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unethical_ban

Companies that don't use Outlook? All five of them?

I've seen companies with varying levels of MS product integration but Outlook is pretty foundational.

Now, if a company says they use SharePoint or Teams to store their documentation, run to the hills. Wikis or bust.

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God, Teams is absolutely miserable. Video calling on Teams makes you appreciate just how well Zoom works.

Teams macOS client? Crashes on startup, even after clearing all of my user data.

Teams iOS client? You can join a call by a link, but you can't see the call UI because it's behind the login window.

Teams on Firefox? No video support for years, and most recently just glitches out and shows an empty page when trying to join.

Teams on Chrome? Tried joining a meeting, and was told by the organizers that they couldn't admit me because the button wasn't doing anything.

I've had all four of these things happen within the last month, and it's made me want to tear my hair out. I get that none of these are "Microsoft Edge/native Windows client", but they could at least pretend to care about other platforms...

Over the years I have used teams on Windows, Mac, iOS, Android and various Linux distros (where I was limited to Chrome and Firefox due to lack of an official client). While it is certainly not the greatest tool in the world, I have never encountered issues like these.

The Teams mac client is so awful I completely gave up on it

You’re probably doing something cute with your network filtering or EDR.

This varies widely by niche. My experience is that a solid majority of West Coast tech companies / startups use Gmail or other non-MS hosted solutions. Outlook or MS365 are a good indicator that the codebase may be older than some of the people writing it.

Silicon Valley in particular uses Google Workspace at a much higher rate than the rest of the world. If you count every one- or two-person startup as a company, Google probably does have a solid majority. If you count mailboxes, Microsoft still easily wins.

Note that MX records are misleading here. They have no false positives, but are full of false negatives --- daisy-chaining MTAs is common, and since Microsoft owns the mailbox, it's invariably last in the chain. So the MX record will show something like Proofpoint (pphosted) or Mimecast or an internal company host, when really it's Microsoft in the end.

Wild to see the different experiences here. I haven't worked for a company that uses Outlook in 20+ years.

Recently it's all been gmail/google workspaces.

Similar experience; I haven’t had to use Outlook since the late 90s, and even then only for about a year.

Every company I worked for before or since just used IMAP.

What did you have as the IMAP client?

In the 90s, mutt. After that, Apple Mail.

Thunderbird

> Now, if a company says they use SharePoint or Teams to store their documentation, run to the hills. Wikis or bust.

It's never just Teams or SharePoint or a wiki. It's almost always some abomination created by putting various bits of knowledge on all three. Also, corporate wikis suck because how your team classifies data is almost invariably different from how someone else wants to see it.

SharePoint, for all of its flaws, typically gets used by the major announcement-and-policy makers at a company, because they just want to use MS stuff (primarily out of ignorance of alternatives), so at least it's somewhat coherent for everyone in the company.

I've been at quite a few places that wouldn't touch the MS ecosystem with a twenty-foot pole, and history has proven that to be a wise decision on their part. It certainly has not cost them any business.

I’ve worked for six companies and only one of them uses Outlook. I think there is some availability bias by industry or job type. I know there are lots of companies that use Outlook, but you may be overestimating how many do, particularly among the companies more likely to be represented here (tech and/or startups).

I tend to work at banks, multinationals and power.

My direct employer uses GSuite (and Google docs as a source of record is as bad as a 2000s file share)

Large enterprises (1000+ employees): probably 70-80%+

Mid-sized businesses (100-1000 employees): around 60-70%

Small businesses: more variable, maybe 40-60%

this reply was written by “AI” :)

Worked for a company that used Lotus Notes 10+ years ago and switched to 365 and outlook, hard to believe that an email client could be worse than Lotus Notes. Only worked for Google workspace companies since then.

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