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Regardless of what you think of Teams -- I myself have had nothing but poor experiences over 2.5 years of using it daily -- it's telling that Microsoft has to r

Regardless of what you think of Teams -- I myself have had nothing but poor experiences over 2.5 years of using it daily -- it's telling that Microsoft has to require folks to use Teams. I'm sure this is just Microsoft unifying everyone on the same comms platform, but seriously, I don't know anyone who chooses Teams. I know non-tech folks who chose Outlook 365 because of familiarity and then end up on Teams because it's free, but there's a difference between "I chose an email/identity platform that I know and I guess I'll use its chat app too" and "I evaluated team chat offerings and Teams is our top pick." Hell, at my most recent company (which was founded on O365 before I arrived) I replaced Teams chat interface with self-hosted Mattermost (Slack's HIPAA-compliant tier is way too expensive for a startup) and it was roundly loved. We did still lean on Teams for its video chat, because most of our non-tech staff know how to schedule and join video meetings, but even then the top complaint I got was from folks on Windows laptops whose Teams plugin for Outlook somehow got corrupted (or something?) and suddenly Outlook's Teams integration was gone. Just an awful product all around -- said with no offense meant to the team building it. _Update_: I now notice the text "for the sole purpose of video conferencing" which lines up with my use case, but still -- of all the video apps I put Teams down with Webex as "bottom of the barrel choices" due to the constant performance and functionality issues.

