Doesn't mean it won't sell, congrats to OP, but god I hate everything about Teams.
Right now it's showing me calendar items with times that are wrong, they'll switch to the right time in a few minutes... probably. I didn't change time zones, I didn't do anything, it's just something wonky about their new calendar setup. If the time updates I'll click to open the calendar item, and it won't show me the join link to join the meeting ... well eventually it will pop in there, maybe.
It's not just annoyingly designed and slow, it's constantly buggy with new and exciting bugs every few months.
My personal favorite UX-failure-of-the-moment in Teams: If I open the teams tab > Browse, it shows a big list of company-wide channels that I could join. There's a search box, but unlike any normal search box, it only does a prefix search, so if your channel is named "some test channel", and you search for "test", it doesn't find it! Several times I've given up at guessing the right channel name and had to ask coworkers to tell me the exact name in order to join.
it's because they hired "frontend" developers to develop these features, likely someone with little actual compsci experience, and have little to no room to make the feature and under a tight deadline.
Two of my team Channels completely vanished last week. Not in the recycle bins, just gone. The only way I knew was because I got a sync notification from Onedrive.
I contacted support two weeks ago. So far they have asked me to check the Teams admin recycle bin (3 days) and then the SharePoint recycle bin (7 day). I had shared screenshots of both of these in the initial support request, both are empty.
Only 3 people have admin rights in the company, one of us deleted the channels, and even if we did there's supposed to be a 93 day recovery window. But they're just....gone.
I asked for them to escalate 3 days ago. No reply.
My favorite bug (still unsolved!) is that maximizing the window on a video call only shows the top left quarter of the video feed. I have to manually resize the window to that exact region of my screen just to see someone’s full face or screen share. Nobody can fix it, my teams install is just stuck like this. Another one: when using airpods, everyone’s voices sound super slowed down, like the audio samples are being played back at half speed. Google meet and Slack huddles work fine. Cherry on top: sometimes the entire window just vanishes mid call (no video, audio, or any UI) but I’m still broadcasting. This isn’t just bad, it’s repeated complete failures of basic functionality that happen on the regular. Frankly, it’s the most incompetently written piece of software I’ve ever had the displeasure of using.
Your video window issue may be related to display scaling and/or video hardware acceleration. If you care enough, try tinkering with those settings in teams, windows, and your display driver (if it has them…).
Ah, that's probably related to the bug I'm seeing where I've got my Teams calendar synced to my phone, but about half of the events show up an hour later or earlier.
Isn't getting this right, like, _the_ purpose of a calendar?
Having interviewed many people from there, I can only assume they hire anyone with a pulse and give them major features to write in a language they don’t know.
I'm unfortunately using Teams. It's really such a comprehensive piece of shit.
I can't share photos in a channel w/ a customer. Why? No idea. There's no feedback at all. Drag and drop simply fails. Uploads won't go. I went through support and there's 5 different places in the admin to check. All of them seem fine.
This often breaks after a call has had interrupted shares and you have to leave and come back. This is one bug where you don't have to also reboot, great improvement MS!
I had an issue with drag and drop which to me is just related to a very crappy UI.
I have to drag and drop my file exactly inside my small chatbox, and if it's in another place, it won't work. Such nonsense.
I try to explain to people how consistent under-market salaries and a combative work environment has thoroughly brain drained Microsoft. It's really hard to turn that around.
From using their products it seems they just don't value excellence. I think everything else is downstream of that (e.g. if they did, they'd pay more, optimize the work environment, etc.).
Whenever I schedule a meeting, Teams warns me that some attendees are in a different time zone. Except they aren’t. I’ve confirmed with coworkers and checking our settings.
And then there’s the “helpful” way teams resets the calendar view: let’s say I’m going back through calls from last week to see how long they took. In Teams, I go back a week, click the calendar item, record the time in my app, then go back to the calendar view and…I’m on this week. Neat. Intuitive.
I used to have a problem very similar to this, where the "working hours" Teams showed on my profile were in the wrong time zone. It turned out the solution was to go deep into some submenu of the Microsoft account settings website (_not_ anywhere in the actual Teams app) and edit the account time zone preferences, so perhaps look into that and make sure those match the local settings in the Teams app.
I appreciate it but at this point I’ve given up on it. It doesn’t cause any issues, or hasn’t thus far, outside of the annoying nag. That said, if I ever get to digging in again I’ll check in to those settings - thanks!
