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Comment by technick | Hacker News Reader

I got my first taste of teams about a month ago. I had to install it on my personal laptop for a job interview. After installation, my laptop started displaying notifications encouraging me to renew my monthly subscriptions to Microsoft Office and Xbox Game Pass, things I haven't had a subscription for in over a year. It automatically set itself to start up with the computer which isn't unexpected. However I disabled the startup and it still launches when Windows restarts. Only solution was to remove it. I don't know why people waste their time using teams, it's such a trash app written by a trash company.

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> I don't know why people waste their time using teams

Because its use is mandated by workplaces, schools, and lots of other entities & communities. I rather hate Teams, but suddenly I’m finding myself spending half my days with it.

And those places use it because it’s free. You’re already paying for Exchange or Office, so Teams comes free. Nobody believes it’s the best product, but it’s 70% as good as Slack for free.

You are absolutely right. To me this kind of bundling is absolutely infuriating. I wish we could literally outlaw it.

At work we just transfered from zoom to google meet. We did this while everyone who expressed an opinion agreed that zoom is simply a superior product. And we did it because “we are already paying for it with our google docs subscription”.

It is just so anti-competitive I can’t even believe we collectively let this happen.

What's the alternative though? I don't like anti-competitive behavior at all, however thinking about what the regulation would be, I am just not sure there is any viable way. You have a few cases where the EU will go after whoever for bundling a browser, which is not really a solution. Are companies only allowed to sell products individually and never discount or bundle anything? What is a "complete" product? Is it Office? Word? Windows? - Which the EU has already said is conglomerate of products given the whole IE thing. It seems tricky.

I don’t see how it’s anticompetitive. It’s not like Microsoft or Google make it harder to use Slack or Zoom.

In fact, Google makes it really easy to integrate Zoom into Google calendar, and Microsoft has slack integrations for all their products. One can even argue that the office experience in slack is better than in Teams.

That’s very pro-competition IMO.

Offering a product for free or a significant discount with another product where a company has a substantial portion of that market to get a foothold and kill off competition in the free-/cheap-product's market is called "bundling" in anticompetitive regulations.

Indeed, this is exactly what is happening with Teams compared to, say, Slack (which is generally regarded as the better team chat) or Zoom (better video conferencing).

This link doesn’t say what you’re saying it does. From the link:

> For competitive purposes, a monopolist may use forced buying, or "tie-in" sales, to gain sales in other markets where it is not dominant and to make it more difficult for rivals in those markets to obtain sales. This may limit consumer choice for buyers wanting to purchase one ("tying") product by forcing them to also buy a second ("tied") product as well.

Teams is free, whether it’s obtained with Office or downloaded separately.

Giving away a product for free doesn’t violate anti competition regulations.

Teams is not free. It's been bundled for free with certain enterprise contracts. Here's list pricing for Teams:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/compare-micr...

Remember Internet Explorer? Also a 'free' product whose bundeling ran afoul of anti competition regulation.

Zoom and Slack shall die. Good riddance to both of them.

I switched companies and I had to use teams. From my experience coming Slack, teams feels heavy app. The bootup is slow and overall it felt like its bloated app. I'm using M1Pro Mac.

What I don't like the most of the teams app is, the freaking code editor. If I paste code in teams, it feels hard to read, in Slack it looks much better. Also, I hate it when on teams having some serious chat about prod issue and some in the group post a random message and whole thing just goes side ways. Lack of threads is bad experience for me. I can go on..

Nevermind bloated, the entire chat workflow experiance is awful.

For those who don’t know, you can use Teams entirely in a browser. I use Teams all day at work and have never installed the client application. I just load up teams.microsoft.com in Chrome. Works great.

I'd stop short of claiming it works "great," but it is indeed usable and I'd second this recommendation if you're forced to use Teams. The "app" is just electron anyway.

Look its not hard to disable the autostart you just got to interrupt on boot and get into the bios settings, from their boot a minimum os of your preference and mount onto the windows partition. Find the registry and kick up the 4d3d3d3.

No, you would go into task manager and disable automatic startup, as you do with other applications.

> I had to install it on my personal laptop for a job interview.

I could use the browser version for that.

Teams is buggy and the native client is less buggy than the browser version.

Also, the browser version doesn’t have all the features of the native.

So if I’m in an interview, I want to make sure that as much as possible works. If I was just joining a conference call or something I would use the browser.

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