9 ms·

It's just something with lots of Microsoft's latest software that annoys me. They all feel behind, laggy and lacking features in comparison to their competitor.

It's just something with lots of Microsoft's latest software that annoys me. They all feel behind, laggy and lacking features in comparison to their competitor. Slack > Teams Trello > Planner PowerBi > Tableau, Looker, Mode And by the quick looks of it: Airtable > Lists At the same time I'm looking at that $136 billion cash pile. Oh well, at least they acquired Github...

nojito 6y ago
Teams is leagues better than Slack simply because of how well it integrates with all of the other ms apps. PowerBI is also on another level when compared to other BI tools due to its data modeling capabilities.
- cannam 6y ago
  Are Teams and Slack competitors at all? I thought one was targeted document sharing, calendaring, and video meetings, and the other was general group chat and asynchronous communication? I haven't used either to an enormous extent - I've used both, but only to the extent that I've had to in recent weeks - anyone care to educate me?
  - evanmoran 6y ago
    Sure, Teams is Slack plus Zoom with Office 365 integration. It turns out that chat follows an organization’s team structures really well, so adding video conferencing and document sharing to channels are a really natural fit to help people work together.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- sergiotapia 6y ago
  My children are on Teams for school from home, it's dogshit. It has that ugly MS-of-2011 sheen where anything you click you get empty white loading or worse yet a huge spinning GIF with no idea what's happening. Sorry I'm being so rough, but I have to deal with this software every day right before work and it pisses me off.
  - karatestomp 6y ago
    I briefly had to use it a couple years ago and found it super confusing. Lots of business tools for me are "places I put things if I want to lose them" and Teams 100% qualified. Then again I bounced off Facebook in ~2011 because I didn't understand the UI (couldn't figure out where anything "went" or would appear for others when I posted it any of the various ways to post things—wall, others' walls, comments on things, statuses, and so on—or where they were coming from when I saw them) and Twitter's confused the hell out of me since a couple redesigns ago, so possibly I'm just dumb.
- toohotatopic 6y ago
  >Teams is leagues better than Slack simply because of how well it integrates with all of the other ms apps. In which way? From what I have seen, teams functionality is so much worse than the native counterparts that I wouldn't call it integration. Even if it is better than Slack, it's obstructive to the point that I am wondering if the teams development team has ever used it to manage themselves.
  - nojito 6y ago
    It integrates seamlessly with excel online, ppt online, word online. Which makes the concept of "file sharing" moot because one just has to paste the new file and the entire team can start working on it without ever leaving the teams app. The same story holds for integrating with the other 365 apps that MS has. Additionally, the PowerBI integration is absolutely game changing for sharing performance reports seamlessly to everyone on the team.
    - toohotatopic 6y ago
      Have you tried more advanced features like making lists in word? Word and word online behave differently. And when it comes to file sharing: how do you copy the name of a file into the clipboard?
      - nojito 6y ago
        Click open on desktop. Any changes you make it automatically synced to Teams. It’s a complete seamless experience for collaboration.
    - prepend 6y ago
      This is my experience. The Teams viewer in word or excel is different than the full browser that is different than desktop. A bette experience, I think, is post link to google doc in whatever chat, everyone clicks on link and edits doc in browser. I wish that worked well in Teams. Part of the problem is Word365 which seems to break under lots of collaborators and revisions. Track changes is practically unusable with lots of edits. Every time, someone ends up “starting over.” And it’s more hassle to try than to do any serious collabs. But for minor edits, it’s nice. There’s no advantage to me to “never leave the teams app.”
- cutenewt 6y ago
