Though one thing that always suffers in Teams is the ability to self-organize. Slack makes it very easy to let everyone write an automation or open a channel. Teams feels like it is imposing a culture that seems antithetical to most of the organisations that I saw adopt Teams, at least until they did.
Although it's bad now, in Feb 2020 Teams was genuinely unusable hot garbage, chats didn't work, calls dropped often, files wouldn't attach to messages etc. Microsoft, for all their sins, recognised the imminent need for mass work-from-home tools relatively early, and made huge improvements to the platform before the end of March. By mid-April was in a usable state.
Slack's better software, but better software's not going to be adopted if it's missing or hiding huge key features.
The biggest problems have been that the 'classic' mobile apps are stale, and are currently being replaced with Element X: https://element.io/blog/element-x-experience-the-future-of-e... - which far surpasses the Teams mobile clients in terms of UX & performance. Also, the E2EE reliability and UX on the old apps was also not great, but that's also fixed (at last) by Element X.
This is the kind of stuff that corporate customers care about. They want systems that integrate well.
Great. I just want a system that allows me to view a PDF file that my teacher sent me without having to click through a dozen menus and wait several minutes.
like Matrix: https://www.freie-messenger.de/en/systemvergleich/team/
Crisis driven decision making is one of the most popular management methods in history.
The mismatch makes sense to programmers and IT types who have internalised the “computers are stupider than we make them look” way of thinking… but most normal non computer professionals are probably just thinking “I am sharing this with these people right now.
To be brutally honest people need to just stop and apply some basic critical thinking to their actions instead of expecting magic.
We have <20 employees and managing an extra vendor for a chat application is a non-negligible % of our time.
Our new hires can log with their work account using a shrink-wrapped machine from Best Buy and will have all of their needed applications ready to go & signed-in without going to random vendor sites or file shares.
Screenhero was the best screensharing software I've used to this day.
If anyone here knows the inside story of what went down with that acquisition, please share because I was expecting such great things when I heard Slack got them and then ... just nothing.
Was it a tech integration problem? A key team member leaving? Like what happened?
...but that still doesn't explain why Slack otherwise seems frozen-in-time: none of the significant end-user usability and quality-of-life issues I've had with Slack since I started using it in 2016 have been addressed (e.g. we can't right-click a message to get its context-menu: you still have to hunt for that awkwardly-placed "..." menu button).
See https://slack.com/release-notes/windows - this is their changelist for their Windows release and most of the releases since 2020 are described as "tweaks", was "tinkered with", or is "tuned-up" which, or "minor security updates" - which, as any npm user will tell you just means they ran `npm update` and not much else (well, besides the bare minimum of automated testing).
> In 2013, I co-founded Screenhero, an app that enabled remote pair programming and made developer collaboration over the internet “better than being in the same room” (to quote our old slogan).
Do you mean April 2024 or 2025? Because the Teams I use on a regular daily basis is still unusable garbage. Granted it's better than February 2020, but it's still a train wreck of chats that don't work, calls dropped often, and files that won't attach to messages. Not that I am all that fond of Slack either.
So either I'm incredibly lucky, or - my going hypothesis - Teams actually does work quite well, if you deploy it along with SharePoint, Exchange, and other Microsoft products it integrates with.
Oh, are you using it on an Apple Silicon mac?
I have shared these observations in their feedback pop ups and I know Microsoft loves collecting telemetry. Why should they dedicate more money/resources to fix defects when it clearly hasn’t stopped them from growing their market share?
Teams is the first example I use to begrudgingly explain to someone that quality doesn’t matter.
I think Apple Silicon is going to one's experience worse here, not better - because of the "Apple" part.
Was thinking maybe something had changed, but sounds like no. ;)
I suspect it depends on what you're used to. Zoom fits in better with the Apple design system.
Guess what? It still sucks. I still hate using it. I still do less work because of it. Can you scroll back thru messages without seeing a 10am one loading spinner every 15 mess ages? No. But it’s faster… in the general sense!
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/new-teams-d...
That was the real MVP for video conferencing software in the early pandemic, and Slack missed it by years.