jerrygenser 4y ago
Why did you need HIPAA Compliance for your chat app? Internal discussion about patients that include PHI?
- generalk 4y ago
  Bingo. Nearly impossible for our staff to do their jobs and not discuss something considered PHI.
npteljes 4y ago
>it's telling that Microsoft has to require folks to use Teams. Not really I think, considering that MS bought GitHub, with all of its already existing culture. I see this move as them homogenizing the infrastructure. And also not willing to pay to another company for a product that's actually their competition.
- generalk 4y ago
  Of course, and I can't fault Microsoft for that, even if (having been on the bad end of a similar acquisition and IT merge) it sucks for GitHub. My point was: GitHub as an organization didn't choose Teams willingly, and are still paying for Slack and only using Teams for video conferencing. Of all the explanations of why that might be, the easiest to land on is "because Teams just isn't that good."
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - waste_monk 4y ago
    Or it could just be that "this is the way we've always done it" / that Slack has enough inertia in the organisation that changing workflow, updating shortcuts, etc. is inconvenient and thus left until the last minute to change over. I haven't used slack but broadly speaking Teams / Zoom / all of the other platforms I've used have been roughly the same, in that they all get the job of text and (usually) video communications done. Some might be a bit nicer to use than others but largely it doesn't matter which one you use as long as everyone is on the same platform.
    - FridgeSeal 4y ago
      In my previous workplaces I have used primarily Slack, with teams for larger video calls. In my current work, it’s 100% teams. I’d be doing in my heels over swapping to teams as well if I was GitHub, using it for any kind of text communication is such a massive downgrade.
  - hnbad 4y ago
    Given how human psychology works, Occam's razor would suggest the most likely explanation is "it's not sufficiently better to overcome the inertia of everyone already being accustomed to what they're using". HN of all places should know better than to believe that people using one thing instead of another must mean the other thing is worse.
- 4y ago
chaostheory 4y ago
Are your company’s MS instances on premise or cloud based? The reason I ask is because nearly all of the negative experiences I’ve had with Microsoft stem from either their native apps or poorly configured on premise servers. This is anecdotal since there’s no wide ranging data, but Teams works just fine where I work. Integration with Outlook is also great, but we have a O365 plan that is completely managed and run from the cloud.
mfer 4y ago
On a regular basis I use Teams, Zoom, and Jitsi for video conferencing. Teams isn't the most troublesome of the set. > I'm sure this is just Microsoft unifying everyone on the same comms platform, but seriously, I don't know anyone who chooses Teams. In big companies like GitHub people don't typically choose their own video conference platform. It's picked for them. For Microsoft I can see a huge benefit to using Teams at GitHub. That's cost. Microsoft can use Teams at cost. That's a better price that those outside Microsoft can get it. It's a better deal than paying for Zoom. At a time when expenses are being cut it's hard to justify paying for a competitors platform.
- airpoint 4y ago
  Curious now, which one would you say is the most troublesome in your experience out of those three then? And why…
  - nl 4y ago
    Not the OP, but Jitsi is terrible. For me, ranked: Zoom Google Meet Discord Slack Teams Anything else
    - vineyardmike 4y ago
      > Jitsi is terrible. But it gets points for being open source and self hostable. I appreciate that. For me, it’s Google Meet (best UI, I like the waiting room, etc) Amazon Chime (I like the ringing features, integrated chat) Jitsi (OSS etc) Zoom (It’s ok, yes, but the company is questionable and the UI is so so) Etc Teams (never used tbh, but I used corporate Skype before rebranding and it never worked right)
      - nl 4y ago
        I'm too old to put up with software that doesn't work sorely because it is open source.
        4y ago
ragingroosevelt 4y ago
Sample size of 1, but... In my personal life, I got all my friends on Discord and we've been really happy with that. It's screen sharing seems tuned for video games, though, and sucks for sharing non-game applications. We all set up Teams accounts because it does so much better with screen sharing. I haven't tried Slack recently but I really disliked that I needed a different account on each server and the UI didn't seem to unify the servers together in a convenient way like discord does. I'm pretty sure this is for enterprise support reasons and that it is by design, but it's still annoying for use when I'm just trying to talk to all of my circles of friends in one place. At work we use Teams and I have zero complaints so far. We've been using it since either 2019 or 2020. It's so much better than Zoom + Mattermost or, before that Skype for Business / Lync. shudder
- pmontra 4y ago
  I use Slack with several customers and it must keep them separate. Nobody would use it if it merged different companies into a single chat. For non business usage, maybe a unified chat could make sense even if I prefer to keep different groups separate as with Whatsapp groups or Telegram channels.
- keithnz 4y ago
  we use discord at work and the only bad thing is the screen sharing, many times we can get away with it but if we can't we usually just jump on a free zoom call
- aledalgrande 4y ago
  Discord is really bad for big groups of people and even worse if you need searchable content.
- Marsymars 4y ago
  Conversely, my friend group is mostly on Discord for group chats, and it’s the least favourite chat program I regularly use. I’m not interested in the constant upsells to their paid service, and I find the client fairly unpleasant to use with its lack of configurability (like I can’t even make the window as narrow as I want, there’s a minimum width to it that’s way too wide). And Discord’s pretty hostile to third-party clients, so I’m stuck using this client that I don’t like.
denysvitali 4y ago
Shameless plug: that's why we started FossTeams [1]. As most of us are forced to work with this thing, the least we can do is to find a workaround for the problem somehow... [1]: https://github.com/fossteams https://github.com/fossteams
- raghukolluru 4y ago
  Have you considered using official Teams Graph API as your backend layer? https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/resources/teams-api-overview?view=graph-rest-1.0 https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/resources/teams-...
  - denysvitali 4y ago
    Yes, and I don't want to follow that because most of the companies restrict third party apps. This means that you can't have a custom client for a good percentage of the companies.
- vxNsr 4y ago
  You’ve mentioned this app before, last I checked there isn’t a usable client yet. Are you just hoping to get more FOSS devs on board or has something changed?
  - denysvitali 4y ago
    The first one, for now I'm a solo developer on this thing :(
    - vxNsr 4y ago
      I would love to contribute to this but its way outside my area of expertise.
- raghukolluru 4y ago
  Have you considered using official Teams API? https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/resources/teams-api-overview?view=graph-rest-1.0 https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/resources/teams-...
josephd79 4y ago
Yep, it’s bundled with office 365 so I’m gonna assume that’s why most companies use it. Which is why we use it at work. I’m not a fan either. Desktop app just seems slow as hell on my Mac.
bastardoperator 4y ago
"I don't know anyone who chooses Teams." Easy, MSFT throws it in for free when you buy other products. That's why there is no incentive to make it better. If you eliminate slack or anything else, you get to say "See, by buying Microsoft we're getting our needs met and saving money". Same thing for GitHub, that's just a freebee depending on your spend at this point.
azalemeth 4y ago
