Microsoft unbundles Office and Teams globally following years-long criticism | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft unbundles Office and Teams globally following years-long criticism

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66 pointscannibalXxx46 comments

The damage is already done, no european corporation is going to rip out Teams because they’re so used to the crap.

This should’ve been decoupled when everyone went looking for a chat platform, not in 2024.

I’ve worked in many places where no employee had ever opened Slack and they don’t get why Teams is shit.

As of this week the “new” version of Teams takes 14 seconds to open from click to usable on my M2 Ultra Mac Studio…

If I'd be Microsoft, I would have added a zero to this standalone price, people using team aren't using it for quality or price anyways but because of corporate compliance and will indeed continue to do so.

I can't even resize the window on New Teams and have the text reflow nicely on my Mac without massive lag.

I could resize web pages nicely 2 decades ago. What on earth is it doing that so special where it can't resize a window?

> What on earth is it doing that so special where it can't resize a window?

They’re probably truly Agile!

Perhaps the resize operation is sending the window size back as telemetry so they can optimize for the most common.

But it is broken and sends every pixel worth of change.

Telemetry shouldn’t be a blocking call on ui though.

You would assume that…

Just because something shouldn’t doesn’t mean it can’t. Or doesn’t.

I've also experienced this on windows. I don't understand how the new version of teams, which Microsoft was pushing so hard for people to move to from "classic" teams, could be so much less usable. The "classic" version was usable and I experienced few issues, never close to the extent of issues that teams was often maligned as having, but this new version is a clear step backward in functionality.

Who ever got promoted for improving a product, compared to a rewrite which is slightly worse?

Although I would say that Classic Teams has always been terrible. Pasting in text and the formatting usually ended up getting completed destroyed. I have heard this was due to someone in the Teams group pushing for RTF formatting, and most formatting that's pasted in wasn't RTF.

Thankfully at my current job, Teams is only allowed when it is requested by customers, and via the Web client, nothing else.

Our org used zoom heavily during covid, like everyone else

We've now got rid of zoom because teams is included for free.

Fortunately nobody is threatening to get rid of slack any time soon.

It's classic microsoft behaviour that they've been found guilty of for decades, alas governments take longer to move than microsoft do.

This is exactly the point.

You're entirely missing the point. You could easily say the damage is already done even if Apple eventually gets forced to stop making Google search their default search engine on iOS. The reality is that bundling software matters way more than you realize. Google has paid an estimated tens of billions a year to Apple to maintain the default search engine setting. That's despite their massive market share lead over competitors.

At minimum, this ruling will make future competitors believe it's more feasible to be successful in creating a competitor to Teams. There will be some similarities to the way Firefox and Chrome eventually competed after the Microsoft antitrust case regarding Internet Explorer in the early 2000s.

And finally, when current Microsoft licenses expire or MS sales teams get into talks with future, net new companies, they will not simply be able to say Teams comes for free as part of their other licenses.

I'm not saying it's bad, but as usual with legislation it's too little and too late.

At this point Teams is clearly junkware.

My calendar isn’t even capable of showing the right dates. So basically all my Monday events show up on Tuesday, Tuesday events on Wednesday, etc…

I’m struggling to understand how that bug’s even possible but that’s Teams for you. It finds new and unbelievable ways to be terrible.

Off by one errors are pretty common

I never had those calendar problems.

Teams got better. Is it as good as the other players who've been at this for longer? Probably not, but Teams works well enough for chat and I get why companies decide to get rid of other chat apps if it comes for free in Office 365. Shifty tactic for sure by MS.

What other things make Teams junkware?

I personally would choose an app that's based on the Matrix standard: https://element.io/matrix-benefits

It's also piss poor at handling dodgy internet connections in the chat. And calls lag a couple years behind discord in feature set. How is it possible that the only sharing option is a singular stream which you can't full screen and which runs at a frame per second in 2024.

I would take MSN Messenger 7.5 over teams.

I think most of the problems with it are related to it being pretty much a web app that runs on the desktop. If they had a nice native app that didn’t take 50% cpu to move from chats window to calendar and then made me wait for the calendar to refresh every time, the whole experience would be much nicer.

It tries to do too much and does them all half assed.

Channels and chats being separate when both have chats is just odd to me.

An option to display channel chats in the main chat window would be nice so I don’t have to manually go dig into every channel I’m a part of to see what is being said. I’m sure they have enough brains at MS to come up with a neat way of displaying that.

Good point about the channels and chat concepts. That's really poorly handled by Teams.

Nobody uses it in my team, even though we have set up some channels. It's too hidden and takes several clicks to get into.

But my comment was really from the perspective of the buyer. If you're responsible for IT for a fortune 500 company, going with Teams is an easy way to save money on paper, even if it does inconvenience some of your users who live and die by Slack.

EDIT: typos

Yeah, it’s there, it’s secureable, already installed, and connects to Sharepoint, which I also hate but people love to use.

> I think most of the problems with it are related to it being pretty much a web app that runs on the desktop.

