Microsoft Teams is dog shit
That’s all.
EDIT: Thank you all for detailing your experience with, and hatred for, this miserable product. Your display of solidarity is inspiring. Now, say it with me:
Fuck Microsoft
That’s all.
EDIT: Thank you all for detailing your experience with, and hatred for, this miserable product. Your display of solidarity is inspiring. Now, say it with me:
Fuck Microsoft
Microsoft OneDrive is the maggots in the dog shit
There shouldn't be worms in the poop of a healthy dog. This analogy just keeps getting better and more accurate.
Maggots aren't worms.
Oooh, I hate it so bad….. I used to click “Save” and my word document would ask to save in the only folder I save ALL my documents in. Change the name, save, so easy!
Now it asks if I want to save to OneDrive… Fuck No Mr Paperclip! I want it in the folder I always use and don’t want to have to select “Other” then dig through screens to select the thing I use every time!
Hit F12 to bypass the bs.
Note to self….
On Mac, I would use Keyboard Maestro to try to automate that. I think AutoHotkey can do the same kind of thing on Windows?
@danc4498@lemmy.world
So annoying. The OneDrive documents folder masquerading as your actual docs folder. Diabolical.
There's more: microsoft outlook is garbage
The new outlook has exceeded "garbage" and gone all the way to dumpster fire. It sometimes takes upwards of 15, 30 seconds to open an email. The new auto formatting is a hindrance to be overcome by tricking it to act how you want. Trying to schedule an event across timezones shits the bed half the time, resulting in improper meeting times being sent out. Absolute failure.
New Outlook also doesn't support Really Simple Syndication, which I used a lot with the Old Outlook.
So back to old Outlook I go.
Wait, really? I've found the new outlook opens emails faster than the old one, especially the HTML-heavy ones that my work loves to send me.
The refactor to the rules UI is really nice too, the old one was so crusty. Can't comment on the timezone issue though.
I've been told the extended time to open is related to how big the outlook database is, I average 200 emails received a day with various alerts and notifications from internal tools and it cripples new outlook in about a week if I'm not diligent with keeping folders cleaned out/emails deleted. This volume wasn't a issue before I switched.
Ah so your issue is, let me see here... Ah, actually using Outlook like a normal user.
I've tried switching to Thunderbird myself but it doesn't support Office 365 without a third party service. So I feel stuck with Outlook.
Ha, right? I'm keeping my fingers crossed there is some executive at MS raging and it will get resolved before they force everyone off the legacy version. Surely there are people inside their organization with tons more traffic than I see.
There's probably a microsoft engineer out there somewhere sitting in a cubical who has the solution already written and tested and they just can't figure out how to send it to their boss. They've tried outlook, teams, github, skype, and even one drive but they're all so broken that it may just be faster to print the code out and mail it.
My CISO has all but said he's going to prevent any auto-rollout of that shit because it breaks decades of user training and TRUNCATES THE FRONT OF THE URL, NOT THE BACK LIKE ANY SENSIBLE APPLICATION.
Like, let's make it so Steve in accounting can't see that the login link he wants to click is actually haxxor.com instead of bank.com, makes perfect fucking sense.
I accidentally switched to it and it dropped all my non-MS mailboxes. Then when I immediately switched back it had the gall to ask me why.
I'll die on the hill that classic outlook is far better than Gmail and similar web interfaces for email especially if you have long threads or lots of emails.
Also somehow Google's email search sucks so bad compared to searching in outlook.
Thunderbird <3
It's actually disturbing that Thunderbird is the only good smtp/imap client available and it's not receiving that much funding.
I agree. The old Outlook was snappy and dense of information. The new Outlook is just a fucking web page.
If I'm being honest the only Microsoft product I actually like is Excel.
They're doing their best to "improve" excel too... I can't understand how their AI generated cell fill is worse than the old approach.
Ever try finding an old email by sender. Lol, good luck
Microsoft Teams isn’t all bad! For example, it bogged down my work computer so much at start up that I would basically get an extra break.
It temporarily deletes my meetings just before they happen, so that I don't have to attend them!
Of course, when I open it later, the meetings are restored, with the original date, and no trace of the deletion. So not attending them is quite hard to explain to others. But it does save me from attending!
Take a print
The one problem with that is that I need to know I'm not being told about a meeting to take a print.
The the screen recording always on lol
Oh, nice, Windows 11 will fix Teams!
fuxk yea I get like an extra 30 mins a day at leastttt
Microsoft
Teamsis dog shitThat's all.
Oh dear god, no, what have I done
Bill Gates in this episode looks like he'd have nanomachines
What blows my mind is MS fucking bought Skype and somehow Teams still can't handle video calls correctly. The actual fuck did they do with that acquisition?
Skype used to be peer to peer. Your call went from you to your friend (whomever). Microsoft decided that they couldn't mitm that setup to scrape data; so, soon after they acquired Skype, they made all calls go through their servers.
Then they tried to make Skype make more money, since those servers aren't free. Then they made teams and copied half the code into that, and cludged the rest to make it hold together.
In mean aside from the fact that almost all of that story is completely wrong, it’s a good story.
Source: Used to work at Microsoft and worked a lot with people from the Skype team.
