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Comment by MR4D | Hacker News Reader

I hope that case study is taught in business schools. That Microsoft did such a bad job is stunning to me.

And Teams is darn near unusable due to interface weirdness, but Windows 11 integration gives me hope that this problem can be fixed.

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It's unbelievable to me how Teams can be this bad on pretty much all platforms. I'm not surprised that it's bad on Linux, but it continuing to record your microphone after you leave a meeting until it's closed is downright acceptable (if you don't believe me, open pavucontrol after a meeting).

On Android, I've had it crash twice this week when trying to expand a message I sent.

Not to mention the terrible and inconsistent UI of course, but I think that's already what it's known for.

I wouldn't mind teams being bad if we could just pretend it doesn't exist. However Microsoft find creative ways to shove it down our metaphorical throats, even for us using Linux, because many companies downright require the use of teams for communication in the corporation because it was sold with a bundled license.

Praise Electron. I can't imagine the cross platform headaches Teams has induced on its developers. Sometimes you have to wonder whether Win11's new hardware requirements and Electron/Teams' crappy performance are related.

Judging by how cross-platform was done before Electron, the macOS app would probably lag way behind and Linux users would get nothing at all.

Considering Slack and Discord also use Electron, and not only have much more functionality but also do it pretty much flawlessly (to reasonable extents), I don't buy this argument.

Yeah it's fine to call Electron a little memory piggy, but there's no reason stable apps can't be built on it. A company like MS should be embarrassed that their app sucks so badly.

Electron works wonderfully and is quite fun to develop with. It's a shame that the performance is.. questionable.. but it's not hard to make stable apps with it. Seems to be a Microsoft issue at this point lol

We can't pretend Microsoft doesn't have the resources to do something like this right. They just don't focus on user experience.

This is not limited to teams. Azure Active Directory, Windows Servers, Sharepoint, OneDrive... they all have terrible UX.

It doesn't just record for too long, it also seems to record on multiple microphones. I have an Elgato Wave 3 microphone that has its own mute mechanism, but even when it's muted in hardware, Teams is somehow able to tell when I'm speaking and alerts me if I'm muted within Teams. It's pretty creepy – the Wave 3 seems to mute itself just fine, I've tested it again and again and it always works flawlessly, yet Teams always shows the alert. My best guess is that Teams probably records other microphones as well (my webcam has one, too). No idea how to verify that on macOS, though.

Every time I'm done with a Teams meeting, I `killall -9 teams` because I can't trust it to behave if I leave it in the background.

Heh, if I don't trust the app then don't install it. Maybe offline VM/docker/etc as option.

> That Microsoft did such a bad job is stunning to me

Google also managed to do a similarly bad job. Google Talk was quite popular.

This, 100 times this. I don't think I'll ever understand how Google so horribly lost the "Chat Race". They were in early, had a product, let it flounder, then launched multiple other chat services that all were bad in their own way.

Teams is the worst UI I’ve ever used in an application.

Seconded, yet my university chose it as the collaboration app for all employees.

For the same reason as most others: "its included for free in our existing subscription. Is your other tool free?"

Aren't there tons of free or even open-source tools?

Yes, but someone would have to be responsible for making the entirely reasonable choice to use them. No one gets blamed for buying into the status quo and following "best practices" (by popularity), even when they're bad practices.

Not that include hosting (with a SLA), SSO support, and integration with all of the other apps you already use (well, at least Office). And if you pay for a Microsoft license that includes compliance stuff, it automatically does Teams too.

Teams is not free, it's a free addition to the subscriptions that almost every IT department buys already. So you can think of it as a subsidized moat, or a loss-leader for new clients. Any competitor needs to figure out how to cover the not insignificant costs of running this service, plus to give them their due, Microsoft support is better than almost everyone else in the enterprise setting.

It's not even free in that it mostly just replaces the Lync/SharePoint interfaces. It's a feature people were sold that was rewritten and replaced, and the old feature removed.

The UI is bad, but I will take Teams over using WebEx for meetings.

There must be something they're doing right as there are so many people talking about how bad it is. (They all have it installed)

Microsoft included Teams with their offerings that most businesses already subscribe to. So, it's essentially "free." It makes it really had to pick other options. Especially because it has Active Directory.

Nobody was ever fired for choosing Microsoft. Same goes for some of Azure usage I've seen.

obligatory reading about enterprise software (apologies for it being a twitter thread)

https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/1182635589604171776...

I feel like this could be said about paid APIs as well? The ones purchasing/signing the contract (business) and the ones using the API (developers) have completely different 'needs'.

The fact that "Click to expand" / auto-collapse is the default for almost all conversations and there is no way to toggle it off is inexplicable to me.

You've obiovusly never used Azure DevOps. Nothing will make you miss Jira like moving to DevOps.

With Microsoft's luck and finesse the Windows 11 integration will just kill Windows.

From 400B to > 2T market cap in the past 5 years. Not sure that's dumb luck.

Teams is terrible, Azure DevOps is painful, windows has a had a lot of misses; but .NET is awesome, Azure is my favourite all-round IaaS/Paas and lots of their new initiatives are pleasant surprises, so IMO Microsoft is at their best as any time in the past 10+ years or longer.

Hopefully, Salesforce doesn't repeat that with Slack

business school, is the wrong place to teach that. I can bet 90% that the acquisition was messed up by the suits. but anyways what can plebs like us do ? we didn't go to fancy mba school, but can bet we would've done a way better job.

This is a popular opinion that I tend to agree with on a personal preference level, but Microsoft's userbase across Teams and Skype is still much larger than Slack's... so they're certainly not doing a very bad job outside of the realm of HN opinion.

Salesforce is probably banking on a similar bundling tactic to 365, which makes the sale seem like a tactical move reflecting the reality that better doesn't always matter. Plus Microsoft is also working on a CRM to rival Salesforce.

I'd say the comparison to discord is the more relevant one

e: and zoom

Slack never went after schools during Covid - Microsoft did. My guess is that their markets are different and that's why the user count is so different.

Of course, Teams is free when you have Office365, so.... there's that.

I smell outsourcing, or trying to save money by hiring really green programmers and designers and putting them on something too big for their experience level.

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