Comment by bix6

14 hours ago

I love when people shit on teams and provide no basis for why it’s so much worse than all the other chat offerings other than it being teams.

It switches to a randomly chosen microphone when I connect. Why can’t it default to the microphone on the device I’m using?

Try get transcription to work. What the hell is all that about?

And these are things that happen once you have got the call going. Half of all calls start with a debrief on WTF happened this time we tried to talk.

And then there is the document structure. Try adding a long file name, or dealing with the random upload fails.

my coworkers are always complaining about how much trouble they have with it, not being able to copy and paste into chats, freezes, crashes... never happens to me.

I don't have much experience with others, but I can throw out my complaints about Teams:

* Too much resource usage.

* Chat UX is not good. The team/channel concept makes sense, but threaded (and nonthreaded) chats really just have a bad UI, so everyone at my company just uses multi-person chats, which are terrible for managing access, history, etc.

* For the past while I get some extra prompt about "improving my security" every time I punch in my 2FA info that I have to decline on a daily basis.

I think it's gotten a lot better over recent years but in just the past week we had:

A meeting where 2 people somehow weren't able to join. Even after "restarting". One dialed in by phone, the other gave up.

It chose I guess a dock's microphone over a headset mic. Honestly having some kind of tiny local speech recognition model that would say "get you're really quiet/far away/muffled" would be a godsend. That's user error but still. They have the technology.

There's also the problem that it doesn't remember layout preferences so every meeting I have to focus the content, which still doesn't show it full screen.

And unlike discord there's no option for smooth video so good luck.

Also they removed the Linux native app.

  • - A colleague's whole system has been freezing for a full minute every time he joins a meeting. This has been going on for over a year, including after multiple full system resets

    - On macOS, I regularly (~once a week) end up in different broken sync states, where message histories for all chats are missing messages from the last few month. The only way to reliably fix this is to remove the whole cache, causing it to resync after a app restart. Due to this, I run a whole Windows VPS, just to be able to "reliably" receive Teams messages from customers.

    - In multi-tenant usage, it's incredibly slow to switch between different tenants. If you are semi-actively chatting with users from 2-3 tenants its a big PITA

    - If you are an external user to a organization, the default settings are that your Teams session will last ~24h, after which you have to re-authenticate. Teams doesn't give you any good indication that you have been logged out, unless you actively check, in which case you might be shown a warning banner after ~a minute delay (if you are lucky).

    ---

    I'm usually one the more defensive side of cargo cult hate against software (e.g. I think a lot of people dislike JIRA to an unjustified degree, and mostly due to badly hosted or configured instances), but Teams is one of the few where it's absolutely deserved. I think it's a prime example of how Microsoft as an organization has forgotten how to build good desktop software.

    Only upside is that it's a good bonding ritual with customers, as the Teams suffering is a universal feeling.

I don't know whether Teams is worse than Slack. I do know that I loathe Slack, though. Of the software I use almost every day, it is the worst by miles.