What is the real story?
Skype made the call negotiation go through a central server (as does all systems nowadays). Skype was originally built on Kazaa technology to punch through firewalls without a central coordinator and that’s what Microsoft removed. They didn’t remove it to track the calling but to enable larger group calls on weaker devices which required video mixing on a central system rather than peer to peer call (where weaker peers couldn’t decode that many video streams). Calls up to 4 are still routed peer to peer if the backend can find routes through all firewalls.
Very very little of Skype was in the new Teams if anything. Teams was a rewrap of Communicator calling tech and was a response to Slack. The real time chatting had nothing to do with Skype either.
Skype lingered in Microsoft for a couple of reasons; Microsoft was crap at acquiring businesses back then, thinking that a hands off approach was best. It meant Skype never really became a proper Microsoft team - they still felt and acted like Skype employees and they didn’t manage to affect Redmond very well. Being acquired is super hard especially when almost all of the bigger business was in a different time zone and a different culture.
I was at a leadership development workshop with a tonne of Skype leaders about 10 years ago. They were still feeling incredibly frustrated and not understanding what was expected of them. It was a botched acquisition and the fault was on both sides.
So Teams calls of 1-4 people can send traffic direct peer-to-peer if they're on the same LAN right?
Do all calls of 5+ users stay centrally hosted on the cloud? These are the kinds of things that MS should document and make easily available for IT and firewall admins. Finding info on Teams ports wasn't easy in my experience.
You’re way outside my scope of knowledge - I know a bit about the decisions they took 10 years, and not very much on what is happening today. I would imagine some of these limits are configurable and dynamic. I really don’t know.
You should write a post sometime about what you know from the internals of Skype. I would read it.
Well, I'm a unix guy for 30 years and hated M$ bill gates blablabla and forced to use windows at work etc. Teams was somewhat bad at the beginning, especially start of covid pandemic , I'm using Teams multiple times daily for ~5 years now. But since ~1 year it handles video call pretty nicely, 20+ feeds, share screens, whiteboard, etc. it's pretty stable at least, don't crash anymore, and we can have multiple accounts. It took times to reach this state I agree...
In the past two years, I have had horrible issues where it decides that I'm not allowed to join the call because I have a Teams account logged into a different organization, that it won't let me log out of. An issue where Microsoft servers just time out if you have ipv6 enabled, etc.
Don't get me started on Skype for Business. It's still around.
Oh yeah, that multiple organizations things absolutely fuuuucks me since I'm adjunct at multiple universities/colleges. It keeps trying to default me to a place I don't even work at anymore and somehow still refuses to let me leave it without reinstalling Windows (which I won't do as I'll be moving to Linux full time once I do).
How the fuck did they let motherfucking Zoom take over. The video-call equivalent of "Googling" something was to "Skype." When Covid hit, Microsoft screwed the pooch horribly.
My sister is super high ranking at Microsoft, and when she calls the family, she uses Zoom.
I don't see "screwed the pooch" used much but it always is funny to me.
I always say that the only reason they keep Skype alive is to make Teams appear good
The core of what made Skype great was made by a team of engineers in Estonia. Once it got acquired most of those people left the company. Many of them ended up at Twilio.
I was expecting a detailed rant, including an example or two. “That’s all” is much, much funnier.
Need a Explanation?
(Gestures vaguely in the air)
Microsoft Teams: Awww, come on, you just motioned all of me.
Is there a Microsoft product that isn't?
To be fair, Teams is pretty bad even for MS. I've never seen something do so relatively little and still perform so poorly. When I switched jobs and got to use Slack it was like a great fog being lifted off of my being.
VS Code. That's it though.
You may know already, but you should try VSCodium. At least they took the Micro$hit telemetry out!
Powertoys too
That's open source though?
Ah yes, you're right.
I guess a better qualifier might be: closed-source Microsoft products tend overwhelmingly to suck.
They've been cramming random stuff in that though that's making it more laggy. Recently switched to Zed and it's so much faster.
VS Code is OK if you can't afford the JetBrains ultimate subscription. I never want to see a VS Code launch configuration again.
Fuck subscriptions though.
Agreed...the community editions of their tools are solid, but if you're doing cloud stuff, get your company to pay for it. It blows VS Code out of the water.
Ehh, it's ok in the case of JetBrains - if your subscription lapses your license converts to a 'perpetual fallback license' so can just continue using the version you installed when the subscription was originally purchased.
I'm using a 4 year old version of PhpStorm with no issues and no subscription. My PyCharm sub ended 6 months ago and I'm staying on the 2023 version of PyCharm because the latest version comes with lots of AI which makes my CPU fans scream continuously.
WebStorm and Rider will have community versions soon, they are going to eat VS Code's lunch.
WSL was my gateway drug to Linux. It's neat. Until it isn't.
Excel, Active Directory, and to a somewhat lesser degree MSSQL.
Excel?! Have to respectfully disagree on that one.
What's wrong with excel?
Excel is great.
It does so much that people make it do what it shouldn't, and never think to explore technologies beyond it... Like a proper fucking database.
Then you get garbage business systems based on fragile excel sheets with bonkers macros and weird ETL pipelines to sync things.