Several coworkers and me also had the problem that we were unmuted but it said we were muted. Just today the teams screen blacked out when someone presented something.
Notifications are a mess too. And when you have multiple teams with the same channel names (project with microservices) it only shows the channel name, but not the team name in the notifications and in the UI.
By the way, I'm not a native speaker. I know what a call is, I eventually checked what's a huddle now. "a close grouping of people or things."
IMO, Slacked drop it again. The old slack video worked much better than the new one. I use the zoom plugin now for quick chats.
Teams is a dumpster fire every time I'm forced to use it. Not much to say about that.
Lots of our staff got caught out when all the channels got truncated. Oof.
It's like when sysadmins get confused when people use the recycle bin as storage and the user gets angry when the bin gets cleared.
My employer, a large university, has moved to Microsoft, and I've definitely noticed this in MS's software. It feels like the software is designed with certain office culture and workflow patterns in mind.
For example, previously I was able to use standalone email software. Outlook, in contrast, pushes its calendaring features, which are not something I care to use. I've gotten an increasing number of meeting invitations through this calendar, and Outlook "helpfully" tells me whether I'm available or not. I'm in fact always "available", because I don't use Outlook to manage my schedule.
I've never understood why neither Google or MS have the ability to give their calendar tool an ical feed and have the availability from that reflected in your corporate calendar.
I guess it made sense in the days of everyone being in offices on a fixed schedule, but in the modern world where people's work life and personal life increasingly intersect I'd love to be able to drop things like needing to pick my son up from school in the calendar and have that shared with my partner without also needing to duplicate that same entry in my work calendar so no one books a meeting with me.
I've never understood Outlook being both email and calendar. Does no one at Microsoft ever want to read an email and reference their calendar at the same time, or vice versa?
Beyond that, maybe I'm thoroughly infused with corporate culture at this point, but I find this perfectly obvious and natural bundling. E-mail, calendars and TODO lists belong together.
I'm a university professor; there's always pressure to join this or that initiative, to participate in more committees, and the like. But in the long term, success depends on maintaining much of my focus on my long-term research goals, which means saying no a lot.
PG wrote about "makers' schedules vs managers' schedules"
http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
and this feels similar to me. Outlook feels designed around the manager's schedule.
Neither do I. Fortunately, my employer doesn't care about it anyway.
> Outlook feels designed around the manager's schedule.
That is 100% true.
However, relevant to this entire thread, it's typical to put "focus time" blocks on the calendar. If you set your free/busy status to "busy" on those blocks (which is the default anyway), then come focus time, MS Teams and Outlook will both show you as "busy" / unavailable for the duration. A little bit of automation, but it does a good job at deterring casual interruptions, as anyone who tries to "invite you" to a meeting, or ask you "a small question, 30 seconds tops" will have their Outlook tell them there's a scheduling conflict, and their Teams that you should not be disturbed and won't get the notification anyway.
My biggest gripe is the distributed db that backs exchange/outlook365 mail on their server... I operate on inbox-zero and when I clear all the filtered mail out, then try to empty the "trash" I either have to wait 2 minutes for all the other deletes to sync to the trash, or empty the trash multiple times.
It's significantly worse than it was in the 90's on dedicated server(s), though back then the hardware was really easy to overwhelm with too much email/activity.
You can; open outlook, right click the Calendar thing, Open In New Window.
Individually all of these apps are shit, the value is that they work well together. This is not unlike, say, the Apple computer which can do things like go back from sleep in 1 to 2 seconds because the software is written for one particular chip.
As a side note, it is not obvious to me that Teams is a separate product that you get for free. I would say it is just as correct to look at what you buy from MS is a standard office communication and organization service and Teams is just a part of that.
It was an i9 (10th? gen), and performed worse than a 4th gen i3 in practice.
I tried using the linux client but it simply will not allow me to connect to anyone and keeps telling me I need to login and enable teams on my "account" (we do not have a microsoft company account).
Somehow, everything works, except for starting and receiving calls. Meetings work just fine, so it's not lack of some browser functionality.
