Comment by EbNar

Like many I use a variety on those chat programs, Zulip for my companies, Slack for some customers, good old IRC for some open source things, Discord for gaming, ... They all have some strenght and some weakness.

But then Teams keeps showing up because "everyone knows it", "you already have it through office", ... And somehow I can't name a single strenght for it. It's just plain bad.

It reminds me of the galaxy of "prime" service from Amazon beside delivery, that don't need to compete on their own merit but benefit from the main product they're attached to: on its own, it should have died a dishonorable death a long time ago.

Teams is one of the only exceptions I can think of to my "blame the system, not the developer" rule with regards to corporate software.

No, in Teams' case, they somehow managed to take a trivial problem that was solved quite well 30-40-odd years ago (albeit in a slightly different skin - IRC) and completely botch it in every way imaginable, and then a few more ways not even the most creative of QA engineer could have possibly imagined a team messing up such a basic problem set.

It's finally a little bit less bad than it was 2-3 years ago, so the trend line is slightly angling upwards out of hell now, where the bar has been, but that's really not saying much.

Spoken like someone who has never used Deltek Maconomy. Teams is really bad but not Deltek Maconomy bad. Nothing else I’ve used is.

That being said, in the last job where I used it regularly, Teams was responsible for 100% of the blue screens I regularly experienced. Dell laptop and some quirk of interaction between Teams video calls, NVidia graphics drivers, and WiFi drivers than no update ever fixed. Very frustrating.

As bad as teams is, there is absolutely no comparison to the crap that is slack. Just a number of things I regularly encounter: 1. Slack selecting speakers instead of headphones for call, even though I've used the headphones just before. 2. Calls ringing on my mobile that has been quietly sitting on the desk, instead of on the desktop that I've been typing on. 3. Mobile and desktop client being completely out of sync, it sometimes takes several minutes for messages typed on the mobile to show up on the desktop or vice versa. 4. I always have to select which screen to share twice before it shares (non of the other programs have this issue) 5. Don't get me started on the worst search ever, it's almost always easier to scroll than to search if it wasn't for: 6. Whoever thought it was a good idea that we should everything older than 15 messages or so back from the server. So instead of just quickly scrolling up it becomes an excercise of wading through molasses.

7. The absolute brain dead formatting, which makes typing equations or e.g. python exponents super annoying (no I didn't want to have this text bold)

I mean don't get me wrong, I'm not a big fan of teams either, but it's absolutely mind boggling how slack got to such a dominant position in this space