I think I have to agree with OP here. To me, Teams is more of a failure of product management/design and corporate culture. It was more of a move to add value and subscribers to the Office365 platform than an attempt to build a world beating chat/conferencing platform. So many of its users simply use it because it's included in their Office365 subscription, whereas with Slack, Zoom, etc they'd be paying $8+ a month per user.

While the development effort, skill, and time, that goes into building something like Discord is certainly significant, I feel it's certainly something Microsoft could have built given their resources and technical aptitude. What you can't buy is the inspiration, ideas, and culture that make something like Discord happen.

If it follows the inspiration and ethos of tools like Github and VSCode, I'll be really happy. Given Microsoft's shift in attitude over the past few years, I really hope that's the case.

My biggest fear is to get all those office365 integrations teams runs slow and is quite the memory hog whereas discord has a nice a svelte memory and cpu footprint. If they were to buy it and give it the traditional microsoft features bloat then that would not encourage many gamers to stay on the platform

I think, at least for corporations, the selling point is security compliance: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/security-com...

This always come first over user's convenience. But the user experience of this tech is abhorrent, so I could see that Microsoft would like to fortify Discord with security features and sell it as Teams 2.0. This actually could work if done right...

Teams have integrations with other MS products (Outlook, Sharepoint). They are clunky and look like they were bolted on, but they're there which is better than not having them at all.

> they're there which is better than not having them at all

I disagree fervently. At my current job the department has strong pushes to use these features amongst the teams and if they weren't there we could explore real solutions.

As it stands we're doing things like task tracking and taking meeting notes in teams and it's a terrible experience. I can't help but wonder what happens to that corporate data when teams eventually gets the axe

As far as I understand, the Teams meetings notes are stored in a Sharepoint, not in Teams server itself.

The Slack integrations for SP and Outlook are arguably better than what MS did in Teams.

You’re spot on there. It’s all the little things that Slack and Discord get right but Teams gets wrong. For example, searching for messages, navigating between channels, showing which channels have unread messages. Also, Teams frequently has issues on Mac in a way that Slack and Discord don’t.

Well it's also the big things like chat and video to be fair.

The only saving grace Teams has is it so reliably overheats my MacBook Air that no meeting can be over an hour long

Slack's search is terrible....

But is it better than Teams'?

Much better. It's not perfect, but without mind-reading, I'm not sure what you would do to improve Slack's search. Teams, on the other hand... messages just seem to disappear entirely.

Having cancer is better than Teams.

Is Discord better than Teams? I can't tell, I'm still waiting for it to finish swapping and processing my input. Okay, this might be a (slight) exaggeration, but I just don't think a chat app should run much slower than any IDE. What is that thing doing all the time?

Please elaborate. Teams is the Microsoft product I hate the least. UI glitches and Electron problems aside, I find that at least some UX work has gone into it, there are relatively few things preventing me from working - the calls are pretty reliable too in my experience.

In no particular order (top of my head and mostly considering the desktop Windows one)

  - The history (scroll up) takes a lot to load (this is on 300mbit up/down and fast processor)
  - html content in the chat totally hogs the processor
  - Attachments takes forever to open internally. Not so large files like 4-5MB of log pretty much wreck it
  - upload is hilariously slow (again 300mbit up/down)
  - loading in browser requires an explicit login to microsoft account to open, instead of a generated link that actually works (to add some salt, my company requires 2FA for the MS login)
  - audio quality issues, 'intelligent' (echo blocking algorithm kicks in wherever it wants), call drops. Esp. bad in group calls
  - 'teams' chat gotta be a joke with each post forming its own thread, and you'd need to click to answer the proper one. Close to unusable feature that bears the name of the product
  - Video sharing has a massive lag on screen sharing both on visual and startup time
  - Blurred background algorithm is a massive flicker and it really resents people with green (t-)shirts
  - Calling the phone, instead the desktop while working on the desktop. (Half of my team uses phone version as it's less buggy)
  - One more: if you don't login the phone app, it will remind you to login every 3hours - until it gets uninstalled....

I can rant for at least 45minutes about it... and it's the 'default' chat application the company uses for years (along with Lync/Skype for business before) and I use it as my 'main' chat application.

Some points to add:

  - As soon as I start a Videocall, the rest of the Application is almost completely unusable
  - The Application uses 500MB of RAM after it has been idling with one message received in the last hour

I have 32GB of RAM and a dedicated video card, so it's passable. But yeah, resource wise - calling it 'inefficient' is putting mildly.

> 'teams' chat gotta be a joke

I've never understood this either. What is the purpose of the Teams tab? Why doesn't it show up where all the other conversations happen? It doesn't make any sense to me.

> The history (scroll up) takes a lot to load (this is on 300mbit up/down and fast processor)

that's not my experience, especially with a much worse connection. Maybe I live closer to the server?