And never try to deal with dates and timezones.
Or anything that looks like dates.
Gene scientists had to revise their whole naming scheme because Excel would see MARCH1 (Membrane-Associated Ring-CH-Finger Type 1), and 'helpfully' convert it into a date, rendering it useless (since it uses timestamps on the backend).
It's bad enough that my data science course recommended against opening CSV files in Excel, because it would edit the file to do the conversion, even before you explicitly saving, mangling your data before you could process it.
Reminds me of my last job where I had to build a ridiculously complex excel spreadsheet that I copied a bunch of reports into to do scheduling because someone decided I didn't need access to the actual data...
It's an awful mix of half-assed approaches to things. Awkward syntax on everything and very poor at recognizing what types of data it is handling.
Open a CSV in a fresh Excel install. It will almost certainly mistake something for a date if the CSV is sufficiently large (unless the user is exceedingly explicit at changing settings for that particular CSV). It will reformat that data as a date, and as an added bonus, since Autosave is on by default, it'll save that reformatted data back into your CSV. Yes, settings can be changed to avoid these things. But why isn't it just designed better so as to avoid it altogether?
If that was just a natural side effect of spreadsheet apps, I could understand it. But LibreOffice Calc is a million times better at recognizing what types of data it is handling, so it seems to just be Excel's shittiness.
The fact that it also hasn't really changed beyond aesthetics since 2004 is just... wild.
Can confirm. I've sent csv files to my coworkers, and they've tried to tell me that the files I sent were invalid. It's because they opened up the file in Excel to look at it first, and Excel autosaved the reformatted data.
Sadly I had to go the other way, from Slack to Teams. Oh the horror!!
For your sacrifices, I salute you
How about Zoom to Teams?
Excel?
Unpopular opinion: I actually like MS Teams
Look, I know this might get downvoted, but Teams is... actually fine? Yeah, it's not perfect, but it just works. The best part is that everyone and their grandma knows how to use it because it's the corporate standard around here.
I can't tell you how much time I've saved not having to do the whole "can you hear me? let me try reconnecting... oh wait try updating your browser" dance that happens with other platforms. My company recently switched to Google Meet and honestly? It's been a downgrade. Teams might not be the coolest kid on the block, but at least I'm not spending half my meetings troubleshooting audio and video issues.
I hate teams because it consistently doesn't just work
missed notifications, screensharing
i have little use of it and it constantly breaks
I haven't really used any other platforms so I can't really compare but I have encountered enough audio issues too. Especially with new Teams and bluetooth devices.
Same, Teams is terrible in terms of getting audio to work properly, our meetings still start with "can you hear me?" And often at least one person has to rejoin after pairing their bt headset again. But honestly everything else I've come across is even worse.
For me "it just works" doesn't ring true. Generally at least once a day, I join a call and it won't let me unmute, and I have to restart Teams.
Scrolling through history is obnoxiously slow.
The activity feed is mostly useless, spammed with stuff that isn't important and it's the only place that vaguely tries to keep track of 'Teams' conversations.
In my company, I've been added to about 70 Teams and it's pretty much impossible to interact with them, so as a result no one does, they all just start ad-hoc chats, since that's the only thing that vaguely gets managed in a way people can follow.
When going cross-organization, it's a crap shoot whether or not we can use text, voice, and screen share/remote control. I know this is generally due to obnoxious company 'security' policies and other solutions have it, but it is a frustration. One recent call with a particularly screwed up company had us on two different meeting platforms at once as well as on an old fashioned conference call, because text was only allowed on one platform, screen share on another, and no audio was allowed on either (despite both supporting all three).
Sure, Teams suffers, in part, because like all corporate tools it connects you to generally dysfunctional work communities. However it broadly does have it's own annoyances.
I went from teams/ms at another business to google at my current one. If they changed to Microsoft anything I'd burn the place down.
Yeah, I have a similar experience, but it certainly lacks in features compared to other messengers. For example:
I like the integration w/ Outlook because we're basically forced to use it at work, but Slack is way better for almost everything that doesn't interact directly w/ Outlook. So if it's not a scheduled meeting, I and my team much prefer Slack.
Gotta say, formatting of text isn't a high priority for me... I'm pinging someone about a thing, I'm not writing a presentation. Adding emojis is about as much as I need 🤔
And - to me - adding people to an adhoc group call / chat is straight forwards - and finding those conversations later is too
But, I believe that there's a few Corp IT settings that can be adjusted (we've recently lost the ability to add gifs for example), so maybe that's what's going wrong.
But we're a long way from AOL IM 😉
I send code snippets, quote sections of linked documents, and provide in-line links pretty often, kind of like here on Lemmy. Slack isn't as nice as Markdown, but it's good enough, whereas Teams is a complete pain in in the butt and it completely butchers code blocks. That said, I'm a team lead, so I fairly frequently post about recent releases, security issues, or give cliff notes of recent meetings, so formatting for me matters quite a bit.
And for calls, we have multiple logical groups of people, such as:
And we have ad-hoc group chats where just a handful of people need to be involved, but they don't fit cleanly into one of the established groups above (e.g. project manager wants to know a rough estimate for an upcoming project).