If nothing else, Teams is horrendously inconsistent and one might naïvely think that MS would want to dogfood it better, with good statistics. This HN article now has nearly 600 comments of people – mostly – griping about Teams. A large number of them are replied to with people saying "Oh, it's never done that for me!" or, alternatively, "Teams never works fully, but at least X works" being replied to by "X has literally never worked for me". They're all right. I've had vast numbers of random errors – like the application bars just disappearing, or a thousand and one "Sorry, Something Went Wrong™!" errors, but fundamentally, it's indescribably awful. Periodically I'm asked to give feedback about how a call went. I always give one star. I'm not cruel and petty – it genuinely is always one star, where with my hardware, Zoom is pretty much real-time HD audio and video. People chop in or chop out, or I hear fan noise, or I wasn't able to join the link in Chrome because – well, it recognises that it's in Chrome but the version numbers don't match, and it thus asks me to download Chrome or Edge to join in Chrome – whatever. Microsoft must know that it's made a dog, and a very, very positive take would be that they want to make it better by having a larger base of competent developers to call upon to basically bug and betatest. If I worked there, I'd have jumped ship at the acquisition, however...
- onphonenow 4y ago
  I was just on such a call and the chop in / out is so weird
- bartvk 4y ago
  Exactly, thank you so much for putting the experience into words. The random errors are just so... astoundingly random. I've had problems with a headset on USB-C (Sennheiser EPOS). Teams would connect once, and then never again. Another time it would stop responding to any click. Then it would reload whenever changing team/channel. And then it would no longer show any notifications. I haven't seen an app with that amount of apparently completely random errors, often not reproducible either. It's like a Bethesda game.
  - courgette 4y ago
    Yah Bethesda game is fitting. For me it’s the text formatting. Why can’t I express a pretty table unless pasting it from xls? Why code blocks are useless and unreadable. And how HOW do I exit a quoteblock if the quote reach the last line. ( I now always type a character on the last line before starting a block quote ) Call themselves are fine, not great, but damn. Writing text is reminding of text formatting in early version of ms-word.
jeffy90 4y ago
I used to work at LinkedIn (owned by microsoft) and about 2 years ago they announced engineering was switching from zoom/slack to teams. There was significant uproar and LinkedIn leadership ended up reversing the decision. To my knowledge LinkedIn engineering is still on zoom/slack.
wdb 4y ago
Sounds like a good idea from a compliance and risk side of things to require a particular comms platform. If I had to choose I would pick Teams over Google Chat though
0xbadcafebee 4y ago
> it's telling that Microsoft has to require folks to use Teams. Most people, when they get comfortable with something, are averse to change. Even if the thing they would change to is better than what they have, they still won't want to learn a new thing. Not saying that's the case here. But without real data to lead a decision, people just do what they prefer, rather than what's better. (I use both Slack and Teams daily within my company, and while I prefer Slack, I could probably learn to deal with Teams) A large organization may have to force a change in order to reap benefits. And there are significant benefits to unifying communications. There are also workarounds and alternative solutions, so you usually need to invest some serious time in evaluating a huge switch to know what's best. Or, you can just make a decision, pull the trigger, and live with the consequences (an "executive decision")
- analog31 4y ago
  People love change. Look how Google, Amazon, and social media took the world by storm. And pocket calculators, smart phones, large screen TV's, the list goes on. People like changes that benefit them. On the other hand, probably the #1 user request for enterprise software is: Please don't change anything. This tells you something about the software. Common reasons are: * The last major change broke everything and we couldn't do our jobs for weeks. * The new system has nobody to help us when there's a problem. * All of our files / contacts / messages disappeared, or we can't find them any more. * Meanwhile, we're still expected to keep up the pace of work.
  - 8note 4y ago
    For enterprise software, people don't like solving a problem twice. Responding to the change doesn't move forward current goals, so any change is bad -- the current problems have been mitigated, so even something that gets rid of the old problems at the expense of needing to to some work to integrate, with uncertainty about new problems is bad.
  - leoedin 4y ago
    Don't forget * The workflow to use your software is so unintuitive I've had to learn it by muscle memory People don't mind when a nice discoverable UI adds some more features. They don't like it when a horrible poorly thought out one that they had to painfully learn is suddenly different. That button that used to be hidden in the edit menu? Now it's on a ribbon menu which has to be expanded. Good luck hunting!
hboon 4y ago
I remember the first 1-2 years after the iPhone was released, I see Microsoft employees (I mostly see sales and presales folks) using their iPhones under the table or when the meeting attendees from other companies aren't around. Heard they were supposed to use them. Says something.
- sgerenser 4y ago
  Ballmer famously grabbed an employees iPhone and pretended to stomp on it: https://www.businessinsider.com/ballmer-snatches-microsoft-employees-iphone-at-company-meeting-pretends-to-stomp-on-it-2009-9 https://www.businessinsider.com/ballmer-snatches-microsoft-e...
- hboon 4y ago
  Too late to edit. Should be: > Heard they weren't supposed to use them.
wkat4242 4y ago
I think the biggest problem with Teams is the leadership's strategy. They seem to be focusing on adding as many glossy features as quickly as possible. The quality, performance and consistency doesn't seem to be a point of consideration at all. Yet for a user who spends a lot of time in it each day, I really don't care about animated waves on top of my video, or this together mode. I just want it to work and not take ages to open, show stale status info until I click on a user, have choppy video, running my mac's fans on full blast, and be so cluttery that it's almost impossible to find back information we shared in chats in the past. And the worst thing for me: the information density is so low. These big bubbles around everything seem to care more about looking pretty than to actually show information and cause way too much scrolling. Slack does this so much better. The Teams guys can learn so much from their VS Code colleagues. It's really weird how one company can produce one of the worst infamous electron apps and also the gold standard best one at the same time. Ps and please, tell me what's going wrong. "Something went wrong" is ridiculous. And let me log into multiple tenants at the same time without switching.
- ryanbliss 4y ago
  Pro tip: go to settings. In general, there is a "Chat density" setting. Change that to "Compact". Wish this was the default because it is so much better!
- kneebonian 4y ago
  It's CDD, checklist driven development. When you are competing against another product in the enterprise space the people making the decision probably won't be using what you are selling often but they will look at the list of features, so money spent adding new features is more important and higher prioritized than stability reliability or any other nonfunctional requirement.
  - userbinator 4y ago
    [flagged]
  - wkat4242 4y ago
    I see, but I doubt that makes sense here though. The main selling point for teams is that it's free for existing M365 customers. Microsoft is aiming specifically at a "quick win" for IT managers to cut a competing product and replace it with something they're paying for anyway. And usually the top would spend a lot of time in meeting themselves too, it's not something they won't be using themselves. But I know what you mean, in our company the top execs have their own support team so they don't even know how bad our outsourced support is. A lot of production issues are streamlined for them because of this.
luckman212 4y ago
It's boring reading comments like these. Really? 2.5 years of "nothing but poor experiences"? I have to ask: what the hell is wrong with your computer? I started using Teams heavily in 2020 and yes, back then it was unequivocally the worst of the bunch. But I've seen it make great strides, and it's been many months, perhaps years since I've really had any problems with it. Audio, video, screen sharing, PSTN dial-in, whiteboard, call handoff between mobile app and desktop... it all works fine. I'm not using anything special. Just a run-of-the-mill MacBook Air. They started pushing out an Arm-native build for macOS last year and that really solved the slow perf and battery drain. As long as you stay reasonably current with updates, Teams works just fine. It's just lazy at this point to bash Teams "because".
