9 ms·

Microsoft to separate Teams and Office globally amid antitrust scrutiny

72 points by comebhack 2y ago

isoprophlex 2y ago
But, you can still bet on the pricing to be such that you'd be insane not to subscribe to both.
- microtonal 2y ago
  The company started selling the two products separately in the EU and Switzerland on Aug. 31 last year. Yeah. The changes are already active in the EU and Office without teams is Euro 9.80 per month and with teams Euro 11.70. This will still convince managers to get Teams, torturing employees everywhere and murdering the competition. They are indeed trying to do the separation so that in practice everybody will get Office365 with Teams. (I think similarly, including OneDrive disrupts the market for file sync.)
metalrain 2y ago
I wonder what this means for Copilot integrations in Microsoft products?
Quinzel 2y ago
There are no words in the English language that exist that I can use to describe my disdain and hatred I have towards MS Teams. I hate it so much.
- redwood 2y ago
  That's how I feel about Microsoft generally
  - Quinzel 2y ago
    I actually don’t understand how Microsoft is still such a big player when its programs are so clunky and awful generally… And yet - my go to for writing anything is still Word -.-
    - ravst3s 2y ago
      you identified it - Windows & Office. These two products dominate every non-technical industry. I think MSFT makes mediocre software. But as long as those two gravy trains exist, they'll never lose.
    - xxs 2y ago
      by buying out the completion, e.g. skype. For the most part the triple "E" has not altered all that much with the time. Alternative venues include the default installation of windows to (almost) every laptop in existence.
      - Eudaimion 2y ago
        Do you have any recent examples? Skype acquisition was more than a decade ago ( during the Ballmar era).
        xxs 2y ago
        video game industry - zenimax, activision blizzard AI/speech recognition - nuance communications (the stuff behind apple's siri) side note: does linkedIn count?
        xxs 2y ago
        self reply since it's most relevant to "Teams", and I knew I had missed something. Microsoft did try to buy 'discord' but the price was not right.
        sunaookami 2y ago
        Not an acquisition per se but: OpenAI
    - snoopsnopp 2y ago
      Because capitalism is a lie, political power decides which tech companies get big, not innovation.
- Spooky23 2y ago
  According to “Spooky23’s universal law of chat”, the apogee of chat clients is circa 2002 AOL Instant Messenger, and chat clients can only get worse with time. Teams is unique as a combination of chat, phone and SharePoint client. Thus it was born an abomination and the laws of nature dictate that it must only get worse.
  - aunwick 2y ago
    Every rocket has apogee
  - hutattedonmyarm 2y ago
    Clearly the apogee was ICQ in the early 2000s
    - fragmede 2y ago
      uh oh https://youtu.be/RhGHerssyk4 https://youtu.be/RhGHerssyk4
    - Spooky23 2y ago
      ICQ was a magical program for sure.
  - Rinzler89 2y ago
    >and chat clients can only get worse with time Not just chat clients, but pretty much any stable piece of SW from a major corporation that reaches peak perfection, is forced to get worse and user hostile over time, because those VPs, execs and managers in charge of it want a promotion or need to justify their bonuses on a yearly basis, so they force needless changes to have something to present to the board every year till they jump ship or retire early with their masive stock piles. And then the next people who take over, have something to tear down and rebuild, so they can be the ones making their careers on "fixing" that product and the cycle of shittiness repeats. They are not products anymore that need to serve the best interest of the customers, but fiefdoms and vehicles designed to propel and fuel someone's ego and career advancements at all costs. It's an effect of perverse incentives in corporate promotions. You'll never make a career at these companies by doing QA or saying "well, the product we have was perfect already, so I did absolutely nothing to it, added no new features, just fixed some bugs and kicked back".
- tuwtuwtuwtuw 2y ago