Teams works fine, but I find it annoying to use.
Too fuckin right m8
"Your organization has blocked this action"
I mean this is my work phone, and I'm trying to copy a customer's phone number from a spreadsheet to the dialer, but thanks man.
Not that I’m actually trying to defend MS/Teams (seriously, fuck ‘em both); but this is more due to IT Admin settings.
We have similar in our company, that’s in place because we handle PIR data regularly and it’s meant to be a speed bump rather than full roadblock.
For a long time, I would occasionally use my personal phone to check work email and Slack when I had to be out-of-office for an errand. They created a new policy last month that would force me to have a "work" profile on my phone if I wanted to continue using those apps. Fuck that. Instead I removed every work related app from my phone.
"Sorry boss, I can't check my messages while waiting at my doctor's office anymore.Why? Oh, because IT policies won't let me."
Your org letting you login to anything on your normal profile is crazy. Did you at least CYA?
A lot of small to mid sized companies lack controls around personal device use. For many years we were actually encouraged by first-line managers to use personal devices to communicate when out-of-office. And yes, I always C my A.
It's still better than WebEx because I don't have to log in to that piece of shit software to start a video call.
fucking WebEx
I shudder when I go to an Apple meeting because they use Webex. (Shudder)
I actually like Webex better because the audio doesn't get choppy where I'm from. For Teams to have good audio, I've had to call from my mobile, and I get charged for that.
WebEx Teams (now just WebEx?) is leaps better... In that it works.
The file/document integration is based on SharePoint. Shit built on top of a nice pile of manure
Edit: and don't get me started on the teams android app which requires access to all your media if you try to share a single image. If you share it as a file attachment however it's completely fine. No your not getting access to my files and pictures MS, keep your filthy adware fingers off my data
Fun fact: internet explorer was originally built off the File Explorer.
I kinda stopped following programming for windows a decade ago. But in sure there is some ancient code from 30 years ago that is holding some critical files together.
The fact that me and a coworker can't both share our screens at the same time is absolutely batshit. 1x1 collaboration isn't even reasonable, nevermind anything more
Yes. Why the fuck doesn’t Teams have this capability??
Try sharing anything except excel and enjoy your 3fps. Being a game dev and wanting to show videos or share my screen while playing is a no-go.
Videos can work, but I think you need to enable some feature that prevents tearing. It works fine for people who frequently present with it, but I honestly just avoid videos in my presentations because I don't want to mess with it.
i hate ms with every fiber of my being, but teams has gotten better. it used to be practically unusable. now its just mostly so
There’s a huge Teams outage right now. I have to use it at work and it makes me want to jump face first into a wood chipper.
Is that regional? Ours is working fine out in the midwest.
Must be.
We used to use it before switching to Google Workspace (don't get me started on how much I hate that), and Teams wasn't too bad. But it had two things going for it then:
I'm still convinced the turning point was when Microsoft deprecated Skype for Business and merged the devs from that team with the ones working on Teams. My tinfoil hat theory is they brought their garbage Lync code with them and pulled seniority to somehow jam it into the new codebase.
Out of the frying pan and into the fire!
To be fair, you are right about SfB. My previous job used that
Maybe I'm remembering early/beta Teams with rose tinted spectacles, but at the very least the silver lining was that I no longer needed to keep a separate Windows machine running just for work IM.
I even tried adding it to Citrix, but it refused to install on a server version of Windows.
I do not believe anyone at Microsoft actually uses it because if they did there's no way in hell that they would have let it be that bad.
It literally keeps every single conversation you've ever had in a big long list on the left, with absolutely no way to organize it, categorize it, order it, or in any way manage it other than deleting history, that's it you can delete history.
Microsoft's design philosophy in any of their products has gone from well organized menus to relying instead on a search bar. Copilot is a further addition to that design, with yet more pushes to never use a menu, but instead just tell it what you want and have it spit it back out. They want everything you make to go on OneDrive as well, so it can also be indexed this way. Teams works the same way. The big search bar at the top is unavoidable.
Windows search is complete garbage, which you might think is a counterpoint, but instead it's just that they only put work into having it serve results for cloud-indexed items or web results.
But you can pin any chat and you can reorder any pinned chat (and maybe even non-pinned ones - I haven't checked).
Not all of them, actually. I regularly have to use the search function to find chats/groups I haven't used in a bit. The most organization you can do is the dozen pinned threads they let you have.
I've had nothing but issues with it since their "upgrade" over the last year or so. It keeps cycling between the new and old versions when I open it, it often closes itself on my PC, and every time I try to pin it to my Taskbar it disappears.
i had this exact issue until i wiped my machine this summer and it refreshed into a full win11 after the crowdstrike debacle
The auto closing is driving me insane.
I have 3 different computers I use on a daily and each of them encounter this issue multiple times each week. A meeting starts and I have to go start up Teams and wait for it to fully open to join the call. Or I have someone cold call me and I don’t get the call on my computer and won’t even after opening Teams.
They can do a full refresh and release new features to make it look pretty but nothing has been done to address this issue that has been ongoing since day 1 of this “new Teams” refresh.
