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?
One thing I haven’t seen mentioned…
Slack was taking a big market share over MS Lync
Microsoft rebranded to Teams and gave it away /for free/ to companies, getting them to decide “well, it covers enough basic features… We can save x million dollars/year”
Without thinking about what happens once Teams is the standard
The upside to Teams is that you can always claim it’s at fault for your fuckup. It has so many bugs that no one can ever say that something can’t go wrong because of teams.
- Fell asleep at your desk and didn’t see an important message or call? => “Dang, so sorry, Teams never sent me a notification!”
- Way too late to a scheduled meeting => “Omg hi, finally! Teams crashed every time I tried to enter the meeting!”
- Hungover and don’t want to turn on the camera => “I’m sorry, Teams starts stuttering every time I turn on the camera, so I’m keeping it off for now.”
- Forgot to get back to someone? => “Huh but I wrote you like a week ago… weird, Teams must have swallowed the message”
- Don’t want to answer a tough question in a meeting? => “Sorry, your audio keeps cutting out for me. Just one moment, let me restart Teams.” pretend to struggle for 20mins and give up without answering the question
Bandwagon syndrome. Capturing even 3% of a huge market is still worth the effort if you can afford the overhead to get in, unfortunately.
It is a reasonable addition to the Office365 / Sharepoint / Active Directory ecosystem for corporate customers. The fact that it’s trash software doesn’t mean it wasn’t a sound business decision for MS at some point!
I’m on Mac and I dislike it too. No flashing cursor to let me know I’ve selected the chat window to type. The app insists on changing to a different view when I switch windows, making me lose it. The share screen ribbon always manages to be exactly where I need it to not be. Doesn’t allow any sort of Markdown-esque formatting in chat, only WYSIWYG.
Are you on macOS 26 Tahoe? The lack of text cursor is something I’ve noticed with Liquid Glass (also on iOS). I’m not sure if it’s a bug or by design, but either way it’s annoying and not intuitive.
Regarding markdown formatting, it works just fine for me. Is there a setting somewhere you need to toggle?
macOS Sequoia 15.6.1
If I type
*blah*it shows it as something like blah, but I want it to not format until I send. It’s difficult for me to write in WYSIWYG editors. I want it to show*blah*.Ah yes, the live preview… that would be nice to have but I don’t imagine Teams would ever implement this degree of granularity in customization.
If you end up submitting a feature request, make sure to tag it with “ai” and “copilot” so there’s at least some tiny chance someone will look at it ;)
The AI push right now is crazy. Where I’m working all teams have to show how much they’re using AI and where. Rather than being measured on their success they’re being measured on how they’re doing it.
Yes, I was only half joking about that.
If you are ever so inclined, you can look at the Microsoft Graph API logging for some of the O365 services like Teams, there is a field in there that logs if Copilot was even mentioned in the transaction, let alone actually used.
Seems like in many cases you can easily game the system to show how much you’ve embraced Ai.
Because Microsoft owned Skype at the beginning of the pandemic, had 100% mindshare, a practically genericized trademark, and an install base of a gazillion users, and yet still managed to somehow fumble the ball to Zoom.
I feel like part of the problem was that Microsoft tried porting instant messaging and video calling services into the Office suite for decades and it didn’t stick. I remember previous attempts like Skype for business and Lync, with few people in the companies I worked at incorporating it into their workflows.
It took COVID and full remote work to push people into using a program like Zoom over SMS and phone calls. Once most of corporate America switched to using Zoom for conference calls, Microsoft had to rush out a new product that could unseat Zoom quickly.
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
Yes, the all in one. Beautiful.
“I’m in the files tab and I’m 6 folders down, halfway through reviewing a word doc. I’m still in the teams app because downloading a file saves it somewhere between purgatory and duat, so this is easier” ping “Oh, a message. Hold my spot in the file and folders while I check that” Teams: actually, you could go fuck yourself.
I went months without noticing it, but you can open the Teams library in the web because it’s just a SharePoint folder in a trench coat. Bookmarked immediately.