  Maybe you should check if your employer offers therapist sessions if your work equipment causes that kind of reaction. Doesn't sound healthy, long term.
- abhinavk 2y ago
  It's ironic that VSCode (best performing Electron app) and Teams are made by the same MS. I know MS is gigantic and these being different orgs but expertise is still inside the company.
  - aunwick 2y ago
    Do you think company knows or cares?
  - dutchCourage 2y ago
    Teams was a rushed Slack clone MS pushed during the lockdowns. VSCode didn't have the same incentives. I was working for a large company using Office 365 back then. Our teams were using either Slack or Skype. The company pushed everyone towards Teams because it was included in 365 only to eventually backpedal and move everyone to Slack because Teams was an unfinished software. What's surprising to me is that they have had a few years to improve Teams yet its UX is still far behind Slack.
    - pid-1 2y ago
      Teams was included in M365 way before lockdowns.
      - dutchCourage 2y ago
        I stand corrected. They actually started phasing out Skype for businesses in September 2019. The timing is more of a coincidence. I do believe the lockdowns might have rushed the transition as the UX felt unfinished for years. I can't think of any other reason that might have pushed them into replacing Skype so quickly.
      - kyriakos 2y ago
        Unfortunately true we've been using it before covid but it was solidified in our day to day since
    - datavirtue 2y ago
      OMG, chat inside Vscode. (Crosses fingers)
petabit 2y ago
antitrusting by default untill too late design patterns
vouaobrasil 2y ago
Back when I read in detail about the original antitrust investigations into Microsoft regarding the browser and the OS, I truly thought these antitrust investigations were a good thing. Well, I still believe in antitrust laws, but I feel they have become much more of a symbolic gesture in a contellation of gestures that pay lip service to the function of law as something good for society. I mean, for the majority of people, does this really give us something good? How many businesses will now switch to a different product given the tight technical integration that Microsoft offers to large and medium-sized businesses? Tech companies have learned how to handle antitrust: now, they make their products highly interoperable and integrated. They also bundle their products and they KNOW that even if antitrust laws come to past, the initial entrenchment will already have done "the damage" of getting the product "out there", and the worst that happens to them is a small fine and some minor legal troubles, easily handled by the best legal teams. This is systemic to big tech: as consumers, we need much more than flabby antitrust investigations. We need big tech to be dissolved completely, and a limit on the absolute size of tech companies so that the Microsoft of the future would not even have the resources to create Microsoft Teams in the first place (if they were already focused on Microsoft Office).
- aunwick 2y ago
  I'm confounded. Backup 30 years and replace Microsoft with at&t and it sounds like the chorus line. Somewhere between agile is bullshit and Microsoft is bullshit is something that makes life and work better for all. Where is it?
  - vouaobrasil 2y ago
    Who knows, but it would be much easier to find if big tech did not exist. In that case, medium-sized organizations would have many more opportunities to try things and make a modest profit. As long as big tech exists, your ideal point will never be found.
- foolswisdom 2y ago
  Antitrust has almost never been applied to big tech, in part because antitrust enforcement in general is only given lip service for many decades. This environment means it's also very difficult for antitrust enforcers to win even if they wanted to. This has been changing recently though. https://www.thebignewsletter.com https://www.thebignewsletter.com is a great resource on these things.
probably_wrong 2y ago
