Hacker News Reader

Comment by bmy78 | Hacker News Reader

Teams is the result of Microsoft taking a look at Slack and saying, how can we make this feel more like Excel?

I wish I could believe that Microsoft appreciates Excel that much. Excel is one of the most empowering applications ever written and the single greatest thing Microsoft has ever been involved with.

Credit where due, spreadsheet applications were already established AND bundled into suites by the time Microsoft got around to leveraging their market position to make Office the de facto standard. But, yeah, I owe most of my career to making real web apps out of badly designed, hard to use, vile to share, yet somehow better than nothing Excel workbooks. Even with all the modern trappings, and besides specific applications like Photoshop or CATIA, you could probably still run a company on just email and Excel, because people will make Excel do whatever they need, no matter how lumbering the monster becomes.

That undersells the innovation of Excel, which started out as a Macintosh exclusive before being ported to Windows.

It was the first major spreadsheet to be GUI-based from the ground up. It didn’t need Office bundling (which came much later) to dominate, it was by far the superior spreadsheet in the Windows 3.0/3.1 era.

> by far the superior spreadsheet in the Windows 3.0/3.1 era

Quattro Pro is waiting outside the door. He says he'd like to have a word. ;-)

What most techies don't get about Excel is that people wouldn't build their businesses around it if it weren't a really powerful abstraction. Sure, a dev could set up a CRUD app, but then you need a dev, which is far outside the budget of most SMBs. Rather than Excel being the root of all evil, we should view it as the empowerment tool that it really is!

When SPJ of Haskell fame was working for Microsoft, he put together a fantastic presentation on this theme:

https://www.lambdadays.org/static/upload/media/1616736415929...

It's still a pretty awful tool, and anybody who wondered what the 109 means in `subtotal(109, A:A)` thinks the same.

Excel is so successful that competitors need to copy its bad parts.

> I wish I could believe that Microsoft appreciates Excel that much

Yeah, I don't think they really appreciate the Excel pro scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xubbVvKbUfY

Mmm, SQL Server and, to a lesser extent, C# would like to have a word.

I don't see where is that a problem? People who will be using Teams are people using Office 365 daily. Having a cohesive ecosystem makes complete sense. From a UX too.

The problem is that Teams is used by companies who have IT departments that do absolutely insane things like DELETE THE CHAT HISTORY AFTER 24 HOURS because of some sort of perverse, contrived "security" issue. These are the morons that Microsoft is selling to, and giving advice to as on how to configure it. So you wind up with a system that's almost worse than not having anything at all. Our Sharepoint installation was so bad, Microsoft was hired to come in and "relaunch" it. As far as I can tell, nothing has changed. Teams isn't necessarily evil, but it's a "code smell" about the corporate IT culture if that's what the company uses.

I'm old enough to remember when Skype was really neat, and it's just another in a long, long line of grievances I'll hold against Microsoft till I die.

Companies love Microsoft because of how many footguns they have available in settings and in group policy configuration. The defaults for so many of the applications are actually remarkably nice, and then it is amazing how many IT departments see the massive list of settings and group policy configurations as a buffet of "security options" rather than a terrifying hall of footguns, because who needs feet or nice things.

Well said.

> DELETE THE CHAT HISTORY AFTER 24 HOURS because of some sort of perverse, contrived "security" issue.

Seems much more likely to be due to legal reasons than for security. If the chats are not retained, they can't be found in discovery. (And given chat is even more informal than email, people probably say a lot of things they shouldn't in chat).

Look, I fully understand the reason given, and, like government programs, it all sounds nice and looks good on paper, but we are simply NOT in that litigious a business space. And, frankly, simply deleting everything as we go seems like something that public safety laws should PREVENT, but I digress.

Back to the "code smell" of the IT department... For instance, I opened a ticket for my new laptop for something that is not common, but it can be self-selected from the menu of requests to make, so it's not like it's a one-off. After THREE WEEKS of emails and chats and calls with NINE DIFFERENT PEOPLE, I found that we... STARTED COMPLETELY OVER. It would have been nice to be able to look back over the history to name and shame, and point people back to what had already been done, since, apparently whatever ticketing system they use is completely useless.

So when even simple things take a month to do in your company, having, say, 30 days of history is not unreasonable. In fact, it's almost necessary.

That seems like a more reasonable policy if you've ever had your email/chat logs subpoenaed. If that stuff's auto deleted, then it's easier to have open discussions there, but yeah, no history.

It does change one's usage model.

The problem is that its very top heavy and is not well done, has lots of UI bugs and really is a pain to work with

Totally agree. MS Teams is super agonizing to work with.

For meetings, calls, screensharing, and scheduling it's superior to Slack in every single way. Written experience is worse though. If only Slack spent a month writing a "Schedule a meeting with those people, and add the meeting with a link to everyone's calendar" feature, they would be on par.

One reason Slack maybe doens't, is nobody actually chooses Teams over Slack because of feature set. They choose Teams over Slack because it's "good enough" and included with Office360 which they already have. Meeting Teams feature set may not actually get Slack any more customers at all.

We do use Teams and Slack, Teams for scheduled meetings and Slack for everything else, just because Slack's scheduling is non-existent while something great comes out of the box from Teams (and yes, also because we get it "for free" through O365, and wouldn't be paying for Zoom). We wouldn't have to deal with Teams if Slack upped their game.

On par won't be enough for slack though if teams comes"for free" with your existing office subscription.

It's not a cohesive ecosystem. Office + Zoom + Slack* is way more cohesive than Office + Teams. There are specific complaints, but overall one part of it is just the "tool that does one thing well" vs Frankenstein that tries to do everything idea

*except I can't copy paste images from slack into office documents, this is a major hassle

People who use Teams are people who have had it forced upon them. Make of that what you will.

Internal code name was Slack360

Because when you saw it you walked 360 degrees away

360 is a full circle, e.g. you'd turn right back toward it.

Au contraire: https://i.imgur.com/PS1Vb6p.gif

Let me help you--that's the joke.

As a teenager circa 2007, I would troll in World of Warcraft's Trade chat with a variant of this joke.

360 degrees away? Why don't you try this and see how far you get. Look at something now turn a full circle (360 degrees) and start walking, become amazed that whatever you were looking at is now closer.

365? Also can’t tell if you’re serious or joking.

The joke is that MS brands its online services as "365", but they have enough outages for people to say things along the lines of "more like Microsoft 360, amiright?"

We use this joke at work all the time, any time a Microsoft service is down we call it “Microsoft 359”. It’s the work equivalent of a dad joke.

Huh, when I saw it first I read it more as: "360 is a full turn, so Slack360 just means same thing as Slack"

This is unintentionally funny

Lol Im meant to joke about the Microsoft product naming and got it wrong which somehow makes it more funny (read the other comments why)

Well, Excel does not come with a complete broken auth. MS posts stats of how horrible the Internet sec is and it is just that you mostly can't even use the service without going into auth hell.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com