Rant warning!
I mean I just quit a office call, the share screen ribbon wouldn’t disappear, opened task manager to kill it nope not found, finally had to select a “quit teams” option from start window. Note this is still windows 10.
Further the entire teams app is sloppy, when I start listing, the enter works but within the same message (when unintended) I have to ensure I click shift+enter to enter a new line. I can’t choose between enter and shift+enter.
A few questions now:
- why/how do these guys design a product this way
- Does it mean Microsoft can keep running any app which necessarily doesn’t appear on my task manager?
Teams and Teams Calling exist because it way past time for hardphones to disappear.
Any organization that does not fully embrace remote employees are stuck in the fucking 1980s.
All collaboration software has issues. Women is wonky as hell, Zooms has just as many issues as Teams and Teams is just as buggy as Webex…
Because it actually makes a lot of sense from a business perspective to have your meeting software integrated with your messaging software integrated with your document storage, etc. MS saw the success of things like Zoom and Slack and said “we can do that!”
And the thing about large companies with big budgets is that they get things done. Maybe it is shitty, but it is done. And the thing about an IM client is that anyone can think up the idea… So the difference between MS and a startup like Slack is that there were 100 other Slack-like startups that failed to make a useable product. Slack made a product that worked because statistically, someone has to - and then everyone uses the product because it works. But MS is not going to run out of venture capital or new CS grads eager to work 80 hour weeks to “change the world” - they will keep plowing money and manpower into a product until it is ready to ship, goddammit!
So Teams stumbles across the finish line, strictly inferior to its competitors. Except that it has an ace in its back pocket… the fact that so many businesses already run windows. Already have MS 365 subscriptions. MS can pitch ecosystem integration as a selling point, and then undercut their competitors on price to paper over any deficits in functionality. And 55 year old CFOs of accounting firms see this and say “yes, let’s do that!”
And thus, Teams
Exactly this. We used to run Mattermost (essentially Slack but hosted on-prem) and Zoom, and everybody loved the combination. Then the bean counters got involved, saw that we were paying extra for something that was already included with our 365 subscription, and that was that.
Now we’re stuck with shitty Teams and its shitty Electron app that seems to come up with new ways to not work on a near daily basis. So much so that “Teams be Teamsing” has become a defacto phrase for when something janky happens.
Keep up the pressure. We went through the same thing, but after a year of Teams misadventure, execs finally realized the savings wasn’t worth it
- it gave them an excuse to kill Skype
- they weren’t willing to let Zoom hog the spotlight
It was actually their answer to Slack at the time. Which is hilarious because slack is so much better than teams.
Wait let’s not forget live meeting!!!
Teams exist because corporations are too cheap to purchase Zoom licenses.
Oh please…All Collaboration tools have the same number of issues, just different ones.
Have you actually tried Teams? It stands above all the rest for number of issues. There are a lot of good ideas, but then it’s like they had a bunch of interns hack together the ui over a weekend and never fixed it
Yes…
I have used it daily for at least six years.
Overlayed on that is I have used WebEx for about 15 years, hell maybe 20 years.
I agree that it has UI has issues, so does Webex, so does Zoom… hell Skype had its issues as well.
There is a lot about teams I don’t like, but that is every collaboration tool I have ever used.
Truth be had the only collaboration tool I have ever been satiated with is the tool my university used back in 2000, but that probably had more to do with not having to drive to class.
Have you ever used Zoom and then be forced to switch to Teams?
It’s like enjoying a warm baguette and then being forced to give it up and eat stale Sara Lee.
I have been forced to switch to different collaboration tools and platforms a number of times and it always just sucks…
For me that pain began back when I was forced to stop using AIM ( America Online Instant Messenger).
Seriously, teams is one of the worst apps I have to use on a regular basis. It’s insanely buggy, especially if you are a freelancer working in multiple teams.
- parts of the app don’t load correctly
- parts of the app don‘t support touch very well
- you get useless notifications, i.e. for a thread you have open or an action you caused yourself but completely miss others
- the UI has SO MANY flaws like giving people different colored placeholder avatars in different parts of the app which made me assign tasks to the wrong person a few times
- it needs its own audio driver on macOS which is probably invasive and does a shit job with airpods
There’s probably more I can’t think of right now but teams actively kills my productivity and I dread having to open it. I don’t understand how businesses can rely on this so heavily and I‘m wondering how incredibly incompetent the team developing it at Microsoft can be.