Oh, look! It's rant time! > Teams, which was added to Office 365 in 2017 for free, subsequently replaced Skype for Business and became popular during the pandemic due in part to its video conferencing. Sorry, but no. Teams became popular during the pandemic because MS didn't give you a choice: with Skype deprecated and with your subscription paying for Teams whether you wanted or not, few IT managers would approve a second videoconference tool. MS used the pandemic to force all of us into being beta testers for a crappy tool that consumed every resource it found, ranging from your computer's CPU up to your patience and will to live. So let's not pretend that Teams succeeded for any reasons other than monopoly power.
- cm2187 2y ago
  To be honest skype for business was a piece of shit. Teams is an even bigger piece of shit. Don't think that made much difference to users.
  - xxs 2y ago
    'skype for business' was lync and had little to noting to do with skype, aside branding
  - Rinzler89 2y ago
    >skype for business Because Skype for business(what a shit name, why not call it Skype Enterprise?) wasn't Skype at all, it was just Lync renamed, which was Office Communicator renamed, which was Windows Messenger renamed, which was Exchange 2000 Conferencing renamed. It's like a Matroska doll of Scooby-Doo masks.
arcosdev 2y ago
Will that stop Teams from sucking?
mensetmanusman 2y ago
Good.
shiroiushi 2y ago
The regulators need to forbid MS from bundling these two at all, so that you have to pay separately for Teams, and that price is no different than if you subscribe to Office or not. The only way it should make any sense to use Teams is if they're basically giving it away for free or close-to-free (in which case the regulators can then bring a court case against them for "dumping").
- cjk2 2y ago
  Free is still too expensive.
- pards 2y ago
  > forbid MS from bundling these two at all, so that you have to pay separately for Teams, and that price is no different than if you subscribe to Office or not Agreed. As it stands, Teams will still be much cheaper than Slack so it's unlikely any enterprises will make the switch, given how entrenched Teams has become.
gardenhedge 2y ago
Lots of things are bad about teams. Here's one that annoyed me the other day: In a channel, I opened a power point presentation. It opened within Teams. I wanted to message someone about one slide. To do that, I had to leave the presentation, navigate to the chat section and search for the person I wanted to message. When typing out the message I realised I wanted to copy paste a phrase from the slide... but now the presentation is closed. So I go back to the channel, open the presentation, go to the slide, copy paste and then close the presentation and go back to the chat - infuriating! tldr: everything opening within teams is a poor ux
redbell 2y ago
> The European Commission has been investigating Microsoft's tying of Office and Teams since a 2020 complaint by Salesforce-owned, opens new tab competing workspace messaging app Slack. For reference, here is the complaint (2020): https://slack.com/blog/news/slack-files-eu-competition-complaint-against-microsoft https://slack.com/blog/news/slack-files-eu-competition-compl... In a nutshell: > The complaint details Microsoft’s illegal and anti-competitive practice of abusing its market dominance to extinguish competition in breach of European Union competition law. Microsoft has illegally tied its Teams product into its market-dominant Office productivity suite, force installing it for millions, blocking its removal, and hiding the true cost to enterprise customers. So basically, this behavior from MS is the same with IE being bundled in Windows in the 90s and, later, probably Media Player.
nerdjon 2y ago
So because of this bundling it has been a long time since I have used Slack. Is Slack still good or has it had its own problems? I hate using teams but I don’t want to try to push for Slack if it has also gone downhill.
- viraptor 2y ago
  Slack is ok. Its latest redesign added bugs and made the interface quite annoying. It could be much better with a few trivial tweaks, but it's not terrible either. Also, I don't know if teams handles it any better, but slack has absolutely no offline capabilities / cache on the desktop. And electron sucks for electron reasons.
- ghusto 2y ago
  I've never liked Slack, but it's UX perfection in comparison. I'm so sorry you have to tolerate MS Teams. Have you thought of quitting? Joking aside, it says a lot about a company when they use MS Teams.
chollida1 2y ago
