Hacker News Reader

Comment by polote | Hacker News Reader

> That feeling is no more.

Yep, and I'm building something to sit on top of google Drive, to manage files, and make it easier to collaborate as a team. That's not something new, similar, to what Confluence, Notion are offering, ...

The reality is that google sucks at B2B, everything they do don't work. There are a few exception like google Workspace because Gmail was number 1 in B2C and they were the first to get Words and Excel in the browser and Google Analytics.

The reality is that, innovation for a big company is hard, Microsoft was able to build Teams from scratch to compete with Slack and managed to it, and that's an amazing achievement, not something that we are used to seeing.

View on HN

> Microsoft was able to build Teams from scratch to compete with Slack and managed to it

Teams is complete shit though, they didn't compete on quality of their offering. They're competing because every org already pays Microsoft a lot of money and they may as well use Teams because it's "integrated"

I don't really understand where this notion comes from. I've used Slack; I've used Teams; I find Teams more than adequate for my organization's use-case. I'm sure that's not the case for everyone, but "Teams is complete shit" is such an odd over-generalization from my vantage point.

For me it is the slowness and bugs. I complained on occasion about Slack's responsiveness but Teams on my Mac is on another level of unresponsiveness. Also it doesn't seem to use the macOS APIs for notifications, Teams notifications show up even in Do Not Disturb mode. Tapping the notification is hit-or-miss as to whether or not it will actually load the relevant discussion.

Teams is also really bad at emoji support compared to Slack.

I've been using Teams for only a few months after having used Slack for years but in the time I've used it I've come to despise it.

Point of note, Teams wasn't built from scratch it was more like a remodel of skype which they already owned. If you start looking under the hood at various aspects of teams one will start to see Skype all over the place.

Must be one hell of a remodel then, considering Teams is an electron application.

I don't know if they updated this yet, but one location this was evident was on Linux. During a Teams call, if you looked at the applications using pulseaudio, Teams would show up as Skype.

It looks a lot more like a remodeled Lync (eventually rebranded Skype for Business) than a remodeled Skype, basically Lync but written in Sharepoint, hence the up to 1 hour account creation and license syncing delays.

> The reality is that, innovation for a big company is hard

Then why is Apple innovating more than anyone else?

Because it is hard it is not impossible.

That still doesn't make much sense if innovation is supposedly easier for small companies.

That statement is very hard to quantify even within the same industry.

Apple makes and will continue to make great products for a specific subset of uses because they are willing to make big investments and are very opinionated about optimal user experience. The end result of that is the often great experience of their ecosystem today.

They obviously also employ tactics to lock out competition too (see the purchase of AuthenTec, Dark Sky and a few other small purchases of best in class companies explicitly demanding that they don't work with anyone else).

Innovation in reality is "improving things" and many many companies suck at defining what an improvement is and who the improvement is for. Too many focus on improving revenue numbers and that's it instead of improving user experience, reliability, security, privacy, etc. All things Apple cares deeply about*

* Again, Apple's decisions are only an improvement to a subset of users but that's really all that matters to them. Happier users means more use of Apple products which is a win.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com