I have the complete opposite reaction; I don't like Slack now that I've used Teams and I had used Slack since the very early days. The only thing I hate about it is how it handles file sharing, to the point it will change file names of images and converts them to png files, which sort of defeats the purpose.

I agree. I went on parental leave a couple of months ago but had I not I would have started using something other than Teams with my colleagues with no regard to what the official platform is.

I don't get why upper management thinks they have anything to do with how I communicate with my colleagues. I can only assume they would want us to choose a platform that allows us to work effectively.

You don't understand why company management would have a say in how work gets done?

> I don't get why upper management thinks they have anything to do with how I communicate with my colleagues.

The organization has to pay for whatever commercial offerings their teams are using, and any non-commercial offerings are likely to either expose the organization's information or at least put it out of reach of controls like legal holds. Use of some free/trial services for business purposes might also introduce legal/contractual liability that the organization is responsible for.

> I don't get why upper management thinks they have anything to do with how I communicate with my colleagues. I can only assume they would want us to choose a platform that allows us to work effectively.

Auditing and compliance.

We use Teams long term and would give quite a bit to be able to use Slack. At least it's a great tool to focus our negative energies on, lol.

Call me when Slack allows collaborative editing of powerpoint presentations and excel spreadsheets. I think there is little overlap between the part of the companies which benefit from Teams and the part that wants to use Slack.

> collaborative editing of powerpoint presentations and excel spreadsheets

Hahaha...if you want collaborative editing of anything, use GSuite. The MS tool suite is a joke for collaboration.

The idea is hilarious. GSuite is basically unusable. It's miles behind excel for anything serious and has no equivalent to powerpoint at all.

Some of you don't understand you live in a very tiny bubble and entreprise needs are very different from your experience.

Gsuite has the best collaborative editing.

What you don't like collaborating in the excel web app and wiping your coworker's active cell edit from existence by inserting a row somewhere above it? Next you're going to tell me you don't enjoy powerpoint web app randomly changing formatting in bulleted lists when you do something as complex as hitting enter to add a new line.

You can tell where Microsoft spent their energies (outlook, teams, maybe onenote?) and which web app products feel just about the same as they did when they were sharepoint web apps.

> were sharepoint web apps

ARE still sharepoint apps. At least that's how they feel.

Oh yeah for sure. I think I meant to say on-prem sharepoint web apps. Which were terrible. Just like SharePoint. SharePoint and every single one of its components really embodied everything wrong with Microsoft's culture. It was distilled awfulness, lack of attention to detail, terrible customer experience, awful UX and just insane architecture decisions that still impact 365 to this day. The SharePoint list limit that Teams hit when you added too many people to a team (since worked around or fixed) a couple years ago is a prime example.

No one uses the web app. You can obviously collaborate from the actual piece of software.

Every discussion about Teams boils down to the same thing: software engineers needs when it comes to collaboration are low so they are happy using an expensive text chat client and they don't understand how the rest of their company actually works and what they need.

Can someone give me the TLDR on why they hate teams so much?

I suppose I work in an organization with few true "technical" folks, and everyone is under Microsoft licenses so it doesn't seem like that big of a deal.

I've used both slack and teams. What am I really missing out on here?

I honestly don't understand the passionate opinions about chat/conference software. They're all doing the same thing in roughly the same way, and I don't have a computer that's ancient enough to really notice resource hogging.

> and I don't have a computer that's ancient enough to really notice resource hogging.

Most likely you don't use a conference software bad enough.

That being said, having useful search, a quick UI and actual availability shown is massively helpful. A great comms tool also makes inter-department chats easy and fun (for example via #random). Lastly, the amount of time wasted with "can you see my screen?"/"can you hear me?"/"Doesn't work for me, I'll restart <software>" varies vastly between tools. Having communication, including discovery and screen sharing, just work makes things so much easier.

> Most likely you don't use a conference software bad enough.

Fair; I could definitely believe that.

But among Zoom, Teams, Discord, and Slack (there's probably another one thrown in there,) I haven't had issues that really stand out to me. I've seen social workplace issues that made comms suck, but they transferred between chat apps.

It really comes down to the details. If the little things don't get on your nerves and you just care about putting messages in a IRC-esque interface that everyone else can see then there's no difference. Here's a really high level tldr: Teams is annoying in dozens of small minor ways that are collectively very frustrating.

For a more detailed take:

Slack is far from perfect but Slack is generally clean, quick, simple and compact. Slack feels like a purpose built tool for chat. Even when they add stuff like huddles it never feels like the priority is anything but the chat. When they roll out updates that make typing or formatting jankier I find they often get a fix out quickly.

Teams feels like it is doing a little bit of everything and is slower, wastes screen real estate, has poor UX all over and does a lot of things so-so to decent vs. one thing really well. Why is chat so different in a Teams/Chat vs a Teams/Teams/Channel? You can't even do the same markdown formatting in those places. And speaking of markdown, you can type a backtick around a string to monospace it like in slack but if it's at the end of your message it won't format it. You need a trailing space for it to kick in the formatter. Little details matter and a lack of attention to them as an organization makes bad UX and weird behavior leak into your software.

The whole concept of a “Team” encourages silos within the company. You can’t just search for and join a channel to collaborate, you have to be invited to a team to even know the channel exists.

If your company is large enough that a flat, open channel namespace is overwhelming, then you might think this is a feature, but I was at Walmart with tens of thousands of people in Slack and I didn’t feel that way.

* Call in 2 minutes, customer sent teams link. You tap it on your phone.

* You expect to enter nickname and connect as a guest (my company doesn't use teams)

* F.. u. Today we're going to log into Microsoft account. No option to abort.

* Personal account doesn't work (bonus points if you already have private office 365 logged in and it defaults to this account, then takes you straight to the error or tells you after 2FA).

* Kill app/reopen? 50% success rate.

After a few times I figured out that best way is to nuke the app data the moment it shows you login screen. And got PTSD.

> * F.. u. Today we're going to log into Microsoft account. No option to abort.

Actually I found a solution for this (on android). Open the settings, apps, find teams app and force stop it. Then try to open the link again. You should get the guest prompt. Sometimes this needs to be repeated few times, but so far this approach works for me reliably.

Ahh walled garden effects. Ya that's annoying.

/s?

You might change your mind if you saw the Slack bill. A medium size org is easily being charged over $1MM/year.

Indeed, I'd rather use Discord than MS Teams if I wasn't allowed to use Slack. But in reality we'd probably get engineering departments just switching back to IRC and hastebin.