Spoken like a person who isn't forced to use JIRA
We have that pile of dog shit as well!
Let us not forget confluence
Somehow still better than sharepoint
We have every one of these, all used lol
SharePoint I'd available company wide but the confluence and Jira are mostly just our department. Sucks to maintain stuff twice
The problem with sharepoint is its all invite only here.
They hoped confluence would fix. But in reality everyone uses the Docusaurus sites my team and another team spun up.
Docusaurus is an underrated project.
I have all 3 D:
sounds suspiciously like we work together. 🤔
Grab lunch tomorrow?
only if the boss is paying 🤣
We just switched to Jira and I hate how pedantic they let admins make it.
Who in their right mind disables the "clone" option on issues 🤦♂️
Spoken like someone who hasn't had to use both!
I like Jira?
The biggest mistake was to make it a "hub" for all sorts of other uses in my opinion. It shouldn't be browser based, it should be native and just focus on chatting and calls, that's it. It could be so much faster and intuitive.
You mean like Skype for Business?
You mean Lync?
You dare speak the name of the accursed one??
Ah, they're all crap.
Came to Teams from Slack, some upsides, some downsides. It's a corporate communication tool, I don't use it because I think it's beautiful and elegant, I use it because I get paid money to use it.
I have a Jabra Headset (now retired) that literally has a MS Teams logo on the side and is market as "Teams compatible". As you might have guessed, Teams is the only VC app were I regularly have to switch betwen inputs to get the headset to work during a call.
Honestly I don't know how it is even possible to make such a dog shit product. I think my first webrtc tutorial app works better than this piece of shit.
I hate teams and have to use it for work . They insist on having all the important documents I need accessed through teams instead of just putting them in a folder .
Your IT team is doing it wrong then. You can map SharePoint sites directly to file explorer. Now that brings on a whole different set of issues ala OneDrive, which IMO is an even steamier pile of shit, but still - it's better than going straight through Teams
I would give almost anything to just be able to rename a Sharepoint folder as an alias for myself. I have so many Documents - x folders that all look the same but are vastly different. Arg!!
Nifty thing is you absolutely can do that if you're using SharePoint shortcuts in OneDrive instead of SharePoint library syncing.
You can't use both syncing and shortcuts at the same time though. Syncing libraries came first, so it's typically what is already setup and is kind of a pain to transfer a whole org away from.
I work in IT. I think it's popular because it's "free".
With that said, I put up a picture on the office wall of a Swiss army knife with features like syringe, fire extinguisher, axe, etc and have it labeled Microsoft Teams. Yes, it can do 100 different tasks, fucking poorly.
I keep a Teams tab and an Outlook tab opened in Firefox on Linux at work, and I feel like I have a better experience than most people using it on windows, which seems crazy.
Does your voice calling work ok in Firefox? My video calls start off ok but always seem to drop out after a short bit. I wonder if it's Firefox or my 30 privacy and security extensions lol
Yeah, our daily stand ups are via Teams (international team too) and it works pretty smoothly.
One oddity I’ve noticed is that when working from home and on (fast) Wi-Fi, it will hang for a moment and say the connection has an issue, but then be fine for the rest of the call. When I’m in the office in don’t think I’ve seen it do that.
I don’t care. I’ll take anything that maintains staff meetings from home. Before COVID they were 90% in person.
Yup. It’s got a stupid amount of bloat for what it is used for, but it’s aggressively “okay.”
Will take it everyday of the week instead of taking meetings in person.
"aggressively okay" is the best description i've ever head of MS teams
Yup, it does exactly what I want it to do: link scheduled meetings to my Outlook calendar (corp requirement) and let me join from a notification box. We have Slack for everything else.
It's not great, but it's certainly okay. Call quality is fine, the chat is crappy but gets the job done (supports links, files, and plain text, which is enough), and audio/camera settings are surprisingly decent. It works well for our use-case, which is scheduled meetings. Impromptu (i.e. useful) meetings happen over Slack.
Since I have not seen anyone mention this problem yet: Teams doesn't let you mute other people in a call for yourself. Obviously also no volume control per person. Imagine sitting next to your coworker in a teams meeting and having to deal with hearing them twice with like 20 ms delay. Awful.
I’m so tired of web engine based apps
that is because theyre selling it to the business, not the end user. They dont give 2 fucks about your experience
No, no! Dogshit sometimes fertilizes and promotes growth. Microsoft teams is poison.
For the budding gardeners who might see this, do not use dogshit as fertilizer for the plants you eat.
Hey, poison has it's uses too, unlike Teams.
FTFY
You put more effort into this post than M$ did to their product
Thanks, your bill is in the mail.
I mean, with winter coming in, and universities not bothering to heat the building, teams turning my potato work laptop into a furnace is the only thing keeping us warm this winter...
Serious question - is their long term strategy bad optimisation to sell hardware? Do they have shares in intel or something?!?
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
Mega corporations that only hire contract workers with no morale or investment in the long term success of the company (because the majority of their efforts are purely to appear shareholders) are not equipped with the means to put out decent products.