- Unknoob 4y ago
  Or maybe people just have different experiences? I ran teams on a fairly powerful i9-equipped MacBook Pro and it was unbearable. Couldn't even scroll up to older messages without it freezing up, the integrations with Office 365 were also really slow.
- userbinator 4y ago
  I have to ask: what the hell is wrong with your perception? What other IM/AV applications have you used before, and on what hardware? If you've never seen better, it's not surprising that you'd think Teams is good. I vividly remember that 20 years ago there was MSN Messenger, and the experience was far better than that of Teams on hardware at least an order of magnitude less powerful. After that was (pre-MS) Skype, which was also not that bad. Teams is an absolute pig in comparison. It works --- just barely. Audio and video calls are probably what it does best, and "best" is relative. For IM, it's beyond horrible.
  - what-the-grump 4y ago
    Really? I use zoom for hours and it regularly eats my PC. If teams works just barely there is something wrong with your setup. None of the chat/im applications work barely. They work, to a point, then crash/glitch/etc. Let’s see, Slack IM notifications on mobile are garbage, I’m just going to assume that I will miss them at this point. Slack audio is an actual joke, we redirect it to teams… Zoom, eats our computers. We screen share 3-4 hours someone’s screen will turn black because the video card driver will crash, daily. Google, does mostly ok for calls without sharing and one person speaking. Limited support for physical devices, calls, etc. noise suppression is minimal so having more than one person unmuted is going to blow an ear drum. Limited features. GoTo, as long as you are using it as a phone and not an app, you can make a call hurray! Webex is crap end to end, but you will join a session and get through a call, mostly without blowing up. Feature rich? No. Teams, let’s see random client gui crashes, but the call stays up so you can keep talking but can’t do anything? Probably weekly occurrence on the current release. Sensitive to https termination in networks and offload, oh hell yes. Forgets camera mappings just like slack every time? Yes and yes. Continues ringing on your phone if you pickup on desktop. Yes just like zoom, but at least it can transfer to desktop, most of the time. I use all of them, for clients, daily, weekly, monthly. Teams by far is the most feature rich client. Somewhere in the middle of consistency, stability, etc. Is it magical and poops unicorns? No but ya’ll need to stop being dramatic. They all work, mostly, some have cool features, some are dead in the water like slack, WebEx, GoTo, etc. MS is dumping tons of money into developing teams, they are going to break a lot of eggs, less than in 2020 but still enough to make a mess.
dotnet00 4y ago
I get the option between Teams, Skype and Zoom. Teams by far is the best of the bunch, even on Linux. Skype is just a complete non-starter and Zoom's UI is so horrible it's surprising the company is valued as high as it is.
grumpyprole 4y ago
> Just an awful product all around It's all relative, anyone that's been forced to use "Skype for Business", would welcome Teams with open arms.
zrobotics 4y ago
I have a surface pro 7,running windows 11. Video calls in teams will reliably cause an actual BSOD (blue screen of death for the younger readers) , and my other coworker with the same hardware experiences the same issue. I don't have issues in zoom or Google meet, but teams video calls will reliably cause an honest to God BSOD. The first couple of times it happened I was a little bit nostalgic, I hadn't seen that since XP and even with XP it was rare. I don't know how I could have a better environment to run teams, I'm using Microsoft hardware, running a Microsoft camera driver, on a Microsoft OS, using a Microsoft messaging platform. Absolutely ridiculous, thankfully we only have one external vendor who uses teams. Ironically, that vendor is an oracle provider, so their whole existence just revolves around hideous software.
rib3ye 4y ago
Can you imagine the morale of an engineer/designer known for working on the worst-in-class product?
nstart 4y ago
Fwiw, I do know quite a few companies outside the tech space that use, and even love teams. These are the ones where I have personally gotten to see how they use teams: 2 car sale companies. 1 Accounting shop. 1 ultra large company that owns multiple types of businesses across 4 different countries. A few real estate businesses. The vast majority of people using it have said they are happy and several have even been excited to show off their setups. All of them said that it allowed them to go remote during the pandemic and has helped them stay flexible once movement and office work started returning to normal. The way they use it is also interesting. It’s not just chat. They integrate a whole host of apps directly into it including sales pipeline tools, document management, and project management. We are not talking about chat bots either. We are taking integrated apps+interfaces. All their meeting happen in MS teams itself. The multinational has a non trivial arrangements using multiple instances where some are separated for client convos and others are for different teams. I use the term interesting because the way they use it is nothing like how I’ve ever seen any slack being used. And I don’t think I’ll ever see slack supporting that. Putting it out there because I think there’s a world of use cases for ms teams that doesn’t involve people being forced to use a bad thing.
- brmgb 4y ago
  Yes, that's how most people use MS Teams. It's extremely useful. The sharing space for documents is good. Collaborative editing in Office is good. Conferencing is good. Presenting from Powerpoint is good. It's the same thing in every discussion involving Teams: most HN readers don't realise just how unusual the tools they use and what they want are with regards to the average job.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    > most HN readers don't realise just how unusual the tools they use and what they want are with regards to the average job. Probably because it literally doesn't matter what experience other have. The only thing that matters to me about a tool is if it's helping or hurting. Teams does both, which I consider damning because there are other tools available that are much lighter on the "hurting" side. But companies don't actually seem to care about things like that. They see that they are getting Teams "for free", and so that's what we're forced to use.
wonderwonder 4y ago
Teams makes no sense. The audio on it is objectively terrible for calls. Zoom is crystal clear [Its UI has issues though] but on teams I have to actually move my head closer to the computer speakers. Another interesting aspect of it is that it appears actually limit the volume. I plug in better speakers during a call and no change. On zoom it just auto sense the new speakers and boom louder. I don't understand why teams constantly asks me if I want to upload a new version of a document when I upload a document, the answer is always yes, that's why I am uploading it. I dont care what you do with the original. I am sure there is a way to fix this but I don't have the energy to figure it out, I just want it to work like slack. Why does it have a separate notification area for people using emojis that makes me click outside of the chat to remove the notification? The entire thing is so far removed from intuitive and "it just works" that I almost think its intentional.
Lutger 4y ago
We changed from teams to google meet when we otherwise do everything in 365 just for the video conferencing. Teams was so bad, it was costing us a lot of frustration and time, working mostly remote it seriously impeded our ability to do work. We still use teams for chat, but it always bogs my mind how broken it is, especially for devs. The last time I used slack for work was maybe 7 years ago, I still miss that. Being forced to move to teams killed any sense of online community in the workplace, biggest example of how tools can actually shape culture.
HeavyStorm 4y ago
That's a lot of naivette. Corporations _require_ we use stuff everyday. And when that stuff is something you build yourself, it makes zero sense that github is still using something else.
hammock 4y ago
>there's a difference between "I chose an email/identity platform that I know and I guess I'll use its chat app too" and "I evaluated team chat offerings and Teams is our top pick.” You literally just described the strategy for every Microsoft software ever. MS Word (vs Word Perfect) comes to mind

