You start a chat and you can't add someone to the chat once it's started. So you create a new chat and add a member to it. Now you decide to hop on a call and you need to invite someone else, and that wasn't an option. But today, you can add another team member to the call. You figure out it's a vendor issue but you can't get your vendor on the call because they don't have a Slack account, and there isn't a link to share for just that one screenshare/conference.

So you are left with inviting your vendor into your Slack space which you don't want to do or move to another solution.

Yup. Those deficiencies are unforgivable.

I wonder what chat program the employees of Slack use.

If it doesn't work as expected, I will try the next. There is literally 0 loyalty involved in my company.

As an example, when switching to Teams to reply to a message why does it focus the search bar instead of the chat window? How often do users search (as their first focussed action) in comparison to using the chat window?

Teams seems to be full of these minor UX annoyances that all add up to make Teams a chore to use. Slack has done a much better job on UX (in my opinion).

Teams works for us. Chat works, charming or not. And say suddenly you need to share your desktop while chatting to show some issue, well no problem. Need to invite a couple of folks from support to get some of their input? No problem, just invite them. Poof you got an ad-hoc meeting going and you get an issue solved in 5-10 minutes and customer is happy.

It's not like I want to marry it, but for the most part it works quite well and doesn't get in my way. And so it's a decent enough tool.

Everything else comes along for the ride.

We spend probably 20 hours every month on the phone with them managing various issues. My CEO has asked if we could run our own email server and I have refused every single time for the simple reason that we would now spend 40 hours per month on the same email issues since both source and destination of the complaint would be company internal.

AND we would be fighting getting our email delivered because Google and Microsoft basically dump your email in the trash for not coming from Microsoft or Google.

No thanks. Pay Microsoft. They're the least bad in the space.

If you’re ok with the apps, then it provides a ton of value for a fraction of the price others do.

I mean, Slack itself is almost as expensive as O365 which offers Office (online and offline) and a ton of other apps and features in addition to Teams.