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Comment by thiagoperes | Hacker News Reader

We’ve been using Microsoft Teams as well as the entire office suite, and we’ve been positively surprised. There is an occasional clunky UI you come across, but the feature set is far superior to Slack or Zoom, and the ecosystem integration is nice.

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Being logged out on a daily basis and having to login twice (once for the main client, once for calendar specifically) is beyond annoying. Hey maybe you would like to try copilot that we are shoving down your throat at every opportunity even through you disabled it as much as possible at the account level. Oh you thought you would get notifications reliably? Thats cute. We will only deliver them randomly. But yeah, sure, teams is better than slack or mattermost. We use mattermost internally. Has the good parts of slack without the lock in.

They also ignore the default browser by default for some reason to force-feed Edge to users. There's an option to change that but why is it ignoring user choices by default?

Funny the last two months Teams has been the most buggy software I use. Nearly every day it drops a call, loses microphone connection, simply refuses to load, and chats disappear. It's nearly unusable. My teammate had it drop him out of a call roughly every ten minutes the entire day last week.

Slack's user experience for chat is leagues better than Teams, they're honestly not even close. I say this as someone who worked at a company that was heavily invested in Slack, and was then acquired and forced into the Teams ecosystem. It was a huge step down.

Teams chat better than slack? Are we using the same Teams? Because it doesn't come close in my opinion, and the opinion of basically everyone I work with.

Chat? No. But the strength of Teams is that it lets you do everything else you want in an integrated communications app - voice, video calls, calendars, viewing (and editing) documents, etc. At a reasonable price that Microsoft isn't going to crank to the moon.

So instead of doing one thing well, it does a bunch of things poorly?

I had the same reaction. I believe that it's the first time that I see someone that prefers Teams. There's no comparison for me. I've been using Slack for the last year after using Teams for years and the difference is staggering knowing how big Microsoft is. Using Teams was a daily battle.

What are your experienced differences?

Frankly most of these tools have been at feature parity since before Covid.

I used Teams just before Covid (last job I had used it). For one messages didn't arrive in the same order for everyone, so chat histories often didn't make sense, with replies appearing above the messages they were replying to. The other thing I recall was slow loading time. Slack is _snappy_, moving from channel to channel is very fast, as if nothing ever needs to load (it does, it just cleverly preloads everything except images it seems like). The interface was just far less intuitive as well.

At the end of the day, just about every team that I worked with had a WhatsApp group that they actually used to chat in. Having a bad product as your internal chat is how you get shadow IT like WhatsApp where people are discussing your proprietary information on a third party service.

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