For thirty years now, the world knows that the last company to trust calendars and mail is Microsoft and yet they are all over the place. I have lost all hope for humanity‘s future.
This seems to be a very common response. I definitely believe it but Teams seems ok to me - can make video calls and do text chats. That is all I need it to do, really. Maybe I just haven't used Zoom enough to know what I am missing.
I miss slack so much. Their attention to detail makes for a much more enjoyable product, paying for something we get for free with 365… still. I don’t know if Microsoft should be content with a product that’s so awful people literally only use it because of network effects.
Curious to know what's awful about slack specifically. For me, I don't like to get lost in a bazillion channels, pins are not global (`saved for later` is), there is no personal message queues etc.
Not so much a laundry listening more that it feels wrong as it is clearly an electron app and doesn’t feel like a native app and chooses to have its own conventions over embracing feeling like a native app.
I think that causes some of the issues you are mentioning.
Now I don’t personally see any communication app like slack that is any better than it. They all sort of suck but I feel like I had a better time with IRC apps back in the day than I do with modern communication apps.
I think it’s less that you’re missing something Zoom does better, it’s mostly that Teams is a poor replacement for any calendar, messaging app, or video call service. It does those things “fine”, but I wouldn’t say it does any of them _well_.
Our company is forcing us to drop slack and use teams. It’s going to be terrible. But hey it saves 600k per year. Never mind that our customer experience will become terrible as team communication fails.
We're all-in on Teams PLUS have management pushing for "service level objectives" on response time. It's impossible to stay on top of the stream of consciousness posts, impossible to find anything you previously answered or value you know is in there somewhere, impossible to measure response time or take ownership of... (what? a chat?). MS keeps cramming poorly thought out "AI-first" features without addressing things like cameras and mics that randomly stop working, blue screens in the middle of meetings. It's such a garbage piece of software that's now THE foundational infrastructure for so many companies. You'll save $600K on the financials and lose $6M across all the things that won't directly show: poor customer service, churn, slower everything, individual and team frustration... but your VP of IT doesn't pay for that.
The stream of consciousness posts is my pet peeve.
A lot of open source projects insist on using Telegram or Matrix instead of an issue tracker or forum and have the same problem. If you want to spend 90% of your time answering the same questions again and again, be my guest, but as a user I won't do more than a cursory search of chat history, and won't try to follow intermingled replies anymore. I will simply ask again and explicitly say "the chat history on this can't be followed and there's no forum, so...".
Professionally I also won't try to keep up with most chats. Someone mentions me on something and if I can't read their one message to get the context needed, I just reply with "I'm not readinf everything said in the last X days. What's the context?" and make them re-explain it.
My company even recently added AI assist tools for our chats, and I occasionally will use it to summarize everything I haven't read just to see if there's any topics I should know about. But I won't use it to try and get context for a question I've been asked.
The chat systems are basically like being in a physical room with everyone coming and going and having their own verbal conversations around you. I'll pay equally as much attention and effort ignoring it to get work done, and ask people to repeat things if they suddenly pull me into a conversation. I'll also drift out of conversations the same, but now they can't see me going back to work to take the hint its time to wrap it up.
I worked at a company that went through this. Honestly, it changed the entire mood of the company and working there. We went from thousands of messages per day to something like 10 (of those channels I was part of, at least). People just hated it, and only used it if they really, really needed to. No more bouncing of ideas around, no more ribbing, just the desperate 'who do I talk to about accomplishing X, anyone know?'
A business owner might conclude 'ah, less time jawing, more time working', but hardly the case. In fact, I think that was a big factor in what ultimately killed the company off a couple years later - through both people literally quitting over it, and a complete breakdown in communication.
I'm no UX expert but I'm going to claim it's because of the UX that Teams doesn't work for so many people, and I'm left wondering why Teams hasn't had a UX overhaul yet.
The other competitor to Slack is Discord, and if you remove the playful "gamer" elements I think it'd be a lot less jarring to people used to Slack, because they follow a lot of similar UX and design patterns.
At one point Discord tried to rebrand into something a bit more serious but it didn't work, but I think they should try again; create a Discord Pro or something like that, get the certifications, add SSO support, etc.
The good thing: When you switch from slack to teams, all channel communications go to 0, because the experience is so dreadful, so you don't get 100 channels to read.
I worry about this too. Diversity is a good thing. And when we do email, DNS, Web, calendars, chat, meetings, storage, etc. all on the same platform, how will we operate/communicate when it fails?
