Hacker News Reader

Comment by microtonal | Hacker News Reader

Oh wow, they unironically posted a video that a chat application takes 9 seconds to launch. What is wrong with computing?

View on HN

...and they're congratulating themselves on having reduced the memory overhead of a chat app from ~1GB to ~500MB.

I'm so glad we have modern computers with gigabytes of RAM so that we can do real-time chat. This app would have been impossible fifteen years ago when computers had only 1GB of RAM or less. Without modern hardware development we would still all be sending eachother long emails like it's 2006. /s

Where was the chat app of fifteen years ago which could open Microsoft Word documents inside it, such that multiple people could have them open and be shared-editing the same file at the same time? Where was the chat app which could record the video call, add automated transcriptions, and upload it to a SharePoint-alike document store with permissions for the people on the call to watch it? Where was the chat app of fifteen years ago which was cross platform Windows/macOS/iOS/Android/Web browser including video calling?

I would imagine that fifteen years ago, nobody needed a document editor embedded in a chat app. In fact, today we don't need a document editor embedded in a chat app. As far as "automated transcriptions", they weren't necessarily practical fifteen years ago. And cross platform? Hello? There have been IRC clients for every platform since forever. And Matrix clients. And many other clients.

In short: Teams is not all that revolutionary or even great.

> "And cross platform? Hello? There have been IRC clients for every platform since forever."

Where's the fifteen year old IRC client which does hardware accelerated video chat from a web browser?

> "In fact, today we don't need a document editor embedded in a chat app."

What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. Except we have evidence: given a choice of Teams or IRC, businesses choose Teams.

Businesses chose Teams not because of anything listed in this thread of comments. Businesses also didn't choose IE because it's fast and had a lot of features.

People chose Skype because it was fast and it just worked. It stopped being fast and people moved over.

You say all this like it's some technical marvel, but my family & friends do all of these things (chat, realtime docs, video, etc) with no problem on a wide variety of hardware with free google accounts.

Meanwhile, at work, I can't reliably see my teammates in video calls because MS Teams still hasn't figured out how WebRTC works.

For context running Slack with a medium sized company workspace:

* Slack takes 6.5s to load on my 2021 Macbook.

* Slack consumes 366MB of RAM - if I browse around that rises to 744MB of RAM.

For the longest time Slack would kill my machine if colleagues posted gifs in messages. I'm no fan of Teams but I think there's plenty of shame to go around living in a world of eight core CPUs running large Electron apps.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com