> 'teams' chat gotta be a joke with each post forming its own thread, and you'd need to click to answer the proper one. Close to unusable feature that bears the name of the product

Interestingly, I like this feature: it's different from a group chat where all discussion are mixed together, each subject has its own thread, so it's easier to follow. And each thread can be ignored

On a lower-end "business" laptop, every interaction is painfully slow. For example, it takes 2 seconds just to switch to a different chat, you can see the redraw happening in real-time...

What about Teams running against a Lync server where you can only establish chats with internal users, and chat with external users is available only through a fake meeting set up in outlook? And where the 1to1 video calls start in skype 4 business instead of teams.

Plus when running multiple instances the call goes to the first instance

What about hiding previous communiques? I have a long list of psuedo-named meeting chats (5 months worth) that are just aggregating on the left hand side. Hide doesn't work. Thanks teams.

- No choice of download directory in their app

I attempt to use the Linu client on Fedora about once a month. Either the video doesn’t work or the sound has a problem, or both.

Meanwhile, Zoom works daily without issue.

MS succeeded in that they're selling Lync and Teams to businesses. They can make money that way even with every single user hates them.

Discord would be a completely different territory of getting the users to join rather than their bosses.

Yes, but that doesn't change the point. The fact that MSFT has been able to build a product as good as slack is an anomaly. (and they apparently didnt succeed on the video/audio part as you said). Usually big corp like MSFT are not able to build an equivalent technology to someone else. Look at Google who tried in so many fields and never succeed, except mayble Hangout compared to zoom. So I agree with you on that.

Nevertheless we know that the product is not that important. If all slack/zoom customers are migrated to Teams over night. The Teams product will keep most of its new users and will have a value for an acquisition, not because of its product, but because of its users.

So even though I disagree that MSFT could build the chat application itself, I agree with OP that what is bought is not linked to the actual product

Keep in mind that before Microsoft bought it, Skype could make direct P2P connections with outstanding fidelity. If they buy Discord, I wouldn't expect it to stay great.

>Skype could make direct P2P connections with outstanding fidelity

I used to be absolutely in awe of the technology Skype had... got bought for $8+B back then and Microsoft managed to ruin the p2p part and stability/latency of the calls

Teams is a B2B product sold to corporate clients as a part of their O365 subscription & Azure services.

It is widely used in this context and is highly profitable. The closest true competitor would be Google which lags far behind.

It's because you need to keep going from Beer 2 Beer to be able to overlook Teams' issues.

While the CTO enjoys his expensive scotch and big bonus for reducing his companies IT expenditure and modernizing their software offering to employees ;)

Can't wait to have to use Discord for Business in a year or two..

I was going to make a sarcastic comment about "Lync for Gaming" soon. Not sure which is worse...

I just joined a consultant company, we are using Signal and discord internally.

New Discord: now with Exchange interoperability!

To second that I think Discord's been publishing stuff about high scale concurrency so I'd think they spent quite some time and intelligence getting that right, and it's not trivial.

Look at it this way: they might be buying Discord precisely to get their devs to fix Teams.

Where's the failure exactly? I use teams to manage a very large and globally distributed consulting team.

I'm not seeing anyone raise issues from within my organisations other than the engineering side of the business preferring slack.

Maybe the non-engineers don't have much of a reference on what a better solution would look like.

Everytime an engineer tries to push slack on a consultant all they see is a new interface, shit loads of noise, gifs etc (cultural issue rather than tech stack obviously) and no real extra benefit vs the cost of learning something new when what you have today ticks all the boxes.

I also use both as I'm a partner on the engineering side of the business but also run a large consulting pod - I really don't care which one anyone uses. I don't personally see Slack being better 'enough' to justify the effort of switching for those that are already on teams.

Thankfully, teams has gif support as well.

It would be a dark day indeed if we'd have to stop spamming memes while at work

Because the rest of the business comes from Skype/Lync! Which was somehow an even larger atrocity.

Very true. I know a couple of people who like Teams, they work in healthcare and education. I think that mostly just speaks about the horrid quality of the software they usually have to face.

Each and every tech worker I know loathes Teams with passion. On the upside it's like a common enemy so there's a small team building aspect to using it.

Are you American? I tend to find tastes in tech differ across the pond. An American literally sent me a link to a google doc the other week - I couldn't believe anyone would send a final professional doc in anything other than Word - you can't even get proper section numbers without a poor plugin....

Every organisation in Poland I've worked at has used google docs and GSuite.

On the other hand, we're mostly using it for few page design doc, and have no idea what "final professional doc" or what "proper section numbers" are and why would anyone care.

I am referring to section 2.3.1 of the strategy doc.

But hard to point someone to the right place without decent numbering.