I'v read this thread and there are soo many rants on teams. What specifically are teh workflow issues people have with teams? My experience is that someone books an online meeting, i get a teams link. When the meeting comes I click the link, everyeone's face shows up, we have the meeting and then close teams. I've never had any issue with teams, not even once. What are the issues people have with teams because there are a lot of rants about teams but no specific issues are mentioned. As a meeting tool its perfect, its there, just works and then goes away. Are the rants directed to it as a chat app? or a company wide messaging app? Because I use teams4-5 times a week and cant' think of a single time its failed me or crashed or slowed down during a meeting. its the definition of a tool that just works and then goes away until I need it again. What is making everyone so angry at the tool?
- quenix 2y ago
  I believe the rants are directed at its crappy performance as yet another bloated web app masquerading as a native program.
  - ryanjshaw 2y ago
    Try opening teams.microsoft.com in Edge and compare the memory usage with the app. On my system the website uses double the RAM.
- taspeotis 2y ago
  I think Teams is the best “all ‘round” for chat and video and screen sharing. Slack is best in class for chat though. Teams chat sucks in a few ways: * Posts? Why can’t messages be more lightweight. * No custom emojis like party parrot. * Total crapshoot whether it converts my three backticks into a code block. * Please fuck off with trying to offer me apps every time I paste a link.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - maxerickson 2y ago
jasoneckert 2y ago
Am I the only one reading this thinking that this is an April Fools joke (given the date)?!?
- ivanmontillam 2y ago
  You're not the only one, but it's hard to say. Does Reuters ever pull off April's Fool? I have no knowledge nor precedent. EDIT: Meditating a bit more about it, I don't think Reuters can afford to pull off a joke, as Reuters news cables can disrupt financial markets in such a way that could cause major damage.
aetherspawn 2y ago
I don’t mind Teams because the standardisation of it means that I can send Teams messages to someone in a completely different org by their email and 9/10 times it just works. As it stands, Teams is “free” for me (with Business Premium or E3 or something like that) and I’m not sure I like this news just because it sounds like more $$ for honestly the same outcome (I don’t care whether our chat app is good or not .. our messages go poof after a few days anyway. We just want something good-enough to get work done). Does this mean that now every other org is going to send me invite links to their org channels hosted on some random chat app?
Ekaros 2y ago
I wonder how far this de-bundling should be taken. Should actually there be complete ban for bundling more than single program in one solution. Like you could not have email and calendar in one, or something like Word and Excel. Cleary offering email+office suite in one is too far. And what about someone like Adobe, surely each of their softwares should be split up to own subscriptions and there should be no discounts for getting multiple at one time.
- maxerickson 2y ago
  Why stop there? No reason for the program you send email with to have message editing capabilities.
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
Official post: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/licensing/news/microsoft365-teams-ww https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/licensing/news/microsoft365-...
stadia42 2y ago
Can someone explain to me if the article in The Information on this topic is completely dumb, or whether I'm dumb for misunderstanding it: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/microsoft-unbundles-teams-are-customers-better-off https://www.theinformation.com/articles/microsoft-unbundles-.... (You don't need to pay, just read the few paragraphs visible for free.) The author claims there's no benefit to consumers because prices went up. The whole point of the rule is to prevent MS from killing off competition by keeping the prices low. So the benefit should be in the form of a healthier ecosystem (and long-term high quality / price tradeoff) rather than the price level today.