Dude trying to explain to co workers , especially the iPad generation, what the file browser is (ie, explorer), what teams is, and how teams is literally a front for SharePoint, and THEN WE ALSO HAVE ONEDRIVE FUCKING IT ALL UP its so frustrating dude. These kids have never used anything outside ios and windows 11 in their lives so they are cooked when it comes to tech literacy.
Never knew id be so thankful to grow up on dos and win95.
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.
Ye gods I lived exactly through this. We had Mattermost installed on test server and it was like night and day with Teams. But as you say, the bean counters don’t care if you’re happy. “We already got Mattermost at home!” they said. And so Mattermost was abandoned for Teams which is indeed already present in the ecosystem and isn’t going away any time soon. Like herpes.
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.
Many things are better than Teams. So many things…
Wait let’s not forget live meeting!!!
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.
For a while, Microsoft Teams was pretty good. I’d say their sweet spot was roughly 2020-2022ish. It was a pretty basic chat app with a bit of workplace collaboration and office integration built in.
Then new teams happened. Now teams can be installed to a user profile, or to the machine as a whole. Now you need new outlook to get some semblance of functionality with calendars and scheduling in teams. Now teams is deployed as part of Microsoft office, or standalone, or needs to be imported as a package, but fuck you if you have a mix of these methods in your environment. Teams holds on to your data now forever, which would be great!.. If the search function actually worked well. Now you have to sort through everything you’ve ever said to find something that someone sent you last week.
Microsoft just can’t fucking resist destroying a “good” chat application by adding a bunch of bloat.
Which Microsoft Teams are you talking about?
The Microsoft Teams with the purple icon and white accent, or the Microsoft Teams with the white icon and purple accent?
With all the Microsoft renaming, I don’t know if Microsoft Teams is a chat app, a project management tool, or some Xbox extension now.
Because life is suffering.
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.
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.
Only Outlook drives more insane : the fucking looking up of every single fucking email in the address textbox, just so it can put some fucking status badge or some other dynamic shit I don’t care about. It’s atrocious. And it’s so well done it does it for every address every time you add an address. It’s so slow I will literally write addresses in notepad so I can just paste them all in one go and endure that lookup only once.
What a bloated monstrosity >:C
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.
Total number of businesses maybe, but they account for something like two thirds of all employees.
You can’t really say it’s much of a business IT stack if it’s just a single freelancer using a Mac.
They wouldn’t be setting up teams in the first place.
If that’s what you meant to say, then it would help to actually say that. Regardless, the argument doesn’t hold water. If Teams has poor support for older hardware and non-Windows operating systems when other apps don’t, then that’s a Teams problem. If it takes someone who specializes in Teams to be able to work with it effectively when other apps require minimal training, then that’s also a Teams problem.
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 of Teams if you want
Do you really not see how Ms has pushed Teams to be a fucking awful imaginary OS box? They’re just tasks (Planner in a trench coat), it’s just a calendar (ripped from outlook), they’re just files (the worst way to access SharePoint), it’s just one drive (in the worst interface), they’re just notifications (triplicates of what outlook and windows already told me).
touch? Mac? Airpods? What the fuck are you doing? You aren’t doing real business if you’re using an ipad
Oh, honey. Not every job is performed by being fisted with code and network protocol. Businesses run on inappropriate excel databases and you know it. You know the number of local programs is dwindling by the second as each software dev moves to “access from anywhere” and “remove the burden of server management” as they slide down an icy hill towards putting everything in a cloud based Web interface. Either that, or you’re middle management that thinks you need asses in visible chairs to get work done.
I don’t see your argument against teams.
It sounds like:
“It’s all together in one place, how dare they.”
At this point I don’t even bother using the desktop version of outlook, the web app is easier for emails and my calendar is in teams.
You act like cloud services are bad, they aren’t. If they were terrible, people would be switching away from them. They’re adding value beyond their cost and everyone knows it.
Could Microsoft be better at some things? Sure.
But they’re already far better than the alternative, which is a janky ass system of 30 different products from 30 different vendors.
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
