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Comment by Quinzel | Hacker News Reader

There are no words in the English language that exist that I can use to describe my disdain and hatred I have towards MS Teams. I hate it so much.

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According to “Spooky23’s universal law of chat”, the apogee of chat clients is circa 2002 AOL Instant Messenger, and chat clients can only get worse with time.

Teams is unique as a combination of chat, phone and SharePoint client. Thus it was born an abomination and the laws of nature dictate that it must only get worse.

Clearly the apogee was ICQ in the early 2000s

uh oh

https://youtu.be/RhGHerssyk4

ICQ was a magical program for sure.

>and chat clients can only get worse with time

Not just chat clients, but pretty much any stable piece of SW from a major corporation that reaches peak perfection, is forced to get worse and user hostile over time, because those VPs, execs and managers in charge of it want a promotion or need to justify their bonuses on a yearly basis, so they force needless changes to have something to present to the board every year till they jump ship or retire early with their masive stock piles.

And then the next people who take over, have something to tear down and rebuild, so they can be the ones making their careers on "fixing" that product and the cycle of shittiness repeats.

They are not products anymore that need to serve the best interest of the customers, but fiefdoms and vehicles designed to propel and fuel someone's ego and career advancements at all costs.

It's an effect of perverse incentives in corporate promotions. You'll never make a career at these companies by doing QA or saying "well, the product we have was perfect already, so I did absolutely nothing to it, added no new features, just fixed some bugs and kicked back".

Truth. That's definitely the Google effect.

Microsoft is a little different as they never really rebuild. Outlook is basically the same as it was in 1995, including non-functional search. :)

Well, when they tried to rebuild something, they ended up removing the start menu and a couple of other things that a third party started to provide for a fee and they had to backpedal many of these changes. I finally received the update on my corporate machine where they bring back the option to ungroup apps after a couple of years...

Every rocket has apogee

AIM would spawn a new window for each conversation. That hardly seems like the pinnacle. Pidgin, with interop with a ton of protocols was superior, and was also an amalgam integrating numerous chat networks.

Having been subjected to every Microsoft chat application since 2000, I can assure you that each one started worse than AIM and got progressively worse.

The only exception was driven by my employer, who opted to embed Cisco Call Manager crap into Microsoft OCS (the circa 2010 chat client). I would rather communicate via requisition notes in peoplesoft than use that shit. Whatever replaced it (iirc Lync for Enterprise Business Extreme Edition) was better.

I see your pidgin and raise you an "interoperability." Pidgin was a thing because the chat protocols/servers were open interfaces. Gone are those days. I miss being able to use different clients for chat.

No, most of the plugins for pidgin were reverse engineered.

It's ironic that VSCode (best performing Electron app) and Teams are made by the same MS. I know MS is gigantic and these being different orgs but expertise is still inside the company.

Do you think company knows or cares?

Teams was a rushed Slack clone MS pushed during the lockdowns. VSCode didn't have the same incentives.

I was working for a large company using Office 365 back then. Our teams were using either Slack or Skype. The company pushed everyone towards Teams because it was included in 365 only to eventually backpedal and move everyone to Slack because Teams was an unfinished software. What's surprising to me is that they have had a few years to improve Teams yet its UX is still far behind Slack.

Teams was included in M365 way before lockdowns.

I stand corrected. They actually started phasing out Skype for businesses in September 2019. The timing is more of a coincidence.

I do believe the lockdowns might have rushed the transition as the UX felt unfinished for years. I can't think of any other reason that might have pushed them into replacing Skype so quickly.

Unfortunately true we've been using it before covid but it was solidified in our day to day since

OMG, chat inside Vscode. (Crosses fingers)

That's how I feel about Microsoft generally

I actually don’t understand how Microsoft is still such a big player when its programs are so clunky and awful generally… And yet - my go to for writing anything is still Word -.-

by buying out the completion, e.g. skype. For the most part the triple "E" has not altered all that much with the time.

Alternative venues include the default installation of windows to (almost) every laptop in existence.

Do you have any recent examples? Skype acquisition was more than a decade ago ( during the Ballmar era).

video game industry - zenimax, activision blizzard

AI/speech recognition - nuance communications (the stuff behind apple's siri)

side note: does linkedIn count?

self reply since it's most relevant to "Teams", and I knew I had missed something. Microsoft did try to buy 'discord' but the price was not right.

Not an acquisition per se but: OpenAI

Because capitalism is a lie, political power decides which tech companies get big, not innovation.

you identified it - Windows & Office.

These two products dominate every non-technical industry. I think MSFT makes mediocre software. But as long as those two gravy trains exist, they'll never lose.

Maybe you should check if your employer offers therapist sessions if your work equipment causes that kind of reaction. Doesn't sound healthy, long term.

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