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Comment by UseStrict | Hacker News Reader

Teams is probably the worst communications app I've ever been forced to use. Extremely slow, random crashes, almost impossible to organize chats in a useful way, and outages as the cherry on top. I would have thought that Microsoft would put more TLC into a core part of their enterprise offering.

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Agreed. Teams on the web for my company continually has issues with random reloads. I traced it down thinking the problems has to do with an authentication server not sending CORS headers when requested, because each time the problem happened, there was a faulty request. I'd expect there is even some monitoring on it, but no, it continues to happen. The Windows application seems to get the most love anyway. I have to fumble around this, running for most stuff the Windows application in a Virtual desktop, but since the IT disallows sharing screens, have to switch to that terrible web version to share, hoping it will not crash in the middle of calls (which it would constantly do)

Also, the "new Teams" is missing functionality. It lost the auto-transcribe feature. Go figure.

Totally amateur hour work. I tried once to get my teammates to use Slack, but it's hard to adjust. Slack ain't perfect, but it just works in so many ways that Teams barely hangs on with.

I find it hard to believe CORS is the root cause. It’s more likely that the server returns an error response and _that_ response doesn’t include the CORS headers.

You are probably right. However, if I remember correctly (it's been awhile), it was one of them that didn't return a CORS header, but a 200 status, but that led to a number of requests that failed. But regardless, as an SPA, the Teams application is not resilient to it.

Are you really surprised lol. MS solutions have always been half baked at best and always sold as part of Windows licensing for most enterprises.

Oh? You have out Windows 11 Pro/Enterprise for 1000+ licenses. We will throw in O365 for a year to get the org fully hooked.

Oh, need windows Active Directory as well? We can add 200 licenses with your existing windows licenses for 1-2 years.

(2 years later) oh your org is downsizing the internal ad sys admins? Don’t worry we got you covered with Azure AD!! Just cough up $250K every quarter. That’s like 1 senior SDE!!1

Oh hey we also have Windows VDIs, Azure Cloud, and other shit. Get into our walled garden. Never leave.

Half baked at best describes almost all tech solutions out there if we are being honest. Some of the products Microsoft puts out are best in class. It's just what you get with an org that size. There's going to be a wide range of quality imho.

Teams does seem to be on a whole new level of terrible though.

> Teams is probably the worst communications app I've ever been forced to use.

Not to pile onto MS Teams, but it's by far the most amateur hour system I ever had the displeasure of being forced to use.

I feel they even managed to botch their transition from Teams Classic. Official docs were out of sync with the app's transition, whole features were missing, some features were suddenly only made available to pro users. What a mess.

Make no mistake: the problems with MS Teams are not technical. It's product design and management. It felt like a rush job where everyone involved failed to get their stuff out, product managers felt the mess was acceptable, and the senior manager still made the call to release anyway.

MS Teams is a mess for the ages.

I apologize for venting like this but I had multiple critical meetings being postponed and rescheduled because MS Teams failed to work in creative ways. This definitely did not happen with Zoom or Google Meet or Slack.

Teams truly is terrible. The example I always give:

There is absolutely 0 feedback to show a speaker when their mic is actively transmitting. When anyone else in a call speaks, a ring around their avatar lights up to show you who is speaking. When you speak? Nada. Technically, you can open the settings menu and there is a mic level bar there... but it's not in the standard view.

As far as I've seen, Teams is the only chat app that can't get this right. Not only does it increase the rate of people trying to talk while still on mute, it gives you no way of knowing if sounds in your environment are transmitting to the meeting and disrupting everyone else.

The weird part is that the video conferencing is excellent compared to the equivalents of zoom and Google.

My entire computer can be dying due to intensive cpu load and the teams call is fine. Zoom causes the cpu load. Google doesn't have basic controls.

I'm sure slack is fine but I've never seen anybody use it for external meetings.

It can be great, but I've noticed lag during screen sharing. Other colleagues have noticed it too.

Even so... it's better than slack for audio/video and my organization uses teams as primary for calls and slack for text communications(group chats, channels, dms)

I mean, they make the OS, they can force it to give teams top priority over all your other lagging shit lol.

Zoom does all sorts of audio processing on the client that does wonders for participants in noisy environments.

Teams only just recently got to that level (like, in the last half of last year)

I'm surprised that the general sentiment here is that Teams is terrible. I've been using it for a very long time and have had almost zero issue with it. I prefer it in most cases.

We are currently moving from Teams to Slack at my workplace and I miss the ability to view my full calendar, join meetings, schedule meetings, share common files, and call others all from one application.

Is there another application that does all that Teams does but better?

Typically, people who’ve had a good time with a product don’t write about it as much as people who’ve had a bad time. Anger motivates venting whereas being satisfied with the product doesn’t create emotions that compel people as strongly to share. For this reason, I believe samples of feedback such as this online forum are often poor indicators of the general experience, as is true with many forms of feedback. In fact, I have a generally positive impression of Teams, and I wasn’t planning to write anything until I saw your comment.

My understanding is that they bundled it in so conveniently that it’s somewhat of a default. They probably don’t have to care because the average company isn’t about to do an entire slack deployment and integration into their purely MS ecosystem

accurate, I work for a company that uses a bunch of Microsoft products. it’s apparently a good deal from a financial perspective and is popular in the public sector because of the easy integration for non-technical users. alas, you get what you pay for.

I really don’t grok all the random chats I get notified for. I was in a meeting two months ago, and there’s still a chat getting updates in my feed. So many random auto generated chat groups that linger that I have to prune and wonder “will I regret deleting this”.

I prefer the subscribed channel where I make an intentional choice, and everything else is ephemeral.

