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Comment by prometheus76 | Hacker News Reader

Here's another fun path I went down: I was wondering why contractions were always marked as misspellings. Wanted to edit the dictionary. Can't do that. Turns out, Microsoft Teams has an undocumented hard-coded link to the dictionary from Chromium builds and uses that for its dictionary. You can turn off spell check, but there's no custom dictionary, and there's no way to edit the dictionary.

I'm convinced that Micorosoft Teams was written by a bunch of interns in three months at the beginning of quarantine so that they could compete for all the work-from-home crowd.

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Except Teams existed before things got all COVIDy. Back then I even defended Teams when we had just moved off Slack. I mean, it wasn't great and the Mac client blows goats, but it gets the job done.

And then we all started working from home, and using Teams for more than just a glorified chat app. That's when it became evident to me that my defense of Teams was way unwarranted.

Our company uses teams more or less as a glorified chat app and it does a good job at it.

Teams is also the default way we call each other (phone number syncing is hot garbage and everyone has unlimited data on their work phones), and video conferencing via teams is acceptable. It helps that we have a No Camera culture, so we don’t often deal with buggy video processing problems.

Anything important is to be put in an email chain, and anything more permanent in the wiki system.

Seriously though, hearing the travails of Slack culture causing headaches and time wasting + degrading documentation standards, I think a glorified chat app is not so bad.

Have you professionally used anything other than microsoft products for internal communication?

To be honest, I have not. Every company I have worked for or had extensive relations with were an Outlook oriented company.

No judgement at all.

I often find the people that actually enjoy teams have never really used anything other than Microsoft messaging solutions professionally.

I usually speculate that it’s because people have never seen anything better than what Microsoft can put out, but there’s the possibility that the way you think about things when that’s your entire ecosystem is different than the way I do.

What I’m saying is: I’m not saying that you’re wrong for liking it, I’m saying that we can be different; and the bigger annoyance is that these closed platforms do not permit client choice. Maybe.

When you rip it open you'll find Skype for a heart.

Skype was pretty good before MS bought it.

Even MSN Messenger was pretty well-behaved in its earlier versions, and definitely far better with resource usage.

you're whitewashing Skype's history. It's always been hot garbage even pre-MS

Skype resembled malware back in those times. No idea where you got the "pretty good" stuff?

That heart has been transplanted so many times from the client formerly known as Skype for Business, formerly known as Lync, formerly known as Microsoft Office Communicator, formerly known as Live Communications Server, formerly known as Exchange Conferencing.

Except it's Skype for Business, which is actually not Skype at all.

And same lead architect, incredible that both system suck so bad while having so many users.

Teams was available before the pandemic.

I was saying it tongue in cheek, but you're right. It just got more attention because of the pandemic, and it's only gotten worse over time.

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