Most people are praising Slack instead so this doesn't make sense as the root of most problems.

A couple of things are better, but Teams is still a straight up PoS that few would use if their employer didn't force them to.

I had the same issue. Switch the view from overall week to just work-week.

I wonder if this is a localization bug. Some part of the code is assuming that for full-week view Monday is the second day of the week. But another part of the code is respecting locale settings and starting the week on Monday.

It's spyware

Of course it is. It’s your it team spying on you.

At this point it's a "nobody got fired for buying IBM" scenario. So you better got a very heavy argument for not using teams

I no longer buy this argument these days. You don't need a "heavy" argument to avoid Teams, you need decision makers who can listen to teams other than the bean-counters.

Sure, it has integrations with the broader Microsoft suite and productivity ecosystems making it easier to approve if the org is a M/O365 org. However, this is not a universal state (Google Workspace, Zoho Workplace, etc), and if the decision maker actually cares about communication efficiency then Teams would never be part of the discussion. There's such a wide field for messaging and calling applications, just going with "easiest bundle that ticks boxes" is rather poor thinking (not that I'm expecting much from C-Suites these days).

I currently have to use Teams today across macOS, Linux, and Windows... personally, I would welcome switching to Google Chat (used at last gig) over this mess.

Google Chat is underrated. My team uses Google Workspace so we’re experimenting with using Chat instead of Slack. So far so good.

I have a preference for Slack over GChat, but I last used the latter in 2021. I had the opportunity to use it briefly during the latest major Teams outage so my team could keep communicating. Some things were definitely different than I remember, but I'm pretty sure in a good way. Didn't get enough time to do a full review, though.

MS offers a hosted-on-Telekom servers (T-Mobile parent company) option. This is a huge boon, because it saves the company from GDPR headache.

At least that's what I'm told...

Ah, allowed me to upgrade my office 365 subscription from business standard to the weirdly named "business standard EEA No TEAMS" that doesn't appear in their listing or comparison page but is available if you order straight from its product page.

2 euro per user per month is not that much, but when applied to every employee over years it still adds up quickly in retrospect

Thank you, Microsoft

Now if you could stop spying on my emails without telling me until it is too late.

? What do you think they're doing with teams? They are listening to your conversations, watching you when you aren't in a call, and the same applies to anyone who comes within close proximity.

I just started using teams at my new job, can someone tell me why it's so bad? It seems perfectly adequate to me.

It’s horrifyingly bloated but my main complaint is that you can’t put a normal-ass chat in a “Team”. Instead Teams themselves are stuck with this super-weird forum-in-a-chat-UI paradigm that makes them nearly useless except for announcement-type interactions, and not even very good for that. This pushes things into ad-hoc or meeting-connected chats, which encourages siloing. This makes it absolute poison for remote work.

I think the rest of it’s probably a lot worse if your org isn’t all-in on a ton of other Microsoft stuff, but mine is. Also I ignore lots of it (it’s easy to lose shit in it anyway so I don’t really trust it, but I find that’s true of lots of “productivity” programs—including most project management systems) so maybe all the parts I don’t use are terrible.

I hate everything about how chats are organized in teams. From the chat announcements from meetings I didn’t join. Meeting chats mixed with my individual chats. Channel chats where you’re often accidentally starting a new thread. Why meeting chat in chat window but not channel threads?

If you want one less annoyance in your list open the Teams settings -> Notifications and activity -> Meeting chat notifications and change it to "Mute until I join or send a message".

It’s because it integrates with the whole group policy management system and it always checks with those policies as you switch from one thing to another.

Chat experience could be a lot better. Performance used to be way worse before switching to webview2. Call functionality is good though.

I agree Teams is fully adequate, there is much more crap software I'd rather not use before I'd be worrying about Teams not being good enough. That said it's a bit embarrassing how "adequate" it is considering how long it has been around. Why are team channels so limited to one jank form? Why can't meeting content be separated into a separate section? Why can't I convert a group chat into a Team without starting from scratch? Why is search so hard to use?

Give it a few weeks.

- crashes weekly, often down multiple times

- randomly slow to load, frustrating when trying to quickly respond (the point of chat)

- Video quality/stability is poor compared to Zoom

But maybe you’ll get lucky.

I hate Teams. Zoom just works, regardless of environment or browser. Teams keeps wanting me to download something, install something, and just causes delays in getting to the meeting.

As for the rest of Microsoft...the gross attempts to ruin the product (Windows and Outlook) in the name of forcing us into the Microsoft ecosystem, had done more damage to the brand than anything. I will not upgrade. I will not update. When Office and Outlook stop functioning I will find something else, until then I am hanging on desperately to a once solid product until Micro$oft forces me out.

Edge is dog crap. Full stop.

>I hate Teams. Zoom just works, regardless of environment or browser. Teams keeps wanting me to download something, install something, and just causes delays in getting to the meeting.

What? this is bullshit

>Zoom's dark pattern is to obscure that every online meeting can be joined from the browser. They really hide this in order to install software on the client machine, which has been susceptible to bugs in the past.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22664751

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