations, they would use Teams chats to send out Zoom links.

The whole experience was a mess, and it was largely a mess where it seemed like Teams was being pushed for uses it really wasn't designed for. Slack, on the other hand, didn't seem to push its way into these uses. I've also used Teams things that seem more within its designed use-cases (eg, faculty meetings), and it has been fine, but it generated a terrible reputation by being pushed for everything else in academia.

For chat, Teams is horrible. I mean who thought in order to send a message in a channel, you need to start a "New Conversation"? And it has depends on other MS services such as Sharepoint and Azure. Not to mention you can't just have channels, you need to have a "Team" that has channels. The whole experience is way more convoluted that it should be.

For video, yes, it has a higher quality compared to Slack, but pretty much that's it. Because the joy ends with random crashes for no reason. Like now, I wanted to double check the "New Conversation" way of chatting and it just crashed. Lucky for me I only have to use it for video conferences once in a while.

Sometimes I am under the impression that not even Microsoft uses Teams internally because of how horrible it is.

Channels being "in" a Team is how it works in Slack or Discord too. A given channel is associated within a server/workspace.

Yeah, but in Teams you have to have a Team to have a channel. It makes absolutely no sense.

So even if you are a small company, you'll have a default Team called whatever with a General channel in it. Bonkers.

Slack + Google meet is my setup and I would need to get a $50k raise to go to a teams shop, I hate it that much. I used teams before, it’s painful.

I actually did use Lync at a small company in the past and thought it worked great, but then MS dropped android support so we moved.

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