72 points by comebhack 2y ago

isoprophlex 2y ago

But, you can still bet on the pricing to be such that you'd be insane not to subscribe to both.

microtonal 2y ago
The company started selling the two products separately in the EU and Switzerland on Aug. 31 last year. Yeah. The changes are already active in the EU and Office without teams is Euro 9.80 per month and with teams Euro 11.70. This will still convince managers to get Teams, torturing employees everywhere and murdering the competition. They are indeed trying to do the separation so that in practice everybody will get Office365 with Teams. (I think similarly, including OneDrive disrupts the market for file sync.)

metalrain 2y ago

I wonder what this means for Copilot integrations in Microsoft products?

Quinzel 2y ago

There are no words in the English language that exist that I can use to describe my disdain and hatred I have towards MS Teams. I hate it so much.

redwood 2y ago
That's how I feel about Microsoft generally
- Quinzel 2y ago
  I actually don’t understand how Microsoft is still such a big player when its programs are so clunky and awful generally… And yet - my go to for writing anything is still Word -.-
  - ravst3s 2y ago
    you identified it - Windows & Office. These two products dominate every non-technical industry. I think MSFT makes mediocre software. But as long as those two gravy trains exist, they'll never lose.
  - xxs 2y ago
    by buying out the completion, e.g. skype. For the most part the triple "E" has not altered all that much with the time. Alternative venues include the default installation of windows to (almost) every laptop in existence.
    - Eudaimion 2y ago
      Do you have any recent examples? Skype acquisition was more than a decade ago ( during the Ballmar era).
      - xxs 2y ago
        video game industry - zenimax, activision blizzard AI/speech recognition - nuance communications (the stuff behind apple's siri) side note: does linkedIn count?
        xxs 2y ago
        self reply since it's most relevant to "Teams", and I knew I had missed something. Microsoft did try to buy 'discord' but the price was not right.
      - sunaookami 2y ago
        Not an acquisition per se but: OpenAI
  - snoopsnopp 2y ago
    Because capitalism is a lie, political power decides which tech companies get big, not innovation.
Spooky23 2y ago
According to “Spooky23’s universal law of chat”, the apogee of chat clients is circa 2002 AOL Instant Messenger, and chat clients can only get worse with time. Teams is unique as a combination of chat, phone and SharePoint client. Thus it was born an abomination and the laws of nature dictate that it must only get worse.
- aunwick 2y ago
  Every rocket has apogee
- hutattedonmyarm 2y ago
  Clearly the apogee was ICQ in the early 2000s
  - fragmede 2y ago
    uh oh https://youtu.be/RhGHerssyk4 https://youtu.be/RhGHerssyk4
  - Spooky23 2y ago
    ICQ was a magical program for sure.
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  >and chat clients can only get worse with time Not just chat clients, but pretty much any stable piece of SW from a major corporation that reaches peak perfection, is forced to get worse and user hostile over time, because those VPs, execs and managers in charge of it want a promotion or need to justify their bonuses on a yearly basis, so they force needless changes to have something to present to the board every year till they jump ship or retire early with their masive stock piles. And then the next people who take over, have something to tear down and rebuild, so they can be the ones making their careers on "fixing" that product and the cycle of shittiness repeats. They are not products anymore that need to serve the best interest of the customers, but fiefdoms and vehicles designed to propel and fuel someone's ego and career advancements at all costs. It's an effect of perverse incentives in corporate promotions. You'll never make a career at these companies by doing QA or saying "well, the product we have was perfect already, so I did absolutely nothing to it, added no new features, just fixed some bugs and kicked back".
tuwtuwtuwtuw 2y ago
Maybe you should check if your employer offers therapist sessions if your work equipment causes that kind of reaction. Doesn't sound healthy, long term.
abhinavk 2y ago
It's ironic that VSCode (best performing Electron app) and Teams are made by the same MS. I know MS is gigantic and these being different orgs but expertise is still inside the company.
- aunwick 2y ago
  Do you think company knows or cares?
- dutchCourage 2y ago
  Teams was a rushed Slack clone MS pushed during the lockdowns. VSCode didn't have the same incentives. I was working for a large company using Office 365 back then. Our teams were using either Slack or Skype. The company pushed everyone towards Teams because it was included in 365 only to eventually backpedal and move everyone to Slack because Teams was an unfinished software. What's surprising to me is that they have had a few years to improve Teams yet its UX is still far behind Slack.
  - pid-1 2y ago
    Teams was included in M365 way before lockdowns.
    - dutchCourage 2y ago
      I stand corrected. They actually started phasing out Skype for businesses in September 2019. The timing is more of a coincidence. I do believe the lockdowns might have rushed the transition as the UX felt unfinished for years. I can't think of any other reason that might have pushed them into replacing Skype so quickly.
    - kyriakos 2y ago
      Unfortunately true we've been using it before covid but it was solidified in our day to day since
  - datavirtue 2y ago
    OMG, chat inside Vscode. (Crosses fingers)

petabit 2y ago

antitrusting by default untill too late design patterns

vouaobrasil 2y ago

Back when I read in detail about the original antitrust investigations into Microsoft regarding the browser and the OS, I truly thought these antitrust investigations were a good thing. Well, I still believe in antitrust laws, but I feel they have become much more of a symbolic gesture in a contellation of gestures that pay lip service to the function of law as something good for society. I mean, for the majority of people, does this really give us something good? How many businesses will now switch to a different product given the tight technical integration that Microsoft offers to large and medium-sized businesses? Tech companies have learned how to handle antitrust: now, they make their products highly interoperable and integrated. They also bundle their products and they KNOW that even if antitrust laws come to past, the initial entrenchment will already have done "the damage" of getting the product "out there", and the worst that happens to them is a small fine and some minor legal troubles, easily handled by the best legal teams. This is systemic to big tech: as consumers, we need much more than flabby antitrust investigations. We need big tech to be dissolved completely, and a limit on the absolute size of tech companies so that the Microsoft of the future would not even have the resources to create Microsoft Teams in the first place (if they were already focused on Microsoft Office).

