Comment by tom_
1 day ago
The last couple of places I worked at used Teams, as did a number of the clients. We never found anything much better for the video calling aspect, and my understanding is that Teams comes for free with all the other Microsoft Shit - so you may as well.
I didn't find the chats/discussion UI at all clear initially, but once I'd had it explained to me, I could see what was going on.
(I do remember it taking a long time to load, and apparently using a surprising amount of memory once it was finally done, but aside from providing reliable fodder for water cooler conversations with other 40+ year old colleagues this never actually seemed to cause a problem in practice. At my last Teams-using job I would restart my PC no more than once or twice a week, something I could let happen in parallel with making the cup of tea that I'd always be making at some point anyway. And it had 64 GB RAM, which isn't even a lot by today's standards, but still Teams didn't actually fill all of it.)
Zoom, Slack and Google Meet all work as well or better than Teams for it's primary purpose: video calls. Teams freezes up, consume ALL your resources, going from one call to another and it just stops working. The only thing I've used that's worse is Chime.
>> I didn't find the chats/discussion UI at all clear initially, but once I'd had it explained to me, I could see what was going on.
This is an example of how bad it is: you had to have the chat UX explained to you. Combined with MS cramming as much crap into teams as possible and trying to tie you to their other products with integrations that barely or rarely work - and the AI features are terrible (and yet another MS AI offering called Copilot?). It really is that bad and I'm glad I no longer have to use it.
I keep hearing this on HN, but I never run into these issues with Teams. Video calling is fine and chat is ok. We generally just use chats instead of channels as that just seems like an unnecessary abstraction.
Having org wide joinable channels is useful.
Splitting small group chat across more than a couple of chats is insane.
We use Zoom, Teams and Google at work. depending on the client each swears the other never works or is horrible.
I think we can all agree microsoft business video for skype or whatever it was called, was at least the worst
I don't disagree about the chat UX. The chat vs channel distinction was not at all clear when I started using Teams, at least not to me, and actually not to any of my colleagues either, and it was a large part of why we quickly started using Slack at that place. It wasn't until I did some work with a client that had long gone full Microsoft that I encountered somebody that had an idea of what was going on.
(In fact, it's not really that complicated. If you squint right, it might even be more useful than what Slack gives you! But something about the UI just didn't make it remotely obvious.)
Anyway, even if the text chat isn't awesome, for video calls, we never had a problem, and it scales pretty well with number of participants.
I don't see this behaviour at all, and I live in Teams on Windows, web and Android. It has improved over time.