Off topic, but does anyone understand what's going on with the 'new' version which is entitled "Microsoft Teams (Work and School)", such that the app name on MacOS (in the menu bar!) is that?

I assume it's to disambiguate it from the 'classic' version, but seems like an odd name to use?

I'd +1 on how bad Teams is in general: a few weeks ago I got a popup in it saying "We've made teams even better!", and I thought "I bet you haven't".

Does anyone know if MS use it themselves?

I took that to be mobile app store spam tactics bleeding over into the desktop app stores (hardly the first, but certainly a prominent app from a major developer stooping to new lows - hmm, this is MS, maybe I should just say 'different lows').

> Does anyone know if MS use it themselves?

Yes, extensively.

MS's core product offering is the same as AWS being an already approved vendor to buy from, so no one has to go through approvals process for them again. Thus they are a defacto monopoly within large organizations. Who cares what the actual value add is it checks all the boxes required by law and they have a huge expense account to get the win.

My favorite (more minor) issue to harp on is the lack of rebindable keybinds. Paste without formatting is Ctrl+Shift+V, while make a phone call to the other person is Ctrl+Shift+C. After enough accidental calls (fortunately my teammate was very understanding) I had to just install Microsoft PowerToys to override the default keybind.

An app where you can be in a meeting, listening to audio, and watching a shared screen, and the app says you lost access to the chat...

A presentation app where you can't freeze the screen share, a feature requested by hundreds of users 6 or 7 years ago...

It's use should be a firing offense.

"No longer has access to chat" - https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msteams/forum/all/no-lon...

"Freeze screen sharing" - https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msteams/forum/all/freeze...

> I would have thought that Microsoft would put more TLC into a core part of their enterprise offering.

which of their other pieces of software are any better?

PowerPoint is incredible! It lays out my slides much better than I can, and finds good images too!

A lot of their enterprise offerings are still pretty good. SQL Server, AD, Intune.

But Teams is really terrible. And the move to "New Teams" was handled very poorly too. I had hoped it would improve things, but it is basically the same with slightly less RAM usage.

>SQL Server

If you mean the DB server itself, sure. But for actually managing it, they've effectively killed further development of SSMS in favor of Azure Data Studio. And while Azure Data Studio is relatively fast and snappy, it's missing a lot of SSMS functionality. Meanwhile they refuse to implement a dark mode in SSMS despite it being the most requested feature for several years running now.

Excel was and is still the gold standard for everything that "doesn't quite require a database" and can be made by a regular corporate user in 5 minutes or less.

It did crappify somewhat in recent years, but still eons and mountains ahead of anything the competition put out.

Teams is truly disgusting. It is the prime example of what happens to software if you just keep stuffing features into it instead of fixing at least some existing problems. I bet this codebase has tons of "legacy" code already.

I also wonder.. do they have a "UX" team? If so what are these people doing? The usability is abysmal.

We use Slack and Teams at my workplace and regarding chat Slack is lightyears ahead. Sadly the company wants to force more and more people off of Slack and into using Teams.

I've worked in the Teams org at Microsoft in a past life. The tl;dr is that Teams was actually not a core offering for Microsoft and barely anyone outside Microsoft even knew about it before COVID. It was just never designed for the sheer scale, reliability, and feature velocity requirements that were thrust upon it after COVID began.

That’s understandable, but why then they seem to operate under the same premises still?

We are in the post COVID years now and more and more organizations are using it today.

Is it accurate to say they have no incentive to improve, given their dominance in the enterprise space and the complicity of some finance/IT departments into forcing it on their employees given the cost savings and the convenience?

Microsoft does not compensate its employees well relative to its peers by a significant margin.

>Teams was actually not a core offering for Microsoft

Ummm .. Lync / SkypeForBusiness / Teams has been Microsoft's core communication product for long over a decade now.

It has always been part of their basic/essential packages because they know that everyone needs a communication platform.

How you managed to work at Microsoft on Teams and think that nobody knows about it, is a bit astounding.

Teams was a product for 3 years before Covid. A large amount of companies had been running it for 1-2 years at that point.

The idea that Microsoft built Teams as a Skype for Business replacement, but didn't design for scale or reliability is an absurd statement.

----

Either you are

(1) lying

or two

(2) worked on teams but had no understanding of the product or userbase.

... which kind of does sounds like how teams might have been built

It was evident from the complete disregard for scalability and amateurish dev and ops processes that Teams was not regarded as a serious project right until COVID began and the org pretty much spent all of 2020 fighting fires to keep up with the pressure. In the years that followed, the org likely quadrupled in size to keep up.

Teams was very much the sleepy rest-and-vest corner of the company that people transferred into to quiet-retire. Teams is not just a reskinning/re-clienting of SfB's backend. They are separate systems.

You are conflating two separate things.

We all know the code and development direction in teams is lacking. This is one problem.

Microsoft scrambling around COVID times with Teams had more to do with the load / demand / capturing market share, than anything else.

SfB stopped releasing in 2018, 2021 it was lights out no matter what .. everyone was already moving to Teams.

Trying to pretend that their main communication platform is not a "core offering" when it is the definition of one of their core offerings makes no sense.

And trying to say nobody knew about it, when everyone knew about it also makes no sense.

SfB was dead by the time covid started. Where do you think these people migrated to?

Many companies with O365 used other platforms for voice and chat. Otherwise products like Webex and Zoom would've had zero market share since virtually everybody who pays taxes has an O365 (thus, Teams) subscription.

Also consider, Teams for Education as a market segment basically didn't exist before COVID.

My point is, many organization had a Teams license but never really pay attention to it until COVID. Which was another problem for Microsoft because although op costs for Teams went up like a hockey stick, they weren't monetizing that growth until a bit later.

Atlassian's HipChat was pretty on par with Teams.

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