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Comment by GuB-42 | Hacker News Reader

From a UI perspective, Teams is terrible, but there is one thing it does well and that's large meeting calls. Microsoft knows their customers: large companies.

The boss doesn't see that you can't properly paste a piece of code in the chat, but he wants to make sure that everyone hears him at the annual talk. He wants it to connect to the company directory, make analytics, reflect the corporate hierarchy, make announcements, etc... He sees it as a one way, top down communication tool more than peer-to-peer, and for the former, Teams delivers. Developers hate it, but developers are not the ones who have the money and make these decisions.

Still, that's a thing I miss about Bill Gates's Microsoft. It was certainly evil (Embrace Extend Extinguish, the fight against free software, etc...), but at least, they actually cared about usability and developers, not just pleasing big company bosses.

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Completely agreed. I sit in dismay, remembering the Microsoft I frowned upon back in the days as a Linux/FreeBSD user. But at least their software was accessible via keyboard and their translations were really good.

Fast forward to now, after being a dev on Windows for years and loving it, and now their UX is a joke. For example, to jump back and forth between chats, neither the back/forth mouse buttons nor any other key combo works on macOS. You have to click the navigation buttons in the symbol bar instead. Translations are AI-powered, and that shows. Also, Teams is dog slow, which I also count as a UX issue.

I remember working at MS a decade ago and how good out translation pipeline was. Tons of attention paid to cultural nuances even between different English dialects. We'd have separate translations for UK, US, AUS, and international English. We'd change not just words but the overall tone of messages based on the culture in different countries.

So much care, and the expertise and professionalism of the people doing the worn was amazing.

It’s sad to see the decline in the quality of desktop computing. I blame this on the rise of mobile apps and Web apps in the 2010s. It’s not that mobile apps and Web apps are inherently bad; that’s not the problem. The problems is that we have an entire generation of engineers who never learned desktop UI/UX conventions and principles.

To make matters worse, in an attempt to save on development costs, mobile and Web applications have been deployed on the desktop, with the justification that it’s better to have an app, even a shoddy one, than to not have one at all. What’s appropriate on a smartphone or a tablet may not be appropriate on a desktop, and vice versa. The Web never had a mechanism for enforcing UI/UX guidelines, similar to the MS-DOS and Apple II days of computing.

The sad thing is Microsoft and even Apple now have shoddy desktop apps, despite the fact they have the resources to make well-designed desktop apps, and that at one point they set standards for excellent desktop apps and conformed to them.

We had a sweet spot in the 2000s with Windows 2000/XP/7 and Mac OS X and their ecosystems of desktop applications. It’s been downhill since.

That's also my opinion but I am ready to give them some excuse, because they have it harder than when it was just desktop computing.

Now we expect a desktop and a mobile app, also native and browser based. They all have different requirements. Even in the same category, such as iOS vs Android, some conventions are different. Having to write the app differently for each platform to make the best of it is not only expensive, but it may also be confusing to users who switch from one to another.

For example let's say you have a button on your desktop app that sees little use, but it is a nice feature for the few times it is needed. Because it is a desktop and you have lots of space and a precise pointing device, it stays. But for your mobile version, there is simply no room for it, so you remove it and tweak the workflow a bit so that it isn't needed anymore. Taken individually, they are both good decisions, but I can guarantee that the desktop user will complain that it is missing on the mobile app, and he would be right. It means you have to make a compromise you didn't have to make before.

Even Microsoft MacOS apps are second-class citizens next to the ones found on Windows. I personally feel this is $WORKING_AS_INTENDED because honestly why would Microsoft empower people to exit the platform? It would be like creating an open source version of Active Directory and giving it away.

> The boss doesn't see that you can't properly paste a piece of code in the chat

Of all my many gripes with Teams, it usually handles code surprisingly well. Single `inline` and triple backtick blocks usually render as you'd expect.

OneNote on the other hand doesn't support a code-block at all, and is worse (if you can believe it) than storing cli commands in Word docs.

When I paste code into the native MacOS Teams chat, my peers using Window Teams see a literal black box. I wish it worked! I really do. Or we all had MacBooks or Linux desktops.

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