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Let's hope Teams is next in line

Everyone I know who uses Teams does not like it. Is that selection bias based on my personal network of technically savvy peers and professionals, or is it founded in a broader experience?

More importantly, does Microsoft really believe this is a winning product? Are they that out of touch with their customer base?

I’ve never met anyone who chose to use Teams. My organization forces me to use it. I don’t like it, but to its credit, it is better than “Skype for business.”

It’s strange to me how companies take these huge messaging brands and then just burn them down (Skype, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Google’s chatbominations, even AIM). As a user, they don’t fizzle out due to user disinterest, it’s always the owner just sort of doing away with it for something new.

Is there just not a financial model here? Cheap to run and lots of users but no money. Skype seemed to be profitable back when I would use it for international calling.

The issue is that they have working tools which work in one period, but fail to adapt to change.

AIM, Yahoo, MSN etc. were mostly plain text systems, built around presence and a single client. Then came mobile phones, with unreliable connections, with messengers which allowed integrating pictures etc. and easy sign up (iMessage by using apple ID, which every iPhone user has; Whatsapp by using phone number which directly linked the contacts), which worked without battery draining connection.

Skype originally worked by making random clients "super nodes" which coordinated the network, without needing a big data center managing it all. Making phones super nodes wasn't an option so they had to change their protocol in big ways.

So adapting was a cost and changed user experience, while newcomers grew.

In case of Google there was the addition of missing strategic leadership, where each team built their own new messenger, but nobody maintained any old one.

At any point of its existence and until its last hour, Skype was a better video call/chat product than Teams.

But that is not saying much. I wish the Teams goes the way of the dodo next.

Accidental Tech Podcast episode 581 [1] had a great conversation about the reason why Teams is winning: Microsoft was using their dominant position in office applications to win market share.

Specifically, they would offer Teams for free in a bundle with Office (which basically every company buys anyway). Every manager could strike Slack from their expenses, replace it with Teams and claim great success.

Microsoft has since been forced to change their tactics [2-3], but the damage is done.

[1] https://overcast.fm/+AAQ2lFdljEs/40:32 [2] https://www.ft.com/content/be838956-7038-4179-8a1c-851b83048... [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/25/business/european-union-m...

This was obvious, at least to me. MSFT has always offered Teams as a "free" add-on to O365 licenses. Google does the same with Meet and Workspace licenses.

It's a real shame, given that Zoom is leagues better than both solutions. But "free" is free :(

Zoom? Better? Maybe to have a videocall.. but add a couple hundred users to a call .. and you start hitting limits. Granted, those are not very common but I think the killer feature of slack and teams is discoverable channels. Dont get me wrong Teams UX and performance is terrible in MacOS the whole experience is like taking a school bus to a freeway.. but feature-wise is very complete IMHO and it can handle 500+ user video calls with no problem.

Teams as a Zoom competitor is fine. It works perfectly well as video calling / conferencing software.

Teams as a Slack competitor is abysmal. Absolutely unusable for anything other than the most basic communication needs.

I think this is exactly why it's getting all the hate. People being forced to migrate from Slack to Teams. Not only do they lose years of archives, but the UX and features are a huge downgrade for such an essential tool.

If it was zoom -> teams, i don't think anyone would care so much.

zoom actually has a chat service that might be worse than teams, too

Most basic communication needs, if your basic needs don't include messages being communicated reliably.

Some people use these products to go through the motions of appearing to do work, and don't seem to be aware how ineffective they're being.

Whether MS office suites slot right in because the org is already dysfunctional, or whether the org is dysfunctional because MS office suites have made them that way over the years, I don't know.

I haven't used Zoom extensively, so I cannot comment on its performance. I just had a meeting this morning on Teams using video, and my MBP battery went from 95% to 49% in about 25 minutes (it normally lasts for about 5-6 hours under normal workflow). That was after I had to restart Teams the first time I picked up the call, because it hung and didn't display the conference window.

I find Teams performance atrocious for modern standards. It's not great on W10, but on my Mac is horrible. The conversation buffer is abysmal, having to refresh a million times if you need to scroll up in the conversation history.

Most of my peers use windows, and have constant crashes, incorrectly identified input devices like mics and cameras, sluggish performance when sharing screens, etc...

Just a data point.

As of right now, search appears to be completely broken. I can see that the keyword I'm looking for is in the messages. But it won't show up via search (either from the top bar, or from the helpful "press ctrl-f to search within this channel" right-side-bar.)

The UI is aggressively debouncing, so it won't search again unless I change the query.

The UI message is "We couldn't find any results in this channel. Check for spelling, try another search keyword, or search in another channel."

Looking into the network response, I see some fun JSON:

  ...
  "error": {
        "code": "OK",
        "message": "The call failed, please try again.",
        "target": "",
        "details": [
            {
                "code": "OK",
                "message": "The call failed, please try again.",
                "target": "",
                "details": [
                    {
                        "code": "OK",
                        "message": "The call failed, please try again.",
                        "target": "",
                        "details": [
  ...

Teams is a winning product.

It is not the best, but it offers just enough and is good enough that you dont want to spend on a separate dedicated product.

Especially as teams comes as a part of a bundle and is integrated with it.

I hate skype's interface (the is just so bad, even sharing screen), I also hate the sharepoint integration, but reality is that if you look at costs you will use it

Different thing is that windows 11 taskbar now has space for 11 windows open.. wow this is bad for any officr work

> Are they that out of touch with their customer base?

When did they care? Their business model is based on having their software forced upon users by clueless management and/or hardware vendors.

I use teams, I don't get the hate but have also not use slack. Are there good videos about it?

My guess is that for the VCs and PMs at Teams, it is easier to play politics and ensure your product is tightly integrated and coupled with other MS products, than to build an actual quality product.

It speaks of the culture at MS really, but it's amazing how a revenue and cash rich company can keep a dogshit product going.

I despise teams, all my colleagues despise teams, all my friends despise teams. It's a product that all users hate with amazing uniformity. But MS bundles it with Office, which makes demure and uninspired IT departments use it because it's less work.

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