jerrygenser 4y ago

Why did you need HIPAA Compliance for your chat app? Internal discussion about patients that include PHI?

generalk 4y ago
Bingo. Nearly impossible for our staff to do their jobs and not discuss something considered PHI.

npteljes 4y ago

>it's telling that Microsoft has to require folks to use Teams. Not really I think, considering that MS bought GitHub, with all of its already existing culture. I see this move as them homogenizing the infrastructure. And also not willing to pay to another company for a product that's actually their competition.

generalk 4y ago
Of course, and I can't fault Microsoft for that, even if (having been on the bad end of a similar acquisition and IT merge) it sucks for GitHub. My point was: GitHub as an organization didn't choose Teams willingly, and are still paying for Slack and only using Teams for video conferencing. Of all the explanations of why that might be, the easiest to land on is "because Teams just isn't that good."
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- waste_monk 4y ago
  Or it could just be that "this is the way we've always done it" / that Slack has enough inertia in the organisation that changing workflow, updating shortcuts, etc. is inconvenient and thus left until the last minute to change over. I haven't used slack but broadly speaking Teams / Zoom / all of the other platforms I've used have been roughly the same, in that they all get the job of text and (usually) video communications done. Some might be a bit nicer to use than others but largely it doesn't matter which one you use as long as everyone is on the same platform.
  - FridgeSeal 4y ago
    In my previous workplaces I have used primarily Slack, with teams for larger video calls. In my current work, it’s 100% teams. I’d be doing in my heels over swapping to teams as well if I was GitHub, using it for any kind of text communication is such a massive downgrade.
- hnbad 4y ago
  Given how human psychology works, Occam's razor would suggest the most likely explanation is "it's not sufficiently better to overcome the inertia of everyone already being accustomed to what they're using". HN of all places should know better than to believe that people using one thing instead of another must mean the other thing is worse.
4y ago

chaostheory 4y ago

Are your company’s MS instances on premise or cloud based? The reason I ask is because nearly all of the negative experiences I’ve had with Microsoft stem from either their native apps or poorly configured on premise servers. This is anecdotal since there’s no wide ranging data, but Teams works just fine where I work. Integration with Outlook is also great, but we have a O365 plan that is completely managed and run from the cloud.

mfer 4y ago

On a regular basis I use Teams, Zoom, and Jitsi for video conferencing. Teams isn't the most troublesome of the set. > I'm sure this is just Microsoft unifying everyone on the same comms platform, but seriously, I don't know anyone who chooses Teams. In big companies like GitHub people don't typically choose their own video conference platform. It's picked for them. For Microsoft I can see a huge benefit to using Teams at GitHub. That's cost. Microsoft can use Teams at cost. That's a better price that those outside Microsoft can get it. It's a better deal than paying for Zoom. At a time when expenses are being cut it's hard to justify paying for a competitors platform.

airpoint 4y ago
Curious now, which one would you say is the most troublesome in your experience out of those three then? And why…
- nl 4y ago
  Not the OP, but Jitsi is terrible. For me, ranked: Zoom Google Meet Discord Slack Teams Anything else
  - vineyardmike 4y ago
    > Jitsi is terrible. But it gets points for being open source and self hostable. I appreciate that. For me, it’s Google Meet (best UI, I like the waiting room, etc) Amazon Chime (I like the ringing features, integrated chat) Jitsi (OSS etc) Zoom (It’s ok, yes, but the company is questionable and the UI is so so) Etc Teams (never used tbh, but I used corporate Skype before rebranding and it never worked right)
    - nl 4y ago
      I'm too old to put up with software that doesn't work sorely because it is open source.
      - 4y ago

ragingroosevelt 4y ago

Sample size of 1, but... In my personal life, I got all my friends on Discord and we've been really happy with that. It's screen sharing seems tuned for video games, though, and sucks for sharing non-game applications. We all set up Teams accounts because it does so much better with screen sharing. I haven't tried Slack recently but I really disliked that I needed a different account on each server and the UI didn't seem to unify the servers together in a convenient way like discord does. I'm pretty sure this is for enterprise support reasons and that it is by design, but it's still annoying for use when I'm just trying to talk to all of my circles of friends in one place. At work we use Teams and I have zero complaints so far. We've been using it since either 2019 or 2020. It's so much better than Zoom + Mattermost or, before that Skype for Business / Lync. shudder

pmontra 4y ago
I use Slack with several customers and it must keep them separate. Nobody would use it if it merged different companies into a single chat. For non business usage, maybe a unified chat could make sense even if I prefer to keep different groups separate as with Whatsapp groups or Telegram channels.
keithnz 4y ago
we use discord at work and the only bad thing is the screen sharing, many times we can get away with it but if we can't we usually just jump on a free zoom call
aledalgrande 4y ago
Discord is really bad for big groups of people and even worse if you need searchable content.
Marsymars 4y ago
Conversely, my friend group is mostly on Discord for group chats, and it’s the least favourite chat program I regularly use. I’m not interested in the constant upsells to their paid service, and I find the client fairly unpleasant to use with its lack of configurability (like I can’t even make the window as narrow as I want, there’s a minimum width to it that’s way too wide). And Discord’s pretty hostile to third-party clients, so I’m stuck using this client that I don’t like.