  There's a lot of outdated thinking that Teams < Slack. I use both multiple times a day. Teams is far from a carbon copy of Slack. If anything, Slack needs to pay attention to Teams. They've already out-innovated Slack on several fronts. For example, Teams is a slick hybrid of industry-std channels (Slack) and industry-std video (Zoom). Slack doesn't offer that.
- prepend 6y ago
  I disagree. I use both and Teams is very buggy. It does more than Slack with 365 integration, but it doesn’t do what Slack does well- persistent chat, document collab, calls. I would expect to never miss a notification. I don’t in Slack, but Teams will delay notification for hours. Search in Teams doesn’t find as well as slack. Won’t search across “teams” as opposed to multiple slack orgs. Teams will freeze and require religion/restart but I won’t know it unless I try to use the tool. So it could have been frozen for minutes or hours without updating. Slack has never had this problem. It’s weird how multiple times each day (I’ve used Teams for about six months) I scratch my head with some bonehead bug. Not in the free tier of Slack.
ibdf 6y ago
You forgot about Flow which is some terrible version of Zapier.
screye 6y ago
Over the years there is something I've realized about the mainstream user. They do not want the best. They want convenient and 'good enough' and compliant. All of Microsoft tools work fine, sync really well with each other and integrate natively with existing workflows. Power users even among devs are a rare breed.
- dade_ 6y ago
  That would explain Yammer.
  - bnt 6y ago
    AFAIK they purchased Yammer, it wasn't an in-house product.
- satyrnein 6y ago
  It does make sense to prioritize how well something fits into your overall workflow higher than which tools is the best in a vacuum.
- dx034 6y ago
  And sync is the one big advantage of Office products. It's a pain to properly sync email, chat, file storage, calendars etc. MSFT has a very compelling way that works for end users and IT alike. Setting this up with products from different vendors is a pain.
keithwarren 6y ago
I have used lots of BI tools over the years, PowerBI is the class of the field and it is not even close.
crazygringo 6y ago
That's just how major corporations operate. They don't innovate much, which is too risky -- they buy/copy and they integrate into a single attractive package for businesses. Customers (companies) don't want to have to spend months researching which separate word processor, spreadsheet, calendar, chat app, email, etc. to use. They want a single integrated choice. Integration brings an insane amount of value to the table. When you include that, the competitors often become a clear second choice, even if they seem better when judged on their feature set alone. Also, for people who haven't been involved in integrating products as part of a suite, the amount of work is close to unbelievable. Want to make a small improvement in Calendar, that seems like you should budget a single developer 2 weeks for? Guess what, it's a 3-person six-month-long project because now you have to update 20 other products and API's that interface with calendar, as well as handle interoperability between versions, independent rollouts and rollbacks, etc. But at MS Office scale, the improvement can still be worth it.
kart23 6y ago
I really like the latest to-do app they have, its on every platform (except linux...), nice design and relatively snappy. Sure its not the most advanced app, but it does everything I need and want. Their new terminal emulator has potential, although I do find it a bit slow and fonts to be weird.
timwis 6y ago
I agree. Teams has felt very unintuitive, and often has duplicate notifications, and Planner is embarrassingly bad - you can’t even edit comments. I don’t understand how there are so many little bugs and annoyances they’re a massive company and they’re putting a lot behind these products.
raindropm 6y ago
I hates their barebone 'barely there' product too, but damn, their integration game is strong(in the enterprise world at least), especially all these recent announcement.
laurentb 6y ago
What you're forgetting is that all of those SaaS tools came about to improve (or replace) some of the existing Microsoft products that did not live up to the expectations of the modern corporate world: Slack -> Lync/Skype for Business/Whatever other name MSFT came up with Trello -> MS Project Tableau -> MS SSRS Airtable -> SharePoint Lists & Workflow