aunwick 2y ago
I'm confounded. Backup 30 years and replace Microsoft with at&t and it sounds like the chorus line. Somewhere between agile is bullshit and Microsoft is bullshit is something that makes life and work better for all. Where is it?
- vouaobrasil 2y ago
  Who knows, but it would be much easier to find if big tech did not exist. In that case, medium-sized organizations would have many more opportunities to try things and make a modest profit. As long as big tech exists, your ideal point will never be found.
foolswisdom 2y ago
Antitrust has almost never been applied to big tech, in part because antitrust enforcement in general is only given lip service for many decades. This environment means it's also very difficult for antitrust enforcers to win even if they wanted to. This has been changing recently though. https://www.thebignewsletter.com https://www.thebignewsletter.com is a great resource on these things.

probably_wrong 2y ago

Oh, look! It's rant time! > Teams, which was added to Office 365 in 2017 for free, subsequently replaced Skype for Business and became popular during the pandemic due in part to its video conferencing. Sorry, but no. Teams became popular during the pandemic because MS didn't give you a choice: with Skype deprecated and with your subscription paying for Teams whether you wanted or not, few IT managers would approve a second videoconference tool. MS used the pandemic to force all of us into being beta testers for a crappy tool that consumed every resource it found, ranging from your computer's CPU up to your patience and will to live. So let's not pretend that Teams succeeded for any reasons other than monopoly power.

cm2187 2y ago
To be honest skype for business was a piece of shit. Teams is an even bigger piece of shit. Don't think that made much difference to users.
- xxs 2y ago
  'skype for business' was lync and had little to noting to do with skype, aside branding
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  >skype for business Because Skype for business(what a shit name, why not call it Skype Enterprise?) wasn't Skype at all, it was just Lync renamed, which was Office Communicator renamed, which was Windows Messenger renamed, which was Exchange 2000 Conferencing renamed. It's like a Matroska doll of Scooby-Doo masks.

arcosdev 2y ago

Will that stop Teams from sucking?

mensetmanusman 2y ago

Good.

shiroiushi 2y ago

The regulators need to forbid MS from bundling these two at all, so that you have to pay separately for Teams, and that price is no different than if you subscribe to Office or not. The only way it should make any sense to use Teams is if they're basically giving it away for free or close-to-free (in which case the regulators can then bring a court case against them for "dumping").

cjk2 2y ago
Free is still too expensive.
pards 2y ago
> forbid MS from bundling these two at all, so that you have to pay separately for Teams, and that price is no different than if you subscribe to Office or not Agreed. As it stands, Teams will still be much cheaper than Slack so it's unlikely any enterprises will make the switch, given how entrenched Teams has become.

gardenhedge 2y ago

Lots of things are bad about teams. Here's one that annoyed me the other day: In a channel, I opened a power point presentation. It opened within Teams. I wanted to message someone about one slide. To do that, I had to leave the presentation, navigate to the chat section and search for the person I wanted to message. When typing out the message I realised I wanted to copy paste a phrase from the slide... but now the presentation is closed. So I go back to the channel, open the presentation, go to the slide, copy paste and then close the presentation and go back to the chat - infuriating! tldr: everything opening within teams is a poor ux

redbell 2y ago

> The European Commission has been investigating Microsoft's tying of Office and Teams since a 2020 complaint by Salesforce-owned, opens new tab competing workspace messaging app Slack. For reference, here is the complaint (2020): https://slack.com/blog/news/slack-files-eu-competition-complaint-against-microsoft https://slack.com/blog/news/slack-files-eu-competition-compl... In a nutshell: > The complaint details Microsoft’s illegal and anti-competitive practice of abusing its market dominance to extinguish competition in breach of European Union competition law. Microsoft has illegally tied its Teams product into its market-dominant Office productivity suite, force installing it for millions, blocking its removal, and hiding the true cost to enterprise customers. So basically, this behavior from MS is the same with IE being bundled in Windows in the 90s and, later, probably Media Player.