denysvitali 4y ago

Shameless plug: that's why we started FossTeams [1]. As most of us are forced to work with this thing, the least we can do is to find a workaround for the problem somehow... [1]: https://github.com/fossteams https://github.com/fossteams

raghukolluru 4y ago
Have you considered using official Teams Graph API as your backend layer? https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/resources/teams-api-overview?view=graph-rest-1.0 https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/resources/teams-...
- denysvitali 4y ago
  Yes, and I don't want to follow that because most of the companies restrict third party apps. This means that you can't have a custom client for a good percentage of the companies.
vxNsr 4y ago
You’ve mentioned this app before, last I checked there isn’t a usable client yet. Are you just hoping to get more FOSS devs on board or has something changed?
- denysvitali 4y ago
  The first one, for now I'm a solo developer on this thing :(
  - vxNsr 4y ago
    I would love to contribute to this but its way outside my area of expertise.
raghukolluru 4y ago
Have you considered using official Teams API? https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/resources/teams-api-overview?view=graph-rest-1.0 https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/resources/teams-...

josephd79 4y ago

Yep, it’s bundled with office 365 so I’m gonna assume that’s why most companies use it. Which is why we use it at work. I’m not a fan either. Desktop app just seems slow as hell on my Mac.

bastardoperator 4y ago

"I don't know anyone who chooses Teams." Easy, MSFT throws it in for free when you buy other products. That's why there is no incentive to make it better. If you eliminate slack or anything else, you get to say "See, by buying Microsoft we're getting our needs met and saving money". Same thing for GitHub, that's just a freebee depending on your spend at this point.

azalemeth 4y ago

If nothing else, Teams is horrendously inconsistent and one might naïvely think that MS would want to dogfood it better, with good statistics. This HN article now has nearly 600 comments of people – mostly – griping about Teams. A large number of them are replied to with people saying "Oh, it's never done that for me!" or, alternatively, "Teams never works fully, but at least X works" being replied to by "X has literally never worked for me". They're all right. I've had vast numbers of random errors – like the application bars just disappearing, or a thousand and one "Sorry, Something Went Wrong™!" errors, but fundamentally, it's indescribably awful. Periodically I'm asked to give feedback about how a call went. I always give one star. I'm not cruel and petty – it genuinely is always one star, where with my hardware, Zoom is pretty much real-time HD audio and video. People chop in or chop out, or I hear fan noise, or I wasn't able to join the link in Chrome because – well, it recognises that it's in Chrome but the version numbers don't match, and it thus asks me to download Chrome or Edge to join in Chrome – whatever. Microsoft must know that it's made a dog, and a very, very positive take would be that they want to make it better by having a larger base of competent developers to call upon to basically bug and betatest. If I worked there, I'd have jumped ship at the acquisition, however...

onphonenow 4y ago
I was just on such a call and the chop in / out is so weird
bartvk 4y ago
Exactly, thank you so much for putting the experience into words. The random errors are just so... astoundingly random. I've had problems with a headset on USB-C (Sennheiser EPOS). Teams would connect once, and then never again. Another time it would stop responding to any click. Then it would reload whenever changing team/channel. And then it would no longer show any notifications. I haven't seen an app with that amount of apparently completely random errors, often not reproducible either. It's like a Bethesda game.
- courgette 4y ago
  Yah Bethesda game is fitting. For me it’s the text formatting. Why can’t I express a pretty table unless pasting it from xls? Why code blocks are useless and unreadable. And how HOW do I exit a quoteblock if the quote reach the last line. ( I now always type a character on the last line before starting a block quote ) Call themselves are fine, not great, but damn. Writing text is reminding of text formatting in early version of ms-word.

jeffy90 4y ago

I used to work at LinkedIn (owned by microsoft) and about 2 years ago they announced engineering was switching from zoom/slack to teams. There was significant uproar and LinkedIn leadership ended up reversing the decision. To my knowledge LinkedIn engineering is still on zoom/slack.

wdb 4y ago

Sounds like a good idea from a compliance and risk side of things to require a particular comms platform. If I had to choose I would pick Teams over Google Chat though

0xbadcafebee 4y ago

> it's telling that Microsoft has to require folks to use Teams. Most people, when they get comfortable with something, are averse to change. Even if the thing they would change to is better than what they have, they still won't want to learn a new thing. Not saying that's the case here. But without real data to lead a decision, people just do what they prefer, rather than what's better. (I use both Slack and Teams daily within my company, and while I prefer Slack, I could probably learn to deal with Teams) A large organization may have to force a change in order to reap benefits. And there are significant benefits to unifying communications. There are also workarounds and alternative solutions, so you usually need to invest some serious time in evaluating a huge switch to know what's best. Or, you can just make a decision, pull the trigger, and live with the consequences (an "executive decision")