nojito 6y ago

Teams is leagues better than Slack simply because of how well it integrates with all of the other ms apps. PowerBI is also on another level when compared to other BI tools due to its data modeling capabilities.

cannam 6y ago
Are Teams and Slack competitors at all? I thought one was targeted document sharing, calendaring, and video meetings, and the other was general group chat and asynchronous communication? I haven't used either to an enormous extent - I've used both, but only to the extent that I've had to in recent weeks - anyone care to educate me?
- evanmoran 6y ago
  Sure, Teams is Slack plus Zoom with Office 365 integration. It turns out that chat follows an organization’s team structures really well, so adding video conferencing and document sharing to channels are a really natural fit to help people work together.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
sergiotapia 6y ago
My children are on Teams for school from home, it's dogshit. It has that ugly MS-of-2011 sheen where anything you click you get empty white loading or worse yet a huge spinning GIF with no idea what's happening. Sorry I'm being so rough, but I have to deal with this software every day right before work and it pisses me off.
- karatestomp 6y ago
  I briefly had to use it a couple years ago and found it super confusing. Lots of business tools for me are "places I put things if I want to lose them" and Teams 100% qualified. Then again I bounced off Facebook in ~2011 because I didn't understand the UI (couldn't figure out where anything "went" or would appear for others when I posted it any of the various ways to post things—wall, others' walls, comments on things, statuses, and so on—or where they were coming from when I saw them) and Twitter's confused the hell out of me since a couple redesigns ago, so possibly I'm just dumb.
toohotatopic 6y ago
>Teams is leagues better than Slack simply because of how well it integrates with all of the other ms apps. In which way? From what I have seen, teams functionality is so much worse than the native counterparts that I wouldn't call it integration. Even if it is better than Slack, it's obstructive to the point that I am wondering if the teams development team has ever used it to manage themselves.
- nojito 6y ago
  It integrates seamlessly with excel online, ppt online, word online. Which makes the concept of "file sharing" moot because one just has to paste the new file and the entire team can start working on it without ever leaving the teams app. The same story holds for integrating with the other 365 apps that MS has. Additionally, the PowerBI integration is absolutely game changing for sharing performance reports seamlessly to everyone on the team.
  - toohotatopic 6y ago
    Have you tried more advanced features like making lists in word? Word and word online behave differently. And when it comes to file sharing: how do you copy the name of a file into the clipboard?
    - nojito 6y ago
      Click open on desktop. Any changes you make it automatically synced to Teams. It’s a complete seamless experience for collaboration.
  - prepend 6y ago
    This is my experience. The Teams viewer in word or excel is different than the full browser that is different than desktop. A bette experience, I think, is post link to google doc in whatever chat, everyone clicks on link and edits doc in browser. I wish that worked well in Teams. Part of the problem is Word365 which seems to break under lots of collaborators and revisions. Track changes is practically unusable with lots of edits. Every time, someone ends up “starting over.” And it’s more hassle to try than to do any serious collabs. But for minor edits, it’s nice. There’s no advantage to me to “never leave the teams app.”
cutenewt 6y ago
There's a lot of outdated thinking that Teams < Slack. I use both multiple times a day. Teams is far from a carbon copy of Slack. If anything, Slack needs to pay attention to Teams. They've already out-innovated Slack on several fronts. For example, Teams is a slick hybrid of industry-std channels (Slack) and industry-std video (Zoom). Slack doesn't offer that.
prepend 6y ago
I disagree. I use both and Teams is very buggy. It does more than Slack with 365 integration, but it doesn’t do what Slack does well- persistent chat, document collab, calls. I would expect to never miss a notification. I don’t in Slack, but Teams will delay notification for hours. Search in Teams doesn’t find as well as slack. Won’t search across “teams” as opposed to multiple slack orgs. Teams will freeze and require religion/restart but I won’t know it unless I try to use the tool. So it could have been frozen for minutes or hours without updating. Slack has never had this problem. It’s weird how multiple times each day (I’ve used Teams for about six months) I scratch my head with some bonehead bug. Not in the free tier of Slack.

ibdf 6y ago

You forgot about Flow which is some terrible version of Zapier.

screye 6y ago

Over the years there is something I've realized about the mainstream user. They do not want the best. They want convenient and 'good enough' and compliant. All of Microsoft tools work fine, sync really well with each other and integrate natively with existing workflows. Power users even among devs are a rare breed.

dade_ 6y ago
That would explain Yammer.
- bnt 6y ago
  AFAIK they purchased Yammer, it wasn't an in-house product.
satyrnein 6y ago
It does make sense to prioritize how well something fits into your overall workflow higher than which tools is the best in a vacuum.
dx034 6y ago
And sync is the one big advantage of Office products. It's a pain to properly sync email, chat, file storage, calendars etc. MSFT has a very compelling way that works for end users and IT alike. Setting this up with products from different vendors is a pain.

keithwarren 6y ago

I have used lots of BI tools over the years, PowerBI is the class of the field and it is not even close.

crazygringo 6y ago

That's just how major corporations operate. They don't innovate much, which is too risky -- they buy/copy and they integrate into a single attractive package for businesses. Customers (companies) don't want to have to spend months researching which separate word processor, spreadsheet, calendar, chat app, email, etc. to use. They want a single integrated choice. Integration brings an insane amount of value to the table. When you include that, the competitors often become a clear second choice, even if they seem better when judged on their feature set alone. Also, for people who haven't been involved in integrating products as part of a suite, the amount of work is close to unbelievable. Want to make a small improvement in Calendar, that seems like you should budget a single developer 2 weeks for? Guess what, it's a 3-person six-month-long project because now you have to update 20 other products and API's that interface with calendar, as well as handle interoperability between versions, independent rollouts and rollbacks, etc. But at MS Office scale, the improvement can still be worth it.

kart23 6y ago

I really like the latest to-do app they have, its on every platform (except linux...), nice design and relatively snappy. Sure its not the most advanced app, but it does everything I need and want. Their new terminal emulator has potential, although I do find it a bit slow and fonts to be weird.

timwis 6y ago

I agree. Teams has felt very unintuitive, and often has duplicate notifications, and Planner is embarrassingly bad - you can’t even edit comments. I don’t understand how there are so many little bugs and annoyances they’re a massive company and they’re putting a lot behind these products.

raindropm 6y ago

I hates their barebone 'barely there' product too, but damn, their integration game is strong(in the enterprise world at least), especially all these recent announcement.

laurentb 6y ago

What you're forgetting is that all of those SaaS tools came about to improve (or replace) some of the existing Microsoft products that did not live up to the expectations of the modern corporate world: Slack -> Lync/Skype for Business/Whatever other name MSFT came up with Trello -> MS Project Tableau -> MS SSRS Airtable -> SharePoint Lists & Workflow