The problem is that its very top heavy and is not well done, has lots of UI bugs and really is a pain to work with

Totally agree. MS Teams is super agonizing to work with.

For meetings, calls, screensharing, and scheduling it's superior to Slack in every single way. Written experience is worse though. If only Slack spent a month writing a "Schedule a meeting with those people, and add the meeting with a link to everyone's calendar" feature, they would be on par.

One reason Slack maybe doens't, is nobody actually chooses Teams over Slack because of feature set. They choose Teams over Slack because it's "good enough" and included with Office360 which they already have. Meeting Teams feature set may not actually get Slack any more customers at all.

We do use Teams and Slack, Teams for scheduled meetings and Slack for everything else, just because Slack's scheduling is non-existent while something great comes out of the box from Teams (and yes, also because we get it "for free" through O365, and wouldn't be paying for Zoom). We wouldn't have to deal with Teams if Slack upped their game.

On par won't be enough for slack though if teams comes"for free" with your existing office subscription.

It's not a cohesive ecosystem. Office + Zoom + Slack* is way more cohesive than Office + Teams. There are specific complaints, but overall one part of it is just the "tool that does one thing well" vs Frankenstein that tries to do everything idea

*except I can't copy paste images from slack into office documents, this is a major hassle

People who use Teams are people who have had it forced upon them. Make of that what you will.

The problem is that Teams is used by companies who have IT departments that do absolutely insane things like DELETE THE CHAT HISTORY AFTER 24 HOURS because of some sort of perverse, contrived "security" issue. These are the morons that Microsoft is selling to, and giving advice to as on how to configure it. So you wind up with a system that's almost worse than not having anything at all. Our Sharepoint installation was so bad, Microsoft was hired to come in and "relaunch" it. As far as I can tell, nothing has changed. Teams isn't necessarily evil, but it's a "code smell" about the corporate IT culture if that's what the company uses.

I'm old enough to remember when Skype was really neat, and it's just another in a long, long line of grievances I'll hold against Microsoft till I die.

Companies love Microsoft because of how many footguns they have available in settings and in group policy configuration. The defaults for so many of the applications are actually remarkably nice, and then it is amazing how many IT departments see the massive list of settings and group policy configurations as a buffet of "security options" rather than a terrifying hall of footguns, because who needs feet or nice things.

Well said.

> DELETE THE CHAT HISTORY AFTER 24 HOURS because of some sort of perverse, contrived "security" issue.

Seems much more likely to be due to legal reasons than for security. If the chats are not retained, they can't be found in discovery. (And given chat is even more informal than email, people probably say a lot of things they shouldn't in chat).

Look, I fully understand the reason given, and, like government programs, it all sounds nice and looks good on paper, but we are simply NOT in that litigious a business space. And, frankly, simply deleting everything as we go seems like something that public safety laws should PREVENT, but I digress.

Back to the "code smell" of the IT department... For instance, I opened a ticket for my new laptop for something that is not common, but it can be self-selected from the menu of requests to make, so it's not like it's a one-off. After THREE WEEKS of emails and chats and calls with NINE DIFFERENT PEOPLE, I found that we... STARTED COMPLETELY OVER. It would have been nice to be able to look back over the history to name and shame, and point people back to what had already been done, since, apparently whatever ticketing system they use is completely useless.

So when even simple things take a month to do in your company, having, say, 30 days of history is not unreasonable. In fact, it's almost necessary.

That seems like a more reasonable policy if you've ever had your email/chat logs subpoenaed. If that stuff's auto deleted, then it's easier to have open discussions there, but yeah, no history.

It does change one's usage model.