analog31 4y ago
People love change. Look how Google, Amazon, and social media took the world by storm. And pocket calculators, smart phones, large screen TV's, the list goes on. People like changes that benefit them. On the other hand, probably the #1 user request for enterprise software is: Please don't change anything. This tells you something about the software. Common reasons are: * The last major change broke everything and we couldn't do our jobs for weeks. * The new system has nobody to help us when there's a problem. * All of our files / contacts / messages disappeared, or we can't find them any more. * Meanwhile, we're still expected to keep up the pace of work.
- 8note 4y ago
  For enterprise software, people don't like solving a problem twice. Responding to the change doesn't move forward current goals, so any change is bad -- the current problems have been mitigated, so even something that gets rid of the old problems at the expense of needing to to some work to integrate, with uncertainty about new problems is bad.
- leoedin 4y ago
  Don't forget * The workflow to use your software is so unintuitive I've had to learn it by muscle memory People don't mind when a nice discoverable UI adds some more features. They don't like it when a horrible poorly thought out one that they had to painfully learn is suddenly different. That button that used to be hidden in the edit menu? Now it's on a ribbon menu which has to be expanded. Good luck hunting!

hboon 4y ago

I remember the first 1-2 years after the iPhone was released, I see Microsoft employees (I mostly see sales and presales folks) using their iPhones under the table or when the meeting attendees from other companies aren't around. Heard they were supposed to use them. Says something.

sgerenser 4y ago
Ballmer famously grabbed an employees iPhone and pretended to stomp on it: https://www.businessinsider.com/ballmer-snatches-microsoft-employees-iphone-at-company-meeting-pretends-to-stomp-on-it-2009-9 https://www.businessinsider.com/ballmer-snatches-microsoft-e...
hboon 4y ago
Too late to edit. Should be: > Heard they weren't supposed to use them.

wkat4242 4y ago

I think the biggest problem with Teams is the leadership's strategy. They seem to be focusing on adding as many glossy features as quickly as possible. The quality, performance and consistency doesn't seem to be a point of consideration at all. Yet for a user who spends a lot of time in it each day, I really don't care about animated waves on top of my video, or this together mode. I just want it to work and not take ages to open, show stale status info until I click on a user, have choppy video, running my mac's fans on full blast, and be so cluttery that it's almost impossible to find back information we shared in chats in the past. And the worst thing for me: the information density is so low. These big bubbles around everything seem to care more about looking pretty than to actually show information and cause way too much scrolling. Slack does this so much better. The Teams guys can learn so much from their VS Code colleagues. It's really weird how one company can produce one of the worst infamous electron apps and also the gold standard best one at the same time. Ps and please, tell me what's going wrong. "Something went wrong" is ridiculous. And let me log into multiple tenants at the same time without switching.

ryanbliss 4y ago
Pro tip: go to settings. In general, there is a "Chat density" setting. Change that to "Compact". Wish this was the default because it is so much better!
kneebonian 4y ago
It's CDD, checklist driven development. When you are competing against another product in the enterprise space the people making the decision probably won't be using what you are selling often but they will look at the list of features, so money spent adding new features is more important and higher prioritized than stability reliability or any other nonfunctional requirement.
- userbinator 4y ago
  [flagged]
- wkat4242 4y ago
  I see, but I doubt that makes sense here though. The main selling point for teams is that it's free for existing M365 customers. Microsoft is aiming specifically at a "quick win" for IT managers to cut a competing product and replace it with something they're paying for anyway. And usually the top would spend a lot of time in meeting themselves too, it's not something they won't be using themselves. But I know what you mean, in our company the top execs have their own support team so they don't even know how bad our outsourced support is. A lot of production issues are streamlined for them because of this.

luckman212 4y ago

It's boring reading comments like these. Really? 2.5 years of "nothing but poor experiences"? I have to ask: what the hell is wrong with your computer? I started using Teams heavily in 2020 and yes, back then it was unequivocally the worst of the bunch. But I've seen it make great strides, and it's been many months, perhaps years since I've really had any problems with it. Audio, video, screen sharing, PSTN dial-in, whiteboard, call handoff between mobile app and desktop... it all works fine. I'm not using anything special. Just a run-of-the-mill MacBook Air. They started pushing out an Arm-native build for macOS last year and that really solved the slow perf and battery drain. As long as you stay reasonably current with updates, Teams works just fine. It's just lazy at this point to bash Teams "because".

Unknoob 4y ago
Or maybe people just have different experiences? I ran teams on a fairly powerful i9-equipped MacBook Pro and it was unbearable. Couldn't even scroll up to older messages without it freezing up, the integrations with Office 365 were also really slow.
userbinator 4y ago
I have to ask: what the hell is wrong with your perception? What other IM/AV applications have you used before, and on what hardware? If you've never seen better, it's not surprising that you'd think Teams is good. I vividly remember that 20 years ago there was MSN Messenger, and the experience was far better than that of Teams on hardware at least an order of magnitude less powerful. After that was (pre-MS) Skype, which was also not that bad. Teams is an absolute pig in comparison. It works --- just barely. Audio and video calls are probably what it does best, and "best" is relative. For IM, it's beyond horrible.
- what-the-grump 4y ago
  Really? I use zoom for hours and it regularly eats my PC. If teams works just barely there is something wrong with your setup. None of the chat/im applications work barely. They work, to a point, then crash/glitch/etc. Let’s see, Slack IM notifications on mobile are garbage, I’m just going to assume that I will miss them at this point. Slack audio is an actual joke, we redirect it to teams… Zoom, eats our computers. We screen share 3-4 hours someone’s screen will turn black because the video card driver will crash, daily. Google, does mostly ok for calls without sharing and one person speaking. Limited support for physical devices, calls, etc. noise suppression is minimal so having more than one person unmuted is going to blow an ear drum. Limited features. GoTo, as long as you are using it as a phone and not an app, you can make a call hurray! Webex is crap end to end, but you will join a session and get through a call, mostly without blowing up. Feature rich? No. Teams, let’s see random client gui crashes, but the call stays up so you can keep talking but can’t do anything? Probably weekly occurrence on the current release. Sensitive to https termination in networks and offload, oh hell yes. Forgets camera mappings just like slack every time? Yes and yes. Continues ringing on your phone if you pickup on desktop. Yes just like zoom, but at least it can transfer to desktop, most of the time. I use all of them, for clients, daily, weekly, monthly. Teams by far is the most feature rich client. Somewhere in the middle of consistency, stability, etc. Is it magical and poops unicorns? No but ya’ll need to stop being dramatic. They all work, mostly, some have cool features, some are dead in the water like slack, WebEx, GoTo, etc. MS is dumping tons of money into developing teams, they are going to break a lot of eggs, less than in 2020 but still enough to make a mess.

