Hacker News Reader

Comment by godelmachine | Hacker News Reader

I am going to seize this opportunity and rant out my angst against Microsoft’s worst product till date.

Has anyone even felt that Teams is a heavy app that consumes a lot of time to come alive?

Even during calls, the quality is horrible that I don’t even want to describe the pain I go through. There’s strong distortion and voices will never be heard clearly.

View on HN

I use Teams every day (mainly at my desktop, but sometimes via the Android app if I'm outside) because I work from home and I have found it to work perfectly fine. I text chat with teammates or others at the company and have regular meetings (voice/ screensharing) with no issues.

Whenever Teams comes up on HN, there are people complaining about how much infinitely better some cooler product is. I don't doubt that you see a huge difference, but I feel like I'm listening to a wine expert explain how some $1000 bottle of wine is better than a $20 bottle, when to me they taste the same.

No, you're not alone. I don't hold out a great deal of hope for the future, either, since the roadmap looks like it's being handled on UserVoice and the top-voted features are mostly "duplicate existing Office functionality instead of fixing basic features (like search) that are actually broken."

https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/

Worked for Microsoft for 4 years. It’s a classic big company problem. The execs and the chain downward want their fat bonuses. You get fat bonuses by shipping features.

There’s a famous saying “no one gets promoted for fixing bugs”. I imagine it’s why Google has 10 messaging products that are half assed too.

It’s really hard to say No and focus on making the best essentials. It’s something that even Apple is having trouble with.

I think this is where Startups sometimes shine and why Slack is here to stay if they don’t also fall in the same trap.

I find it so bad compared to Slack. We used Slack internally in all the IT for a couple of years years (the company was using Skype for Business and whatever it was called before). It was decided that we will go with Teams because it's cheaper/free (we're already on Office 365 and the Microsoft stack since the beginning) and we were told to kill Slack. We didn't and still use it for my team, and the difference is insane. On macOS our conference room equipment crashes Teams (Slack and others have no issues with it), notifications are not native and sometimes they show up, sometimes they don't. You unplug your headphones, Teams rings, but no one is calling. It crashes both on Windows and mac for no reason from time to time. Today we had a meeting and half the people could not join because of this issue.

It seems like it's a clone made just to get into this space and everything looks like a generic attempt to throw money into an app to take on Slack.

You are not alone but MS has market share and easy reach with 365. Slack (as an example) is a much better product but MS can afford to be lazy. Hopefully when Slack releases SIP support it will be forced to improve.

I dont find teams to be perfect, but I find slack to be overpriced at $15/user. Happy to use Teams as part of my $15/user license that comes with email, excel, PowerAutomate, etc etc

I thought Microsoft charged $5/ user for Office 365.

Office 365 means a lot of different things. $5 will get you a business mailbox but it won't get a copy of excel you can install and run offline.

If you're a decent sized organization, you can pay $12.50 per user per month to Slack for a messaging service, or you can pay $20 per user per month to Microsoft for Outlook, PowerPoint, Word, Excel, Access, Publisher, Exchange, Sharepoint, and a messaging service. If you just want messaging then you can pay $8 per user per month, and they'll throw in Exchange, Sharepoint, and a terabyte of cloud storage per user on top of it.

I don't think it's possible for Slack to be better enough to justify that kind of a price difference.

That's probably true for cheap labor, but ~50% of developers I know will try to switch into other teams when they are forced to use Teams because it's that annoying. When you pay somebody thousands of dollars each month, paying an extra 12.50 to make him not look for a different job isn't really something you should need to think about a lot.

On the other hand, a knowledge workers like a mid level software engineer can easily cost a business $100 an hour in salary and costs. If Slack can save employees 8 minutes a month then it's a net win.

People who don’t work with many people love it. For all of its faults, it’s not as awful as Skype for Business.

I interface with too many people, it has brought the dumpster fire of sharepoint to a chat client. I’m now enrolled in 96 teams, 94 of which have no activity.

I think there is a universal law of chat client entropy. All chat clients only get worse over time. The category hit peak UX in 1999 with AIM/Yahoo, and gets worse every day. Eventually, Teams will merge into exchange, and your chats will be specially formatted emails, stored in Sharepoint.

Calls work very well I think. The chat/group chat is a bit clunky but still miles better than the product it replaces for the majority of its users (Skype and Skype for business/lync).

My main worry was about voice and video quality as I’m full time remote, but it’s more or less perfect I think. Haven’t had a disconnect or poor audio/video.

The screen sharing does disconnect some times which is annoying to say the least.

Works great for me... It's also nice that virtually every external person I've worked with, has Teams somehow. Even ex colleagues moving on to other companies I reconnect with on Teams right away haha, because the new company is using it too.

I just don't like the fact I can't control my notifications and chat history well, probably because it's enterprise. There's also a creepy 'get notification when colleague is online' feature that I can't turn off in my privacy settings. Otherwise quite nice.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com