New meetings created in Teams do include a Teams link - but isn't that what you would expect?
I like the auto Teams link because it saves me a click when setting up every meeting (and pretty much 99% of my meetings are Teams meetings).
I think this is a case where it makes sense to default on because most people will leave it defaulted on.
but it's hard to argue for another solution because why pay for Slack when we already have Teams "for free"?
Yes, it's included with Microsoft 365, but it seems like the cost of it in employee pain make it far from free. I know the appeal of "free" for companies, but Teams seems like an occasion where they're really ignoring a lot of time/effort/frustration that their employees have to go through and the impact that has on their work.
Slack isn't cheap, but if you have reasonably compensated employees do you really want them wasting time and energy over Teams? Though, as I said, I certainly understand how this plays out in the real world. Many companies look at what something is costing them in their budget without having the ability to measure the pain and lost productivity those decisions might be causing.
People will complain about anything, though.
The nature of my work has me dealing with all of these platforms, depending on the clients. Guess what? I don't find Slack to be some joyous piece of software to use. It's better than the alternatives, I guess, but not to the point that I really care one way or the other. Some people complain about the bundling, but that can be really convenient for your organization.
But when it's your main communication method, you want people to enjoy it, use it, and want to use it more. You don't want people to avoid communication because they have to use a crappy IM client. These small differences have huge impacts.
I've used all of them in the past, and Teams was, and still is, the one I avoid chatting with someone unless absolutely necessary.
Yeah just like the AD bundling with windows was convenient. Up until you had no other choice than retaining an AD if anyone wanted windows anything.
If you have <50 employees and you are standing on principle against the completely bundled cable TV vertical that Microsoft is offering, I genuinely question how much you care about the success of your business. We should be able to have a rational, business-oriented review of their value proposition - as of 2023, not 2010 or 2018.
Organizations that have a lot of loose capital and cowboy investors might be more interested in playing in traffic with 20+ vendors and horrible integration stories, but we (aka our <20 employee org) really need to ship solutions to paying customers or we don't have any jobs in 12 months.
I always hear everyone complain about how expensive it is, but I feel like John Travolta meme each time I look at our Azure/Microsoft account. The per-seat & consumption/serverless billing models feel like dust in the wind when you have so few employees. Everyone is doing a lot, so why not put a lot of power under each seat? If you intend to do more with less people, I really feel like Microsoft is the answer. If you are a F100 org, I totally get it. Fuck Microsoft. Use something totally different. Build your own datacenters.
If you run a <50 person company, and you're bike-shedding about which chat program to use, I seriously question how much you care about your business.
The consulting company is providing only warm bodies.
For practically any given piece of software, you'll find a crowd of people who will tell you how absolutely trash it is.
Maybe your system admins just suck?
Now that we are all back in the office and don’t use video, we are using Teams even more. The chat is a nice function we’ve adopted since the pandemic, but it’s a side offering really. MS 365 is a godsend for many small businesses.
MS has released a native app for Teams by the way. Performance is much better. I’m not an advocate for MS, I’m just saying Teams is far more than a chat or video app.
It costs Microsoft ZERO dollars to remove the asinine keyboard shortcut control + shift + c to start a call. Who does that? Why is this right next to the ctrl + shift + v (for unformatted paste) What is the point of collecting all this metrics (kusto, whatever) if you don't ACT on it?
My complaint against Azure DevOps: Why is there no "date" field? From what I've heard there are internal people at Microsoft who suffer because of this nonsense. How hard is it to give a date only option? And no, 00:00:00 is not the same as date only.
To sell it later together with other data. There are a lot of bugs and stupid UI decisions which go unfixed by MS and telemetry hasn't improved anything.
What an awful experience, both the app and the forced move. The only people who like it are warm bodies who can barely use other Office products as it is.
Teams is a peak example of what 'tying' looks like.
And then we use Teams simply because it's already included in the package anyway, even though many employees hate it, but it's hard to argue for another solution because why pay for Slack when we already have Teams "for free"?
And since Teams doesn't really need to compete on functionality it's extremely slow and with a borderline unusable group chat.