Heterogeneous computing environments provide diversity to isolate and contain failures. So when email goes down, we can still chat and meet.
Teams is so tightly integrated into the MS ecosystem and 365 that it can essentially bring down email and even office apps. Example: PP decks always want to open in Teams by default; every meeting in outlook wants to be a Teams meeting, etc.
Luckily, short of a DNS or auth problem, my experience is that Teams is just an alternate GUI for what already exists - Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive.
And to be fair, you can just tell Teams to open in the desktop office apps by default (settings > Files and Links), and Outlook has a little radio button to turn off whether meetings are also Teams meetings. All the enterprise productivity apps seem to accumulate complexity and resultant scar tissue, usually in the form of busy settings or painfully opinionated defaults - painful when the defaults don't optimize for your use case.
As if slack was any better. I never understand how people accepted this piece of crappy software for regular communication. I mean it has the populate when scrolling behaviour that everyone hates in website design, but somehow it's acceptable for a chat app where looking at past messages is crucial?! I mean you just displayed those messages to me yesterday, why do you need to reload them from the server today. The amount of space saving compared to the bloated mess that your electron app is can't be worth it?! That would be not so infuriating if the search wasn't so crappy that it's often easier to find things by scrolling.
The there's the whole mess when using multiple a mobile and desktop app. It often happens that I get slack message notifications from my phone in my pocket while the open desktop app sometimes takes another minute to get the same message. The same happens with huddles, why does my phone ring abut not my desktop app? And one of my colleagues even has the problem that when he picks up a call on the desktop it opens up on his phone.
I agree that teams is a mess, but IMO mainly because of the mess that is calendering... around it. The calls and messaging parts are OK. In contrast slack can't even get it's core competency right.
It's gonna be terrible. There are so many teams integrations with github, jira, our deployments etc that took busywork off my plate when I was at a slack company and has slowed down me down a ton when I went to a teams org. Sorry man.
I just had to use Slack again after 6 years, and it's incredible how much worse its gotten. Honestly I don't know how they managed to make an industry leading tool actively worse by so much that its now _worse_ than Teams.
Features it had 6 years ago that I desperately missed when we had to start using Teams are pretty much all gone now. Its such a slap in the face of how Enshittified it's become.
I'm not really sure what you mean, I'm also coming back to using Slack for some contracting work after a similar period of time and it seems identical to how it always was to me, definitely feels nicer to me than Teams.
Could you point out what has changed? I guess calls are called "huddles" now for some reason, that's a bit weird but doesn't really bother me.
Yet it's better than every single alternative. Teams is a flaming pile of UX poo. Just like the rest of Microsoft products except Excel and _maybe_ Outlook.
Been using it for over 10 years and I honestly have no idea what you're talking about. I suppose I didn't use the features you're mentioning.
For me, it's basically exactly the same except the sidebar is now wider because of the multi-slack thing, and the home/DMs/activity nonsense bar, which I could do without.
Otherwise it's just channels with messages in them. Which has improved since I started using it, when there were no threads or reactjis.
Sorry if I'm ignorant, but how can slack cost 600k/year? I doubt they wouldn't give some form of deal for bigger companies. I know integrations can sometimes suck up money, but 600k is insane
I poked around with Mattermost like ~8 years ago, but never anything serious. I don't know how good it is now, especially w/r/t administration, but I have to imagine that if you're concerned about $1000s -- let alone $100ks -- in annual costs, you can scale up your storage and still come out _way_ ahead. Maybe that's a naïve take?
i hated using MS Teams (in the past) so much, i would probably look for a new job immediately if my company decided to do this today. I’m not joking in the slightest. And i’m not a slack fan boy, i just dislike MS Teams that much.
These moves are always penny wise and pound foolish if you ask me.
I think the cracks that ultimately led me to quit corporate IT and pursue being an artist were first formed when leadership insisted that the entire company switch to Teams under the guise of saving $9 a month per user.
I never really understand allthe hating on Teams around here. I use it at work for team meetings, often with people in multiple timezones, on desktop and mobile, and it just works. Its not a stellar experience, but it does just quietly get the job done. The whole, largish company runs on it.
