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.
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.