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Comment by tentacleuno | Hacker News Reader

> MS Teams

I really do empathize here, after having to use Teams for around 2 years. It's amazingly slow, confusing, buggy (it would crash the tab quite regularly), and just generally a perfect role model for what software shouldn't be[0].

I'm still quite amazed that Microsoft decided this was acceptable. I'm curious how Slack performs; perhaps they're not trying harder because there's no[t much] competition in this space ...?

[0]: (If I remember correctly, they were using AngularJS at the time, but I'm sure they're now using the regular React stack.)

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> > MS Teams

> I really do empathize here, after having to use Teams for around 2 years. It's amazingly slow, confusing, buggy (it would crash the tab quite regularly), and just generally a perfect role model for what software shouldn't be[0].

Teams for Linux [1] also struggles with resources. Teams in general is an absolute mess. I would go further and say that most MS products are resource intensive buggy crap.

[1] https://github.com/IsmaelMartinez/teams-for-linux

That's an unfair characterisation, sometimes they're actively user hostile instead of just poorly designed.

One of my favourite ongoing jokes is Word, the program that exists for typing, 'randomly' deletes what you type:

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/word/word-online-web-...

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/how-t...

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/why-d...

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/word-...

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/text-...

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/word-...

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/when-...

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/word-...

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/why-i...

I have no idea how many engineers work on Office Online, but other than security bugs I cannot think of a more important issue to resolve.

For a lightweight MS Teams experience, try: https://github.com/fossteams/teams-cli (terminal client), https://github.com/cacticouncil/lounge-lizard (both Slack & Teams) or https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-teams (plugin for Pidgin).

A little reminder from the past eh? I had to sigh when I read that. I guess purple somewhat died when the companies started banning accounts left and right for using third party clients for using their services. In a few cases it also seems like those bans started happening, because companies wanted to shut down third party clients to make sure people can't bypass ads, but also unfortunately to keep them from harvesting data.

I kinda have to ask, what features can you enforce in rate limiting in a first party client that you can't enforce in a third party client?

While it is neat that people work on them, realistically these are not replacements for people wishing to have a lighter teams experience.

- Non of them are close to feature complete. As soon as you have to do more than chat (share files, do meetings, etc) they will let you down.

- In most corporate environments there is some extra layer of authentication involved I highly doubt these clients are able to handle.

The best way I have found to have a lighter teams experience is to simply use the web version as a PWA. This basically offers you all the features without the extended footprint of effectively running a second browser.

> I'm curious how Slack performs

My colleagues and myself used Slack for years, were forced to use Teams for about 2 years because of our new parent company, and finally went back to Slack after we collectively quit that shitshow to start a new company.

While Slack isn't perfect either, it's miles better.

> While Slack isn't perfect either, it's miles better.

We switched from HipChat to Google Chat, which in my mind is pretty bad. Customers are often on Teams, which somehow manages to be MUCH MUCH worse. People kept telling me that Slack is much better than either Google Chat or MS Team, but after using it I can't say that I'd agree. Teams is clearly the worst, Slack is awful in its own way and Google Chat manages to be the best of the three, but mostly because the two others are so terrible.

It's clearly not an easy problem to solve, but I do wonder why all of these "enterprise" messaging/meeting/chat platforms are so terrible.

Twist is better still than Slack - they force everything into threads, so it becomes a reasonably browsable experience, and therefore possible to maintain async comms with. Slack still wins on integrations, though Twist has a few (including Zapier).

How do you find the thread with the conversation you need to carry on? That's the problem with Slack. Slack threads is where information goes to hide and die. "Ah, you did answer that two days ago? Where?"

There are two levels of organization - channels and threads, so it's not too bad to browse if reasonably setup. It also gives you an inbox with all of your unread threads, so that you can catch up quickly; and, you can mark a thread unread if you want to punt on it after reading.

> I'm still quite amazed that Microsoft decided this was acceptable

Their customers find it acceptable so it's OK for MS too.

If customers wouldn't find it acceptable they would use something else and we wouldn't be having this conversation. Maybe it helps that it comes with the Office suite and they already paid for it.

By the way, when a customer asks me how I want to do a video chat, almost always with screen sharing, I suggest Meet. If they mandate Teams, OK, I'll do Teams in a browser. Actually the best screen sharing seems to be Skype. It can zoom too. None of them can go full screen with no useless UI around the shared screen, tough luck. None of my customers are using Zoom anymore.

I think a look at the organizational and project management structure of the team(s) that develop Teams would reveal a lot. I doubt we can blame the tools they use.

I think a look at the organizational and project management structure of organizations that elect to use Teams would reveal a lot, also.

Yup. It's slow buggy. Tends to go into infinite loops. Sad really that it slows corporates so much.

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