That is exactly the thing. It never just works. There are new bugs plaguing our company on a daily basis. And they change daily. Can't share screen today. can't unmute. unread messages will never become read. Can't call anyone. Meeting invites only updated for one attendee. meeting alerts don't pop up. trying to open basic windows takes upwards of a full minute(workflows panel for example). these are just some of the things from the last couple weeks. The problem is that it's never a consistent experience. It becomes a time sink of eternal FOMO because it cannot be trusted.
None of that mentions the terrible UX(why do emojis take 10s to load?). When your company is remote first, it's a complete disaster.
I only have to use teams as a contractor thankfully for a single client. Not a single meeting I’ve had in two years of using it has been free of someone having some kind of issue specific to teams itself, including me.
I've worked at companies that use both Slack and Teams, and the chat culture that Slack creates is hugely different than Teams. Have you experienced both? Teams chat rooms are ghost towns compared to Slack. The UX of teams discourages chat, syncing is a mess so ordering is all funky, and good luck finding anything written in the past. Slack is so good at search that we have channels with just feeds of auto-generated information, and there's a good chance anything you need to know is in one of those channels. (company is 800+ people doing 300m ARR)
I think on HN, it might be because smaller teams are using it and aren't actually managing it properly. I get the impression they are just rolling it out as a free for all and not restricting who can add apps and channels etc. Of course it will turn into a mess if you allow that.
Features that worked in mIRC in the 1990s are broken, like sending messages. Right this second if I click to reply to someone's message, I can't add a message in Japanese unless I copy-paste it in. This happens every few months. I can't tag people who have non-English names reliably.
It crashes my browser. There are weird security settings, and when you have multiple environments, it is completely unusable without having multiple browsers. Sometimes you can't log in without clearing your cache completely.
It is sheerly anti-organic, adding features no one wants.
I'm literally taking time out of my vacation to complain about it, fml.
I use it every single day, constantly, and it works just fine for me. Only compaint I ever had is that the search functions suck but thats common to literally anything microsoft has ever done
I would have to agree with you. I use it every day for work and besides some wonky syncing between Outlook and Teams and the search which you already pointed out, it works. More than I can say for some of the older tech we were using before Teams.
I would also not that I've never been a huge power user or rely heavily on it for anything really outside of calendar or channel conversations so for me, on a basic level it works.
I don't understand all the hate for Jira to be honest. I've used it at various companies and I think it's fine. You can absolutely customize Jira into a monstrosity that sucks to use, but that's true of many ticket systems. I think that the out of the box experience is reasonable though.
I think that's exactly it - the first time people experience Jira is often in heavily customized workflow-from-hell situations where the Jira Admins are far removed from the users.
You can truly create some workflow nightmares and there's nothing in the app to discourage it apart from org culture.
IMO, this is the right idea. I've worked on small projects using Jira primarily as a means of ticket management, and I've worked on giant orgs with scrums and groomings and all that.
As far as a tool, it's perfectly fine. A lot of my bad feelings came as a result of wanting it to be simple ("What should I work on next") but it being twisted into a series of incantations and rituals by those looking to bend it for the purposes of more and more intricate views into how we spend every moment of our day.
Yeah thats the real pain point, but also just the basic operation of jira sucks. The interface is really confusing and difficult to navigate and changes drastically every time theres an update every few years. Then also its SLLOOOOOWWW. For a program that millions of people use all day every day that does nothing more than display text, its pathetically slow.
If you're in a company with a very top-down model/mentality, Teams is fine. Your comms are mostly in small groups or DMs, which Teams seems to really push users towards.
The whole channel experience is horrible and really degrades any attempt at having open communications in a company.
However, if you are a "flat" company that does everything in the open, Teams is going to work against you; this is one of the qualities that makes Slack great. Its whole approach pushes more things out into the open for more collaboration.
Sad but true. If you run Teams you're more likely to be what some people would consider a slow death corporate hell hole. Thankfully last place I had like that was a husk of a company so I enjoyed a flexible work schedule since literally no one knew what I was doing and no one cared. I logged in, ran an offshore stand up, did the days activities to maintain schedule, and left whenever I wanted to. Liminal office spaces aren't so bad when you can leave anytime and get decent fast food for lunch. Good times!
People use Teams because they're already using Microsoft office products and it is "free" in that way. Then it's entrenched and folks can't imagine doing things any other way.
But then you'd be onboarded (as a guest) on their Teams environment, right? You wouldn't need to have your own to make that work. In fact, when I had the need to switch between environments I found that experience to be extremely confusing, frustrating and buggy.
