Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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?

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.

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.

>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?

>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.

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