Hacker News Reader

Comment by jarym | Hacker News Reader

IT admins have only themselves to blame for choosing Teams in the first place.

Yes, it is included in O365 and it makes it a no-brainer as far as additional costs and things go. But then there's the risk that Microsoft leverage their captive and lazy market to foist other undesirable things on users... like this. And crappy news / adverts in Windows 11's 'start menu' replacement.

Ready to get voted down on this, but my view is pretty robust: no need to self-host EVERYTHING but avoiding vendor lock-in and maintaining independence is valuable. It is a lesson that corporate IT admins seem to forget time and time again.

View on HN

In my experience, in any company larger than 500 people at least, the IT admin has little say in the matter. These sorts of decisions are taken higher up, and the admin just has to live with it.

Hell, my company is just 35 people and I'm head of all things tech (CTO) and even I can't get Microsoft out of the company.

It works "good enough" and change is really hard for many people.

Same in a 7 person company. Got voted down in favor of Teams because the "learning curve" of anything else wasn't worth their time. This despite the confusing and ridiculous UX of Teams.

> because the "learning curve" of anything else wasn't worth their time

As someone on the other side of the divide who hates these products, this is accurate. A non-standard product is a non-starter in most fields unless it has a killer advantage.

Teams is a non-standard product to me who has used various chat programs over the years. It does some things okay, but I still want to go back to lync (skype for business). The features I use are worse than competition, and there are features I don't use that are annoying.

> features I use are worse than competition, and there are features I don't use that are annoying

I hate Teams. I hate Meet. But they work with basically zero training. You have to pick your battles, and successful businesses choose theirs in core competencies.

You lost me at 'they work'. They don't. To the point that I'm boycotting Teams, any customers that force us to use Team can take a hike, I'm not going to spend the first half hour (or more) of every meeting with a new set of people to get them all organized and solve a myriad of audio/video/networking issues. Teams is the biggest pile of junk MS ever released. And don't get me started on the linux client.

You're wrong, there are bigger piles of junk that Microsoft has released.

Possible, but none that I have been repeatedly exposed to. I axed Microsoft out of my life when they started their anti linux crusade and I haven't looked back but people keep pushing Teams on others.

The whole interop situation around video conferencing is ridiculous, there ought to be a common protocol and a variety of clients around this protocol, instead we have this utterly dysfunctional situation where there are five different walled gardens, each of which has their own set of problems and compatibility issues.

There are lots of other chat programs that work with zero training as well. All that is really needed is auto-start and auto-login when the user logs into the OS. If your chat program has those two: someone will figure out how to use it and everyone else will see the pop-up when a message is sent and start using it. Slowly everyone will learn features as they need them.

There are many options that have those two.

> But they work with basically zero training.

I must be a fucking idiot then, because no amount of engaging with it ever got me past "what the fuck, where did everything go, why is that there, how do I do X, why did it do Y when I did Z?" One of the most confusing programs I've ever used. Up there with some very-painful-learning-curve video games (think: Paradox games)

Free with your fucking enterprise windows license vs pay slack is pretty fucking convincing to the c-suite.

I have little sympathy for the IT folks, because not only did they make us switch from Slack to Teams because Teams was "free", but they actually drink the koolaid and think Microsoft products are better. They deserve to suffer for the pain they repeatedly cause the rest of us.

There's sadly a subset of IT folks, often in large corps or government, who tend to just drink the Microsoft "Customer Success Engineer" koolaid without thinking. When I worked briefly for a gov org, any time the IT staff came out of a meeting, we would always be worried about what "solution" they had been sold this time.

Better for them. They love turning all the management knobs to cripple it and reduce “risk”.

Most companies don’t have the resources and manpower to run their own chat and videocall service. A previous employer of mine did (using some open-source tools) and it was painful to use due to the tools’ wonky UX and networking glitches.

> captive and lazy

This is my experience 100%

Why go as far as self-hosting, they should be all open source and IT admins will be able to fix bugs themselves.

(Of course this is sarcasm, just the way you want it)

Worked at a company which used an internal IRC server for messaging, that was the best experience I've ever had.

I agree, this is the best. No one can flood the chat with stupid gifs to make it unnavigable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com