Yep. Companies sign up for O365 and then the bean-counters insist on killing any other products that can be replaced by that (if you squint hard enough) because they see it as cost savings.
It’s not about bean counting, though. As a small startup, should you really spend like $15/user/month on a chat app that you get included with your office suite? Try to explain these expenses to your investors.
Google Workspace isn’t really popular here, most non-technical folks need office tools, and you’ll definitely need email, cloud storage, and communications, so yeah—I’m not quite sure how we would be able to do business without O365 or an equivalent platform.
Slack and Zoom both predate Teams. Teams only gained penetration through bundling with the rest of MS products on large enterprise contracts.
There are already open source alternatives built for both Teams and Zoom. The issue is that open source projects don’t have salespeople that will promise compliance and integration (whether or not they can actually deliver).
> Teams only gained penetration through bundling with the rest of MS products on large enterprise contracts.
Hard disagree on the "only" modifier. Surely integration helped, but I've used Zoom, and I hate it every time I have to use it. Teams is comparatively a godsend.
He wasn't dismissive, he was countering dismissiveness. It was dismissive to throw out "just build your own". 99% of companies don't have that option, most companies are customers, not builders. This commenter was pointing out the obvious lack of perspective on the majority of businesses. That is a huge problem in SV and software development these days, the lack of awareness and context about real problems out in the market. "Just build a replacement" is a non-viable route for most people and most companies.
I think it's dismissive to say that explaining something is harder isn't important.
And something being harder stopping your from doing it is ubiquitous in life. It's a good skill to know how much effort something will take and weighing the risks and rewards.
Chat is a commodity. Right out of the gate, that's not great for margins.
Enterprise chat might not be a commodity quite yet - SSO, DLP/data classification, auditing, retention, compliance checkboxes - but these seem insurmountable at first glance to get a FOSS solution to reach a viable enterprise feature matrix.
Killer features as a moat might help, but while almost everyone uses chat, everyone probably uses chat differently, so that means discovering killer features for a niche and trying to own that segment before expanding. Unfortunately this is the "Draw the rest of the owl" part, because while I have quibbles with chat apps, I struggle to envision a chat app that does something radically different than any other chat app.
If you built that alternative, would companies choose to use it? they get teams built into their outlook and office 365 contracts and all the other integration. Slack didn't lose because it was worse, so just being better isn't enough.
The hurdle is producing a full suite covering everything Microsoft sells in one package, which seems impractical without their funding to start with.
(Disclaimer: Teams is in my "red flag" list when evaluating a company - I hate it that much)
Teams is not popular because it does something that no other app does. It is popular (IMO) because it does everything (calendar, chat, videoconference, and wiki - all of it badly) and, if you're a Windows user, you're paying for it one way or another.
All that Microsoft had to do during the pandemic (which is when they unleashed Teams) was to approach a higher-up and pitch "why would you pay for Slack and Zoom when our product does the same? And since it's already included in your Office license you're already paying for it, so really, you're throwing money away". I know me and my friends complained about it, but so what? The company saved on licensing costs and IT people are always complaining anyway. And while the bundling of Teams got Microsoft in trouble in the EU [1] they still haven't paid any fines for it (I think) so it's hard to argue that they shouldn't have done that.
While Slack doesn’t do all of that natively. Everyone integrates with Slack. For instance if you get tagged in a comment in Google Docs you can reply to the comment in Slack. You can start a Zoom meeting from Slack and Google calendar (corporate) integrated with it.
Comments like this are the real source of dread on HN. The guy built a successful side hustle that clearly has found a place in the market, and people just want to shit on it and virtue signal how much cooler they are than ms teams. If it’s not for you, move along if you don't have anything useful to contribute.
Honestly I'm here for it, because it's an option for a market of groups that don't otherwise have the opportunity to deploy this kind of capability. Teams feelings aside :)
I worked for a client once that refused to let us build and manage databases for things that needed it. The one option in the end that we could get approved was using Microsoft SharePoint lists and CRUD'ing to them through the Javascript API.
A lot of problems have lame constraints, but having an option at all to solve them is pretty nice.
Gosh, I just recently talked our management out of taking the Teams turn after Skype sunset was scheduled, in favor of another solution. I thought maybe I'm too biased against M$ due to all those coworkers' accounts being blocked for no reason without any way to reinstate - but reading through this thread is a sure confirmation I was right
Depression and dread is coming through me. All the repressed memories are flowing back up.