dotnet00 4y ago

I get the option between Teams, Skype and Zoom. Teams by far is the best of the bunch, even on Linux. Skype is just a complete non-starter and Zoom's UI is so horrible it's surprising the company is valued as high as it is.

grumpyprole 4y ago

> Just an awful product all around It's all relative, anyone that's been forced to use "Skype for Business", would welcome Teams with open arms.

zrobotics 4y ago

I have a surface pro 7,running windows 11. Video calls in teams will reliably cause an actual BSOD (blue screen of death for the younger readers) , and my other coworker with the same hardware experiences the same issue. I don't have issues in zoom or Google meet, but teams video calls will reliably cause an honest to God BSOD. The first couple of times it happened I was a little bit nostalgic, I hadn't seen that since XP and even with XP it was rare. I don't know how I could have a better environment to run teams, I'm using Microsoft hardware, running a Microsoft camera driver, on a Microsoft OS, using a Microsoft messaging platform. Absolutely ridiculous, thankfully we only have one external vendor who uses teams. Ironically, that vendor is an oracle provider, so their whole existence just revolves around hideous software.

rib3ye 4y ago

Can you imagine the morale of an engineer/designer known for working on the worst-in-class product?

nstart 4y ago

Fwiw, I do know quite a few companies outside the tech space that use, and even love teams. These are the ones where I have personally gotten to see how they use teams: 2 car sale companies. 1 Accounting shop. 1 ultra large company that owns multiple types of businesses across 4 different countries. A few real estate businesses. The vast majority of people using it have said they are happy and several have even been excited to show off their setups. All of them said that it allowed them to go remote during the pandemic and has helped them stay flexible once movement and office work started returning to normal. The way they use it is also interesting. It’s not just chat. They integrate a whole host of apps directly into it including sales pipeline tools, document management, and project management. We are not talking about chat bots either. We are taking integrated apps+interfaces. All their meeting happen in MS teams itself. The multinational has a non trivial arrangements using multiple instances where some are separated for client convos and others are for different teams. I use the term interesting because the way they use it is nothing like how I’ve ever seen any slack being used. And I don’t think I’ll ever see slack supporting that. Putting it out there because I think there’s a world of use cases for ms teams that doesn’t involve people being forced to use a bad thing.

brmgb 4y ago
Yes, that's how most people use MS Teams. It's extremely useful. The sharing space for documents is good. Collaborative editing in Office is good. Conferencing is good. Presenting from Powerpoint is good. It's the same thing in every discussion involving Teams: most HN readers don't realise just how unusual the tools they use and what they want are with regards to the average job.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  > most HN readers don't realise just how unusual the tools they use and what they want are with regards to the average job. Probably because it literally doesn't matter what experience other have. The only thing that matters to me about a tool is if it's helping or hurting. Teams does both, which I consider damning because there are other tools available that are much lighter on the "hurting" side. But companies don't actually seem to care about things like that. They see that they are getting Teams "for free", and so that's what we're forced to use.

wonderwonder 4y ago

Teams makes no sense. The audio on it is objectively terrible for calls. Zoom is crystal clear [Its UI has issues though] but on teams I have to actually move my head closer to the computer speakers. Another interesting aspect of it is that it appears actually limit the volume. I plug in better speakers during a call and no change. On zoom it just auto sense the new speakers and boom louder. I don't understand why teams constantly asks me if I want to upload a new version of a document when I upload a document, the answer is always yes, that's why I am uploading it. I dont care what you do with the original. I am sure there is a way to fix this but I don't have the energy to figure it out, I just want it to work like slack. Why does it have a separate notification area for people using emojis that makes me click outside of the chat to remove the notification? The entire thing is so far removed from intuitive and "it just works" that I almost think its intentional.

Lutger 4y ago

We changed from teams to google meet when we otherwise do everything in 365 just for the video conferencing. Teams was so bad, it was costing us a lot of frustration and time, working mostly remote it seriously impeded our ability to do work. We still use teams for chat, but it always bogs my mind how broken it is, especially for devs. The last time I used slack for work was maybe 7 years ago, I still miss that. Being forced to move to teams killed any sense of online community in the workplace, biggest example of how tools can actually shape culture.

HeavyStorm 4y ago

That's a lot of naivette. Corporations _require_ we use stuff everyday. And when that stuff is something you build yourself, it makes zero sense that github is still using something else.

hammock 4y ago

>there's a difference between "I chose an email/identity platform that I know and I guess I'll use its chat app too" and "I evaluated team chat offerings and Teams is our top pick.” You literally just described the strategy for every Microsoft software ever. MS Word (vs Word Perfect) comes to mind