Passion, dedication, investment in workers, and long term talent are what create remarkable pieces of software. Microsoft has none of this because these things are incompatible with the directives of infinite growth shareholder appeasement. Want extra time for QA? nope, that would reduce profits. Want to pay higher salaries to attract better talent? Nope, that would reduce profits. Want to adequately reward employees in ways they actually connect with like raises and bonuses? Nope, that would cut into the boss' annual bonus and he needs his new vacation home more than we need to afford rent.
There is an optimal level of profit chasing and company size within which excellent software can be produced, and Microsoft exceeded those thresholds years ago. There is also an optimal phase of capitalism that is conducive to quality innovation and development, and we're well past it.
They make use it at my job. I hate it.
My company has teams and slack and IT wants to switch to all teams. The thread where they announced this had to be locked. :D I don't know how a trillion dollar company can't get this right. Worst yet the bundle that shit with everything and overworked IT depts pick it by default.
What's bad about it? I'm a Linux admin by nature but an admin of all by profession and overall I have no real complaints about Teams. Has always worked just fine for me and to my knowledge everyone else.
Slow, buggy, annoying interface, hogs extreme amounts of resources locally, can be used to spy on its users.
What's not to like? It's basically how Elon envisions X, an "everything app" that is actually good at nothing specific.
Agreed. It feels a bit janky here and there but otherwise works ok.
But don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t say I like it.
It's missing basic features. The stuff that any normal human would assume it can do it just can't do. It's absolutely terrible if you use it in a large organization where you have to speak to multiple different people.
For one-on-one conversations I guess it's okay but the moment you try and get anything more complicated than that going on it becomes a nightmare.
What basic features?
I haven’t used competing apps to know, but as a forced teams user it is very sluggish, seems to break other ms apps half the time and has some strange and persistent design choices that irk me. It also crashes on its own, when I’m not using it 2-3 times a day.
It has improved in terms of features lately, but still feels very bloated and WIP most of the time. It still won’t let me control where video windows are, and I’ll never understand this.
This is our replacement for Skype, which was obviously feature deficient and getting old, but does what it’s supposed to do and doesn’t cause problems.
Not sure if there’s a good competing app in terms of video and slack functionality, integration into outlook and onedrive (both of which also annoy me and seem to be performing worse-over-time, but are unavoidable and sometimes useful.)
Microsoft spent billions acquiring Skype only for us to be left with Teams
I dont know.. SharePoint has pissed me the hell off too, its a close one
Fun fact, teams backend is sharepoint. It's just a fancy wrapper on top 🤡
Well now I just feel bad for the team behind teams 🤣
I have an office account for work. I don’t happen upon the troubles people report here. I couldn’t leave MS as I basically use all their stuff for work (and so do the several other hundreds of employees here). But teams does work well: texting, videocalls with 100s of participants, recording meetings, file repositories
I use teams every day. My only gripe recently is the messages like “look the wonderful things we did to improve it” that I didn’t need and will probably never use, but I press the little X don’t know don’t care
Also the surveys after eveey call. Drives me crazy. And the weird file editor, never edit PowerPoint slides in Teams.
And the way it absolutely freaks out when the computer is in standby.
I feel similarly. I work in an office that's heavily invested in Microsoft for everything and when you use Microsoft everything Teams fits in really nicely with great outlook integration, Microsoft Loop integration, etc. and the experience on Teams is fine
Unfortunately, much better than Skype
It’s possible to be worse?
Oh fuck yeah. Skype used to throw errors when the advertisements scripts didn't run correctly. I remember getting dozens of pop ups when the ad changed to something new. To my knowledge, they haven't put ads in Teams, yet. They first need to kill the competition a bit; really set the hook before they reel you in.
I miss that ringtone though.
The "boop beeep boop... Beee-ooop beep" one?
Skype was a steaming pile for sure, but it had the ability to search for and message a distribution group and get an answer from whomever was available and I could pin it for future use. Now I have to know every name in a group and message them individually until I find someone to help or start a meeting to get everyone at once. It may just be how our Teams instance is configured, but I miss that feature. And who decided there should be a limit on how many people I can pin in Teams?
The real Skype was fine.
This Skype, I think, is just an ugly version of Teams.
Genuinely the single worst messaging app I've ever used. Worse than Skype, which is crazy because Microsoft owns that too.
I am glad that I never had to use it, but I have heard many complaints in my circle. The most common one being that it changes one core UI or workflow every fortnight.
Imagine the plight of people who just want to get their work done and go home, only for them to see a tool critical to their work has automatically decided to update and now has a reshuffled UI.
Cannot help but feel that there are too many product managers trying to make their mark on the product.
I don’t have to imagine it, I’m living it.
You press back when you're on a screen and it never returns you to where you came from?
I mean , works for me. You know what is complete bullshit?
SKYPE. Using that in a work environment is a nightmare
Teams was a factor in leaving my last job. It was a small factor, but a factor nevertheless.
So far every job I've had or seen the inside of has used teams
It's usually Slack for me.
Out of curiosity are any similar products actually good? My company uses Webex and frankly I'd rather use teams.
We used to use Slack + Zoom and had a much better experience than Teams.
Slack is better than Teams IMO, but I don't know if I'd call it "good."
Zoom and Google Meets have both worked better for me.