Everything you posted can be applied to all software, particularly collaboration software packages.
All software needs a special driver to work on MACs, even software made by Apple.
All software has UI issues and always will.
I quite literally teach and consult on Teams, and have for 8 years now. I worked with Lync, Skype for Business, and Communicator before that.
People complain about it all the time, and yet… I’ve never had any significant issues with it.
Other than M365 outages, which impact everyone, I’ve never seen it crash. I’ve never had issues not loading. I’ve never had sound or sharing issues that couldn’t be resolved by clicking the dropdown and selecting the correct option.
It can be a bit slow, especially loading file related stuff, but it’s not any worse than a network drive.
Placeholder avatars in different parts of the App? Teams doesn’t even support task assignment, tasks are handled in MS Planner which is an entirely different product that just happens to be visible inside Teams if you want.
Touch? Mac? Airpods? What the fuck are you doing? You aren’t doing real business tasks if you’re using an iPad.
Maybe the people with problems are the ones running 10 year old hardware with a barely supported operating system?
Touch? Mac? Airpods? What the fuck are you doing? You aren’t doing real business tasks if you’re using an iPad.
I’m using it on the phone sometimes to reply to people which I don’t think is a weird use case. The AirPods issue happens on macOS and I’m not sure if you’re just ignorant but lots of businesses operate on macOS, especially in my industry (ui design, frontend web dev) it’s unusual to even see Windows.
“lots of businesses operate on macOS”
No, they definitely do not. If you go into any business in Canada or the US with more than 200 employees, they are running windows on the computers sitting in front of every office drone they have.
Very specific industries or business may, especially those who are stuck on Adobe’s software, but “lots” is extremely far from the truth.
go into any business in Canada or the US with more than 200 employees
That’s like, 2% of businesses in Canada. Even if they all use Windows, it doesn’t prove the point that few businesses use MacOS.
Because they don’t have to. This quarterly report is good! Copilot use is up (because it was shoved into yet another app) and costs are down (because they layed even more people off). Businesses are locked in for the near future, so core sales remain high.
It doesn’t matter desktop Linux use drastically increased. That doesn’t affect this quarter. This quarter is all about cutting costs and pushing AI. If there is a problem in a few quarters, it doesn’t matter. You sold your stocks by then.
I love MS Teams.
Long live MS Teams.
Why do you think there’s the growing mass exodus towards Linux?
Microsoft laying off programmers and staff like they’re having human diarrhea, while replacing experienced programmers with artificial
intelligenceignorance…You just figuring this shit out?
I use Linux on my personal computer, I had to stick to windows during my uni days (may be because of loads of reports I had to write) but expected something better from their pro version?
Yeah, it sucks. Windows used to be dependable and solid, the whole point of the OS was IT JUST WORKS. They had some downturns in the past (Vista, 8) but you could just skip those. XP, 7, etc. Now though? There is no skipping 11, not if you want security updates. They could have made Copilot it’s own app that you can ignore, but no, even notepad needs AI for some reason. The start menu has ads, the notification center has ads.
Finally pushed me to switch to Mint this past year. My SO followed too. Been happier with it. Feels like I’m in control of the OS again, and it is there to do what I wish. Never going back.
If I need to write a report, I can write it in nano, fuckall with the font formatting and all. If the person reading my report can’t accept my report on an algorithm to generate the value of pi unless it’s formatted with a particular page layout, then fuck them.
If they’re more worried about fonts and page layouts than the actual content of the text and fomulas, then they don’t know how to read or verify the algorithm in the first place.
Loads of formating for reports can be done with text only as well. Markdown or LaTeX, to name just two.
There’s no mass exodus towards Linux in the business user space.
It’s still 99.9% Microsoft Windows.
I have to use Teams for work but I’m on Linux so I just use the web app in Firefox. Other then minor, irritating UI decisions (WTF is the ‘Activity’ tab for?) I don’t have any issues. Video calls work fine, screen sharing works, notifications work. When something breaks I just reload the page. If people have so many issues maybe try using the web app?
