I work for an outsourced tech company supporting a large system of hospitals in the NE USA.

In my team of 50+ people, the last 2 years since starting this contract have been steady transition to using Teams for all communications. They are now moving to use it for scheduling as well with it being integrated with the rest of the Office suite.

Moreover, the entire hospital system uses it as the defacto means of communication. This makes it incredibly easy to connect with any of the thousands of employees we have immediately in a lot ways.

I don't like Teams or the office suite whatsoever. However, I think the real secret to their sauce is simple: > Ecosystem integration > Cram every feature possible into each product

Those two things alone can makeup for all the deficiencies in Microsoft's products within the marketplace. Their software may be clunky, buggy, and terrible to use but if you have those two factors it will stay dominant imo.

It's not only the cost, but it's having to deal with another vendor and maintain another system, interoperability, security, access, etc.

Exactly. Nobody likes it. We use it because we have to. We have to because it was already paid for.

Also, most users haven't ever experienced software that's any better, with a few rare exceptions such as Excel. We programmers have it so good. "How can people put up with such bad software" is a recurring theme, and not unique to Teams or even Microsoft.

Everybody I know has used Zoom at this point, and has thus seen what dead-simple and "just works" telecom software can be (not to mention FaceTime, which seems to revel in "your never-owned-a-computer grandparent is happy to use this").

If you think zoom "just works" I'm guessing you haven't seen the quagmire of poor decisions masquerading as code that is zoom on the Linux desktop.

Still better than teams though. (With the caveat that it's only useable on Chrome).

I use Teams in enterprise, and Zoom for college. At this point I pretty firmly believe Zoom is hot garbage. Teams syncs with Outlook, and basically every org I interacts with uses Outlook and has Office365 at this point.

Teams hasn't been crashy, is responsive, doesn't eat memory, etc. At this point I personally cannot point to why there is so much hate for Teams. Either that or my organisation is doing something well to make it work well.

It works pretty well for us in these respects too.

The chat is fucking useless though. We use Slack for that.

Dead simple is something like Meet. Click a link and you're on a video call with nothing to install. On iOS, FaceTime is also great.

Zoom is a dumpster fire.

I’ve had lots of small annoying problems with Meet and find that the only people who use it are Googlers.

The managers that force this horseshit on they employees never used anything else before the pandemic. Suddenly they also had to use something with that function, already had Teams and now forced everyone to use it as a lowest common denominator.

At least, that's my hypothesis. It's the preinstalled browser debacle all over again.

right and it’s integrated with Sharepoint, Outlook and OneDrive.

And those are in the same boat as Teams: it came with the bundle. (well, one could argue that plenty of people enjoy Outlook, but OneDrive is nothing special and SharePoint is just a bad Wiki going the SAP integration hell route)

SharePoint gives you versioned file storage that searches inside of files. It's a big step up from a network drive or whatever.

(and that's just the really basic out of the box usage)

So in essence, a bad wiki but with WebDAV ;-) But I was mostly talking about the "everything is different, from the rest of the MS ecosystem" and "everything you really want you have to bolt on".

When you use M365 you even get multiple sharepoint-esque instances where there is the subscription one that you get in your general web interface, there is "your own" instance which is the same but more primitive, and then there is a pseudo-instance which is used by all apps (even the web apps) to sort-of aggregate them with infinite loops as a result (some of the interfaces allow you to browse between the instances so you can to into a virtual directory, then go into the same directory but in the other instance, and from there to into yet the same directory again but in the other instance, and so forth).

I find Shareapoint versioning pretty terrible in that it versions every change and doesn’t let me do tags or releases. So with office auto save I’ll have 700 versions of a file as people changed one sentence a minute for a few hours.

I actually prefer a network drive over SharePoint because there are fewer lock and sync issues.

Especially compared to Dropbox or Google Drive (or even OneDrive) it’s so hard to use for file sharing.

I literally would prefer mediawiki from the 2000s in terms of ui and support ability.

If you turn on minor versions there is a publish function, which is close enough to a release.

I use OneDrive as my cloud storage provider. To me cloud storage from the top-tier vendors seem to work well enough at this point. I probably would’ve used Google Drive, but once I learned they take it out of your Gmail storage space I declined. To Microsoft’s credit, your OneDrive storage space does not come out of your app Outlook email storage.

Yeah, they are all pretty similar. The storage usage is probably due to Google's gigantic user base, or perhaps due to their tenancy model (i.e. you get a 'google account' that also contains 'storage' instead of the other way around).

While some features like versioning and sharing and mail integration vary, nearly all of the 'big' ones do the same thing (OneDrive, iCloud, Google Drive, Dropbox, even box.com and MEGA to some extent).

Ironically, this sameness might actually be a good thing, as it makes it a bit more interchangeable (well, if we ignore the variety in native integrations), it would be pretty bad if there were significant missing features between them.

I do still keep my Dropbox because it has better sharing features. But I only use that with my wife and we haven’t used it to collaborate since she finished her Masters degree. If anyone has the edge with features, it probably is them. Some of the lesser known names I have accounts worth as well, but they’ve had sketchier history with storage issues. OneDrive simply gave me the most space for free, and I usually pimp myself out to the highest bidder.

I think it goes beyond just the licensing fee. It makes compliance/on-boarding significantly easier to have everything bundled. If you're using Exchange/Office, you've already vetted Microsoft for your use case.

This. We asked about non-Teams alternatives, and were told we'd be responsible for hosting and maintaining anything else we chose by our IT department, and that was the end of that conversation.

I think Teams also offers more capabilities to Enterprise users. I’ve been on a few teams calls with people on the call that are not visible in the attendee list.

I have also experienced this but I'm quite sure that it was a bug in my cases. Is this actually a service they offer?

Bingo. That's the simple and real answer. They invest heavily in sales and lock in big corporates into their ecosystem. Now, they don't have any incentive than to go the extra mile for somehting like Teams. I think it will hurt them in the long run, but in the short term, it's quite profitable probably.

Good summary of this on the All In Podcast last week (in the context of Adobe buying Figma) https://youtu.be/_UpczzfeAFA?t=1162

I think it also has to do with how much money Microsoft is kicking back to the right people in those companies to evangelize Microsoft despite knowing that it sucks.

In Africa they even fired a employee that discovered a kickback scheme, when he tried to scale the matter up to Satya Nadella: https://www.engadget.com/whistleblower-says-microsoft-spent-...

I've known about it and seen it happen but rarely do you get enough evidence to do anything about it. It appears when you do then Microsoft will just fire you and put out a public statement pretending that something will change.