Slack for text chat, zoom for video calls
Zoom would be nice if they stopped pushing the AI crap and didn’t randomize functionality and button placement every other upgrade. The annotation tool is really great when it decides to show up.
Have to use it at work, it is a real nightmare.
It's the Sharepoint of chat.
Ironically enough it creates Sharepoints for each of your groups.
It's SharePoint all the way down
It's like a graveyard of companies that Microsoft has acquired over the years. Sharing files is one brand name (Sharepoint if i recall), making video calls is another name, planned events is another - every function has a brand name to it, which made me feel like these were the last remaining trace of long-absorbed companies.
But that's just my recollection, i haven't touched Teams since Covid
Of all the Microsoft products I’m forced to use for work, teams is by far the best. It still sucks. Fuck Microsoft. Fuck monopolies.
Is there any video chat service that isn't? It seems every single one has some glaring issue that makes it a pain to use. And it's not like I could just use a FOSS thing that's better; this is one of those things where you are kinda limited to using what everyone else you're going to be talking to is using. :(
I initially hated Zoom, but honestly, it did its job really well
slack is really good, as long as teams doesn't fuck with you a/v settings.
still not as good as zoom. but, fuck china.
well, it's not just Teams and not just MS. Have you worked with Zoom lately? I do agree that Teams occupies that very special dark space in my heart right next to hate and loathing.
Zoom works for video. I test it a few times a week for a few hours with a few contacts each time.
And a few beer.
It's a vPub most of the time with some tech thrown in.
I hate to say it, but FB Messenger is reliable for me too : starts well, sounds good, video's clean, ends cleanly . I need to remind mom how to start that call when it's with her on her old portal unit, but yeah. Cambridge is the worst thing to happen to good products like M and Portal.
I love how they rolled out the new upgraded Teams and it's still awful!
Trying to play a video in a meeting results in 2009 levels of choppiness. It's insane.
It's the worst and has been running like total crap for years. Even Skype for business worked better. Luckily it is better than Cisco Jabber or Webex.
My boss puts it best. WebEx for Calling, Zoom for Meetings and Teams for Collaboration (the actual Teams function).
lmao, based. Discord too.
It sucks, it doesn't work properly in Firefox, so I have keep it open in a Chromium window too. This morning I saw new messages in my Chromium but not in Firefox until I reloaded the page. I wonder what other information it's keeping from me.
Outlook 2010 is better than this new office 365 shit too.
What is crazy is that Mac version is more stable than windows in my experience. Still shit, though
Next you'll tell me the sky is blue.
If we were on Teams right now I may not have received this snarky message.
You can't set alerts for availability. This is functionality that it used to have, but lost across updates. This is by itself is enough to relegate it to the compost bin.
Of all the meeting solutions, I’ve come to the conclusion that Google Meet is the least bad.
We user / have used Slack, Zoom, Meet/Gchat and a VERY brief trial of teams.
We have O365 AND Google Workspaces so we get teams and meet for free.
Zoom is the best to host a large meeting with a split presence. It's the best at dealing with variably poor connections. It shines on being able to share any specific app and sound control.
Meet is the best for small, low-friction meetings. However, it is hampered by its inability to share anything but browser tabs with sound, poor camera control, and poor user display.
Slack is a fantastic, too-flexible chat system with organizational issues. When it works, it works pretty well. However, it has intermittent video and mic problems on many systems. It is not good on poor connections and occasionally not good on fast connections.
Teams is bloated, many systems run it poorly, and there is an unacceptable amount of server-imposed downtime/issues.
I've personally never had an issue with Slack, mic/video included. My connection has always been solid, though. Never tried on a shit connection.
Thank you! Finally someone has the guts to say this publicly
Eh, I thought that was already common knowledge. We use it at work because the Outlook integration works correctly 99% of the time and call quality is largely okay. I hate it as a text messenger or impromptu call tool, but we have Slack for that anyway.
Lol... It is indeed common knowledge... I was just joking.
Using Teams as a freelancer with multiple clients who roll their own user management is a PITA.
I had to sign into multiple browsers in private mode
So what do you prefer over teams? And why is it better?
Slack
Fuck, I miss Slack so much.
Just about anything. IRC, XMPP, Discord, whatever you call the chat built into Steam. AIM is discontinued now, but it used to be better than Teams is today.
Scratching messages onto rocks with other, slightly harder rocks and throwing them at each other is a better form of communicating than using Teams.
As with all things in business, good enough is king
I actually don't mind it being web based, there are a lot of web based tools that run perfectly fine and don't use that much resource
Teams is generally stable for me running the pwa in Microsoft edge nowadays too
It literally doesn't even function half the time.
Screen shared coding with 1 fps. Genius.
Can't even see animations, quick actions, or significant subtleties.
I chalk most of the shit that makes teams horrible, is closely related to electron and their whole web app as a desktop app bullshit.
Buckle up, because they're doing that same enshittification to outlook next. It's already begun. There's a "new" Outlook. FML.
Dog shit has plenty of good things going for it, frankly. It acts as a fertilizer and really its existence just means that your best bud's internal organs are functioning properly.
