People hate Teams/Office because it's so low quality, effecting a large drag on communication. It's also incompatible with effective organizational culture (eg calendar has hardcoded top-down management assumptions, information is siloed to only meeting participants, cooperative doc editing corrupts and loses data, sharepoint is a psychological horror game etc). Its usage is a useful signal about an organisation though.
And of course it's a giant red target from security POV, as is obvious the headlines on the MS phishing epidemics and regular news on the gaping slapstick level security holes ([0] [1] [2] etc) in the load bearing part of company security (identity, and email password reset channel).
[0] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/new-critical-...
[1] https://www.hkcert.org/security-bulletin/microsoft-exchange-...
People hate Office? I don't think I've seen any significant hate for Microsoft Office (but I personally hate LibreOffice).
> calendar has hardcoded top-down management assumptions
What? Where? Is this about the list of other calendars defaulting to showing people under the same manager?
> information is siloed to only meeting participants
You can configure it to show meeting titles to everyone (the company I work for expects everyone to do so), and the new Outlook even showed me the meeting description and participants when peeking at someone else's calendar.
They absolutely do. Many people hate the office suite in its entirety, lots of people hate some program in particular (I particularly despise Word). Most people are indifferent and have accepted that $Program is what they are using in $Job
1.) Microsoft Office
2.) SAP
I know this is merely an anecdote, but it aligns with my personal experience + with the experiences of friends and family
The more sophisticated your documents get the more you hate Office.
As a slack competitor Teams is arguably worse, but for people who haven't used Slack the difference is hard to justify switching.
Slack is just shit, and being just shit makes it an order of magnitude better than the trainwreck that is teams.
Yes, hate is a soft word in this case. We despise it, we wish its creators burned in hell together with the management who chose it.
Teams is the opposite of engineering, is the bully boy around the corner.
To call Teams a shit, means giving it consistence, which it doesn't have.
IMHO, small independent providers should unite and develop something like File API, but for web (for a NAS with web interface).
Are we forgetting decades of office suite incompatibility? The main reason most european companies use Office365 over alternatives is:
1. Fear of retraining
2. Fear of untrodden path
but most crucially:
3. Fear of incompatibility with other businesses
That's the reason why malware has it easy because companies still send office documents that should be a PDF.
Most of Words featured aren't used anyway because most people don't know them.
The rest is some Excel tools somebody once created which heavily rely on VBA but nobody can support them because they guy who made them already has left the company.
Have seen that more than once.
PDF embedding attacks have been a thing for years.
Personally I think that the culture of sending everything as a Word or Excel attachment has a lot to do with the dominance of MS office but if you can't avoid Office-like applications the other options are even worse.
So for example you can use Excel online with Sharepoint/OneDrive (two different hosts btw) but you can also use many maany third party hosts.
Additionally third party tools can programmatically access the first party hosts (like sharepoint).
I don't like Microsoft-esque APIs and the company sure has issues here and there but I doubt you'd get the same level of data privacy with a startup (e.g. everything goes through privacy review, security review, devs can't access customer data, data is separated by region etc)
And MS tries to force you into the cloud.
And if you argue with Andres Freund and the XZ discovery recently, he is really a Citus guy. Yes, that is now part of Microsoft but I guess you get my point of him not being directly hired by Microsoft AFAIK.
Microsoft as an organization could and should really do a lot more for security and privacy than they do. But first the culture would need to be that there actually is a lot of low hanging fruit instead of searching for excuses. [3] For instance, Windows Updates could be more reliable, predictable in how long they run and much faster overall. Windows could detect and stop ransomware much better. Microsoft could make Windows Server Core cheaper and have a separate more expensive license for the "full fat" Windows Server with desktop services. That would put some pressure on organizations to do the right thing and reduce the attack surface area.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/04/micro... [1] https://www.wiz.io/blog/chaosdb-how-we-hacked-thousands-of-a... [2] https://msrc.microsoft.com/blog/2023/09/results-of-major-tec... [3] https://blog.royalsloth.eu/posts/it-takes-a-phd-to-develop-t...
Most companies have a solution for network storage or cloud storage and most software will function with it. For personal use most people use their local hard disk and others use a cloud provider as a network drive. Or whatever proprietary storage solution the software supports.
Example scenario:
As an office user Alice, I want to open documented XXX stored on NAS Foo at Foo.net in application Bar at bar.com.
To do that, in application Bar user clicks on "Open File" button, then in dialog she selects "NAS" tab, then selects Foo, then selects file XXX.
When the file is selected, NAS Foo forms a one-time URL for the file, like davs://foo.net/u/alice/d/xxx.docx?otp=1234567890abcdef. This URL is invisible to user, unless she explicitly asks for it.
Application Bar receives this URL from the user browser and tries to open it.
NAS Foo shows popup to user about "Application Bar at Bar.com [LOGO] tries to open document xxx.docx. Allow? [O]nce, [A]llways, [C]ancel".
When Alice presses Once, a temporary password is generated and securely shared between Foo.net and Bar.com for the next 12h.
Now, application Bar.com can read and write document xxx.docx freely. At each read, NAS stores a record in a log about access to the document. At each write, NAS creates a new revision of the document and backups it.
Application Bar.com has no access to other files except for those selected by Alice. NAS Foo automatically revokes access of Bar.com to all files after a period of inactivity (month?).
In this case, service Bar.com cannot force Alice to pay for service just because their app contains some important documents in storage. Bar.com cannot pass those document to third party actor, like government, police, etc.
These massive integrated bundles of fluffy convenience are cybersecurity death-traps that leak personal data like a rusty bucket. Firms are rightly getting very nervous about massive fines, and blaming MS is not a get-out. With Microsoft unable to reign-in the complexity of their own products they'll lose market share to smaller, more specialised but more secure systems.
Ironically the path to better security for Microsoft would be to partition/split their own products as the anti-monopolists would have them do.
(Or the US could scrap the "Patriot Act" along with shutting down NSA and other 3-letter agencies, but that's even less likely to happen.)
Once again, we can thank the EU for pressuring companies to use Microsoft products.
[0] https://www.edps.europa.eu/press-publications/press-news/pre... [1] https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/04/germanys_northernmost...
>Therefore state organizations sometimes do migrate to different offerings
And then come back to Mother Microsoft. See Munich.