nerdjon 2y ago

So because of this bundling it has been a long time since I have used Slack. Is Slack still good or has it had its own problems? I hate using teams but I don’t want to try to push for Slack if it has also gone downhill.

viraptor 2y ago
Slack is ok. Its latest redesign added bugs and made the interface quite annoying. It could be much better with a few trivial tweaks, but it's not terrible either. Also, I don't know if teams handles it any better, but slack has absolutely no offline capabilities / cache on the desktop. And electron sucks for electron reasons.
ghusto 2y ago
I've never liked Slack, but it's UX perfection in comparison. I'm so sorry you have to tolerate MS Teams. Have you thought of quitting? Joking aside, it says a lot about a company when they use MS Teams.

chollida1 2y ago

I'v read this thread and there are soo many rants on teams. What specifically are teh workflow issues people have with teams? My experience is that someone books an online meeting, i get a teams link. When the meeting comes I click the link, everyeone's face shows up, we have the meeting and then close teams. I've never had any issue with teams, not even once. What are the issues people have with teams because there are a lot of rants about teams but no specific issues are mentioned. As a meeting tool its perfect, its there, just works and then goes away. Are the rants directed to it as a chat app? or a company wide messaging app? Because I use teams4-5 times a week and cant' think of a single time its failed me or crashed or slowed down during a meeting. its the definition of a tool that just works and then goes away until I need it again. What is making everyone so angry at the tool?

quenix 2y ago
I believe the rants are directed at its crappy performance as yet another bloated web app masquerading as a native program.
- ryanjshaw 2y ago
  Try opening teams.microsoft.com in Edge and compare the memory usage with the app. On my system the website uses double the RAM.
taspeotis 2y ago
I think Teams is the best “all ‘round” for chat and video and screen sharing. Slack is best in class for chat though. Teams chat sucks in a few ways: * Posts? Why can’t messages be more lightweight. * No custom emojis like party parrot. * Total crapshoot whether it converts my three backticks into a code block. * Please fuck off with trying to offer me apps every time I paste a link.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- maxerickson 2y ago

jasoneckert 2y ago

Am I the only one reading this thinking that this is an April Fools joke (given the date)?!?

ivanmontillam 2y ago
You're not the only one, but it's hard to say. Does Reuters ever pull off April's Fool? I have no knowledge nor precedent. EDIT: Meditating a bit more about it, I don't think Reuters can afford to pull off a joke, as Reuters news cables can disrupt financial markets in such a way that could cause major damage.

aetherspawn 2y ago

I don’t mind Teams because the standardisation of it means that I can send Teams messages to someone in a completely different org by their email and 9/10 times it just works. As it stands, Teams is “free” for me (with Business Premium or E3 or something like that) and I’m not sure I like this news just because it sounds like more $$ for honestly the same outcome (I don’t care whether our chat app is good or not .. our messages go poof after a few days anyway. We just want something good-enough to get work done). Does this mean that now every other org is going to send me invite links to their org channels hosted on some random chat app?

Ekaros 2y ago

I wonder how far this de-bundling should be taken. Should actually there be complete ban for bundling more than single program in one solution. Like you could not have email and calendar in one, or something like Word and Excel. Cleary offering email+office suite in one is too far. And what about someone like Adobe, surely each of their softwares should be split up to own subscriptions and there should be no discounts for getting multiple at one time.

maxerickson 2y ago
Why stop there? No reason for the program you send email with to have message editing capabilities.

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

Official post: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/licensing/news/microsoft365-teams-ww https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/licensing/news/microsoft365-...

stadia42 2y ago

Can someone explain to me if the article in The Information on this topic is completely dumb, or whether I'm dumb for misunderstanding it: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/microsoft-unbundles-teams-are-customers-better-off https://www.theinformation.com/articles/microsoft-unbundles-.... (You don't need to pay, just read the few paragraphs visible for free.) The author claims there's no benefit to consumers because prices went up. The whole point of the rule is to prevent MS from killing off competition by keeping the prices low. So the benefit should be in the form of a healthier ecosystem (and long-term high quality / price tradeoff) rather than the price level today.