Teams however
The only thing it does better than Slack: A list of all my chats, most recent at the top, without any disappearing or grouped in some weird way. Slack annoys me.
I got slack for my college course, I left the group. I have no fucking idea what is going on on that app it was insanity. Seemed like 12 different groups of the same people and sometimes you got notifications sometimes you did not.
It was just a really bad UI and UX.
My biggest complaint is that you can't save chat logs.
I work in government, and we do a LOT of stuff on Teams, and I'm just waiting for us to get sued because we can't turn over Teams chat logs in Open Records requests.
i just hate everything about micro$oft nowadays to be honest.. and i use and always will use linux mainly aswell cause of my hatred for windows in general
I love the open and evolving C# ecosystem.
All the AI and cloud fluff/craze being pushed to devs is a bit annoying, but outside of announcements it's isolated and ignorable [for now]. I kept my enthusiasm during the cloud pushes, which were limited. But now, the AI and copilot pushing is annoying enough that I'm losing it. At least the enthusiasm. I feel like.
Everything else... Goes into the wrong direction and often is already obnoxious. Last time I installed windows for someone I was baffled it was almost impossible to install it with an offline account. Baffling on an operating system. Insane. Awful. Settings is still a mess. Task manager is getting worse. 11 got worse ui.
Windows 11 "out of box experience" has been made specifically to further control and limit options in favor of value added options. Such as making online services more integrated into an ever bloated OS. The only option I know about setting up the first account as local was to disable the internet connectivity check they are enforcing now using a command prompt that required going well out of my way to get and even I saw how much they pressure you into going along with their demands/instructions instead of allowing freedom/open use of anything you wish to use.
It's so odd because even though it is possible to do more advanced or finer tuned control, Microsoft is intentionally ignoring talking about it and therefore not even offering those options.
Everybody liked this
It may be crap, but it's a masterpiece compared to Skype for business.
well,
anything would end up above the sluge
all default purple theme apps are dog shit, and there are a lot of them. any graphic designer who chooses purple needs to be prevented from designing anything ever. i have to see that fake color a third of my weekdays and it takes a full weekend of spending time outdoors and seeing green to recuperate.
I think that’s a bit insensitive to dogs
I no longer work with corporations, but an online ornithology classI did used teams. It worked, mostly, for a while. Then one day it decided that video would no longer work on my machine. Of course there's no obvious log or anything.
I even booted windows to see if it would fix it, but no.
That was on a very exotic yoga 7 pro laptop.
It's the only piece of software that's ever behaved that way.
Fuck everything about Microsoft products. The different licenses are a nightmare, the programs are shit, and "FUCK YOU FOR TRYING TO INSTALL A PROGRAM OR USE LOCAL STORAGE" seems to be the default.
Also I don't trust them not to be spying on users. But sure, every government job I've had we used the products.
Am I the only one that prefers it to Slack?
Probably.
Yeah I'm going to go ahead and record this meeting. Please speak up if you object. Because we've provided so much psychological safety that there will surely be no judgement or fear of reprisal for those with any hesitation to swim in line with the corporate current. We're also going to share files in this chat that you'll have to catalogue and remember - so when someone refers to a nondescript file shared 3 weeks ago you'll be forced to know exactly which chat and file you're referring to. Also, put yourself on video. We appreciate face to face communication.
That's not really Teams fault though. Sounds more like a team issue than a Teams issue.
Fuck Microsoft. But first, Fuck Google, Fuck Amazon, Fuck Facebook. I am sure I could think of a few more that are worse than Microsoft, as bad as they are.
While I have close to zero trust in MSFT and event much dislike a lot of m365, teams isn’t actually that bad and loop is really good.
I wish we could use Slack.
Let’s start our own company, with blackjack, Slack, and hookers.
I'm torn on this, because on one hand Slack is better, but I've ever only got the option to use the free tier with Alzheimer's. Honestly, that's so crippling I might rather suffer Teams with full history.
💯
I’m annoyed you still can’t do annotations with Teams.
Haha be thankful for what you have. I work at a pretty large financial institution and we still use Skype for Business. There is another messaging app we use but not everyone is granted access to it so I have to use both apps daily.
why are we using it
The corpos demand it
That's not all, a ton of schools use it
I think I don't like that Microsoft has access to stored chat messages between kids.
Yes. But moving on, Is this just a modless wasteland of a community? It seems like anything goes in /technology
I can’t believe we still can’t moderate chat in a public webinar…. « Hey the guy who wrote ‘FUCK’ 20 times? Yeah you can kick him out, but make sure to keep these messages visible for all posterity »
Can’t send private messages to outsiders also. Who could EVER need this in a public event anyway?
And make sure you can’t let people join the breakout room of their choice. Take the time to individually assign them one by one before the meeting! Fun!!
Hey at least we can play Backgammon in a meeting, so there’s that right?
I use it daily and think it's excellent. Skype, on the other hand, is diabolical.
🌈You’re insane💫
365 is just shiiiit. Even Google's stuff (free) is far better and less intrusive/annoying.
Today it decided to not mark messages read after I had opened them.
Omg are you me?
That happens to me regularly. Plus it will have different read statuses in the channel list, pins, and notifications.