Thanks and this is very interesting, I am lucky that I have Firefox browser (a very few in my org have the same, I installed ublock origin and ever since IT disabled installation of plugins). Let me test teams on Firefox (hoping it let’s me login), fingers crossed.
Out of curiosity are you on wayland? At some point teams stopped letting me share my screen (there wasn’t even a button) and it was around the time I changed to wayland so that was probably why. I haven’t tried it since then so maybe they fixed it but it was pretty weird.
There is no market Microsoft won’t half-ass* their way into.
* Purely as an expression. Teams is nowhere near usable enough to give it that much credit.
M$ did build a solid colon for Teams tho
It’s quite literally the worst chat app I ever had to use. It can’t even handle fucking copy+paste without messing up formatting every single time. Constantly crashes, can’t handle notifications across devices, doesn’t work properly with even “teams certified” headsets, uses 3 times more resources than any comparable app … it’s fucking bloatware with a chat function.
Fuck Teams and everyone that made it. I hope the get cancer.
why/how do these guys design a product this way
Its just one of many business applications that MSFT provides as you get vendor locked into the Windows platform.
Technically it was the successor to skype for business, and skype itself was its own product that was acquired by MSFT.
It doesn’t matter how crappy it is because MSFT can sell it to you as part of a complete package with stuff like Azure, M365, etc, and you would find it annoying to pay extra for a better platform like Slack.
Does it mean Microsoft can keep running any app which necessarily doesn’t appear on my task manager?
iirc it shouldn’t be hidden in task manager but it might be easier to use process explorer from sysinternals: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/process-explorer
Haven’t touched hot garbage windows in a long time so I don’t remember if teams has a non obvious process that runs in the background.
It is my work PC, it literally asks me enter password to open task manager. I am not going to explore anything on this PC
My old school had to switch to Microsoft Teams (from Google Classroom) and the head of ICT told everyone that he thought that Teams website was ridiculously slow, the app moreso, but it was necessary as part of a transition from Google’s suite (Docs, Slides, Drive, Classroom) to Microsoft’s (Word, PowerPoint, OneDrive, Teams)
Pretty much everybody complained about the switch to Teams since it was really slow, sometimes taking several minutes to load the app on older computers (e.g. school computers). I assume they switched to all-Microsoft to reduce costs (I remember being told that, since they were paying for both Office 365 and Google Cloud before), and they mentioned other reasons too (e.g. students overseas in mainland China can’t access Google) but I forgot most of them.
A long, long time ago, there was an online messaging tool called ICQ. You didnt even have callsigns in it, you had a randomly generated number you shared with your friends. You chatted. Had fun. Life was good.
Then there was AOL instant messenger. It largely replaced ICQ in the US. It added emoticons.
Then there was MSN Messenger. It tied into the MSN gaming zone(Before MS killed it to make Xbox Live. You could play games with your friends through it. You could do rudimentary video chats.
Then you had Skype(pre-MS. Better video, not tied to MS).
MS makes MSN Messenger into Lynx and adds it to office. Its not good.
Then you had Google Hangouts. Better chat, fun features, tied to your google account.
Then you had MS owned Skype as Skype for Business. Largely replaces Hangouts because Google enshittifies everything, not because it is good.
You also have former Vancouver startup Slack. Its fantastic. Until Salesforce buys it.
Now we have the bastard officespring of Skype for Business: MS Teams.
Lync, not Lynx.
And technically Lync got birthed from the corpse of Office Communicator, not MSN messenger.
Fair, it was over a decade ago that I used it.
Google meet is the only thing I have used that doesn’t need a desktop program, I used it over lockdown and got the in-laws to join (both very not technical).
I can’t say much for chat, as it was never any good. We used slack for text chat, but that has gone down hill with Salesforce.
Meet was so bad compared to hangouts it drove people to MS Teams
Meet has been the only video/call app I’ve never had any issues with. If it wasn’t owned by Google it’d be great.
When the team I was working with at the time used it, it constantly dropped calls, some people couldn’t share their screen sometimes, randomly mics would stop working, it was a bad experience.
