I don't support Slack here but MS really forced Teams on us like it or not.

You then needed to sign in before it would give you the option not to start with windows or to only start in the background.

Obviously you could avoid this by uninstalling teams and ALSO it's auto installer. I'll add the caveat this may have only been the behaviour for those with skype for businesses installed or those in NZ(I've heard NZ is occasionally used as an early roll out/testing zone for some microsoft products) rather than more generally.

Anyway, at least you can self host Exchange. Slack is centralized.

No, we don't have to use Teams. But we were using Skype, so we were going to move to something. No one was already using Slack and paying for just chat wasn't going to be in the budget. We can certainly uninstall it. But you have to be sure to uninstall the machine-wide installer they stick on there or it comes back.

After covid, we hold most meetings in Teams now and its been fine. Wish I had more control at the beginning and it didn't just show up where we already had Skype.

I’m guessing that’s what they mean by it being forced upon their users.

Honestly, Teams is better than Skype. But it wasn't until covid forced everyone home that we really started using Teams, that first week was painful.

So our folks were comfortable once the MS EOL statement came out and the company started moving everyone over. Everyone else had quite a bit of a struggle for a week or so though.

On the plus side, I think there were very few complaints after a couple of weeks. Which probably had a lot more to do with how bad Skype for Business was (much worse than Lync) than how good Teams was (it was still fairly unpolished at the time...it's much better now...MS has been adding features and fixing issues rapidly).

Then one day in June 2019 Microsoft informed me that Skype for Business was going to be upgraded to Teams. I had the option to request a one month delay but I could not stop the roll out of Teams. At some point Click-To-Run (the installer for O365) put Teams on every computer that already had Office. In addition to the Teams app it installed the Teams-machine-wide-installer, which installs Teams to every profile that logs onto the computer, making it run at logon.

Its that part where I didn't get to choose because I already had Skype for Business that bothers me. The machine-wide installer is annoying too. Yes one can uninstall those things but that takes admin rights (some action by IT).

The following day, it came back. It turns out you have to remove both Microsoft Teams and something I think was called "Teams Machine-Wide Installer." Only then would it stay removed.

Isn't that because your org chose to deploy Teams, though?

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/msi-deployme....

Their products and licensing provide more value now than they have in a very long time. There's also G Suite which is pretty cool. Or you could use Libre Office.

Anyone complaining about monopolies today has no idea how bad things actually were in the late 90's to early 00,s. We have more high quality products from more vendors and better interoperability than probably any other time in the history of computing.

In what areas? I see an industry with more and more consolidation. There is no longer the serious competition there once was in the field of office suites or certain kinds of creative software, which is really sad.

I entered computing at a time when there was basically nothing else available. Mac was trash and way past its glory days. Linux was a toy that no one would use seriously. The hardware support was non-existent and if you wanted to get online you often had to go buy a new modem. The other players today didn't exist yet.

It's true there is consolidation, but there are also options which didn't exist at all not too long ago.

By definition, a monopoly is a majorly dominant market position, it says nothing about how it was achieved or the quality of the product.

>Anyone complaining about monopolies today has no idea how bad things actually were in the late 90's to early 00,s. We have more high quality products from more vendors and better interoperability than probably any other time in the history of computing.

Things being worse in the past is not a reason to not push for further improvement. By your argument we should stop all research and progress since things used to be worse so we should be happy enough with the status quo.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there are more google docs/sheets created on certain days of the year than there are Word/Excel documents.

While it may not be included in the OS, it is certainly promoted in Windows. I saw a full-size pop-up ad in Windows telling me to install Teams. I did not have Office installed.