I've been using Teams for years, and though I had an issue on a call with one guy the other day, otherwise I'm in at least one meeting with ~5+ folk daily and it works consistently.
Teams still can't keep up with my 720p webcam without the preview dropping to 15fps and lagging so badly that I get distracted by the delay between my motions and the movement of my preview in the corner.
In 2020, six months into a pandemic where everyone is working from home and Microsoft's highest priority ought to be on their video conferencing collaboration tool -- but clearly isn't -- is fucking nuts.
Oh, and speaking of the audio, Teams really ought to get decent noise removal, echo cancellation, and/or automatic muting.
This covers any/all products and is black magic:
As for quality of meetings, just some counter anecdata...
We moved a many thousand person enterprise across dozens of offices into Teams. The business in question is a meetingful culture, all day every day, and for the most part do not experience the issues you describe.
The issues we do see tend to be (a) echo cancellation from participants who connect from a device and a telephone simultaneously and leave audio turned on on both, (b) consistently the same humans from the same locations, who have similar quality problems on Zoom or WebEx, suggesting what the common element may be.
They don't target users, they target the people making purchases. A feature goes in the marketing materials. Usability does not. "A full replacement for Slack!" works well because the guy making the decision doesn't use Slack or Teams and probably doesn't even know what they do.
Back when the world started falling apart, my university took a survey about remote education. As part of my feedback I told them they need to get better tools, because college students don't want to use clumsy enterprise software like Office 365. Obviously nothing came of it (and I didn't expect anything, but someone needed to tell them).
Still a bit confusing trying to find things but to be fair I have the same issue with most of these platforms.
I think this area will see an increasing amount of innovation and it's anybody's guess as to who will come out on top in the end.
My Linux and MacOS machines behave exactly as the parent suggests, it completely melts my laptops (and my laptops are not slouchy, i7-2020 MBP and a Precision 5520 with a Xeon E3-1505m).
In fact, it's often the case that after a meeting teams will continue using 100% of a CPU core until it's restarted.
Perhaps it's better in Windows?
Due to this, and as the notification system is designed by a sadist, I switched to using it in a browser, which unfortunately means you can only see one person at a time on calls for some reason.
It is now not uncommon for me to join calls twice at once from browser/app each, and juggle audio/speaker/camera settings for a bit to do demo's, then killing the native app.
I can at least get native notifications & not convert my PC to a space heater this way, but it's still pure bullshit.
I had a brief hope when I found some reference to native notifications in a config file, but that was a dead end.
Search far back into history and Teams will load all that past content, then not release it when you're done with the search. So it just bloats in memory. It is caching, but just not in a way that's useful at all.
Try this: say something in a channel, then click away to another channel. A few seconds later the first channel will go into a bold font indicating new activity there. Click back again and that new activity is... your own comment.
We are using it as remote platform for our online classes and it feels stable but the UI's workflow seems to be not the best.
Most people don’t. Or they pay very little compared to something like Slack. Microsoft provides lots of incentives for Enterprise EA customers.
Teams also works with enterprise PBX and hybrid environments, which is lucrative for enterprise customers.
I don’t like Teams personally but I understand why companies choose it. Better this than Skype for Business.
Another thing I love is having Teams, Skype, and Skype for Business being three entirely separate networks for calling, in spite of being owned by the same conglomerate.
What a time to be alive.
Strange how a company with the resources that MS have can't make a decent product, but I guess it is par for the course. I guess what is more fascinating is how people are willing to pay for the garbage that MS makes.
Our CIO doesn’t understand why we’d all rather use Slack, since he isn’t involved in the message/group hell that is teams.