Comment by pluc
14 hours ago
What I conclude from an organization using Teams is that they're running Microsoft stack, which affects my opinion far more negatively. Microsoft sales are powerful. If you use Teams, there's a chance that:
- You use Windows for OS
- You use Sharepoint for documentation
- You use Outlook for Mail
- You use OneDrive for storage
- You use Azure for hosting
- You use Copilot for LLM
- You use GitHub for scm
- etc
all of those are things I actively want to avoid. they're all sub-par, they're all managed by button-clicking pseudo-sysadmins, they're all red flags.
You would severely limit yourself if you're strict about your list without nuance. GitHub is pretty much bog standard in most companies unless you're working for the few using mercurial, etc.
I work in a MS stack and most of your list is untrue for my case. We use slack for messaging, Confluence, Wikimedia, and GDrive for documentation, Google Mail for email, I develop primarily dotnet/C# apps on a MacBook pro M5, have access to all major LLM providers and primarily use Claude and antigravity.
There only thing that checks of your list is Azure hosting.
On a personal note, it has been by far one of the best place I've worked at. The dotnet ecosystem is so well developed and rich, I expect to be paid a huge premium if I ever have to deal with Java again.
GitHub is not git. GitHub is not an alternative to mercurial or svn.
This is like saying Facebook is the alternative to http.
The Facebook comparison is on spot: Both GitHub and Teams have become social networks. Even better if inferior, they solve visibility and connection issues. Actually Microsoft keeps the friction for people without an account just high enough that you want to use it in a business. What we need is that those services are regulated more like Telefone networks allowing federation.
The four companies that I've worked for here in Europe all used GitLab, btw.
How many times has Gitlab deleted their production databases and had irrecoverable data loss? I remember twice.
1 reply →
In our european company (insurance/gov space) we use Teams, Outlook, Sharepoint as side products of Office, largely to get the official editing tools for the documents our clients provide. Depending on who you are in our company, you are using either Mac or Windows, although we are slowly shifting to OpenSUSE. Azure and GitHub are completely out of the question, and OneDrive is only used in the context of Teams/Sharepoint. Sharepoint, too, is only used by half the company for whom it is relevant.
Security-wise most of our data is with our customers on european servers (Word/etc. are not linked to OneDrive), except billing.
100%. We're a total Microsoft shop and it's all so mediocre. We started with Azure AD and slowly replaced all our AAA solutions with Microsoft ones. The Microsoft ones are cheaper (packaged together) and better integrated but in terms of user experience they're really mediocre.
The only thing that was not really worse was email, we came from lotus notes which was a crashy piece of shit.
But our messaging, storage etc solutions all were a big step back when we went to Microsoft.
- You use Windows for OS
Personally I run linux but most of the company is on Windows, sure
- You use Sharepoint for documentation
No, we use Nextcloud for docs and most storage
- You use Outlook for Mail
No, Mxroute. Which actually caused quite a bit of problems with Teams original because it REALLY expects you to use exchange
- You use OneDrive for storage
For large files only, or files that are shared in chat
- You use Azure for hosting
Nope, Hetzner
- You use Copilot for LLM
Come on, not even Microsoft uses that
- You use GitHub for scm
Yep and for all the complaining here, I've literally never had any noticeable downtime or issues. I don't use it for CI though
> - You use GitHub for scm
- You use Azure DevOps for SCM
You’ve missed Office suite.
I know people love Excel and Word, but I just don’t get it. What even is Word? The web thing? Teams Word? The app?
Whichever Word last touched it, formatted it. This breaks it in the other versions.
How is this is a thing? It’s so awful.
I my experience, it's often that Excel is an absolute necessity. Try telling people who work in finance or accounting that they will have to use Google Sheets or another alternative and you'll have a picket line out front of the office within a week.
I've never met anyone who was a die-hard for Word, I'm sure they exist but they can't be a large contingent of users.
Excel is a lot like Photoshop. Everyone hates the parent companies, but there just aren't good alternatives for either one.