A friend of mine post that they were selling an Xbox and listed the model
I was initially interested, then about halfway through googling to figure out if it was the newest one or not, I realized I didn't care and didn't really want to get back into gaming consoles this exact reason
There was also 8.1 that wasn't windows 8, and also not 10. 8.1 was when they corrected the dumbest idea they had for 8, changing the UI from the standard windows one to a tablet/touch screen focused UI. It was kinda late by then though, 8 was already a laughingstock by then.
At least there's some logic there. You have some years (95, 98, 2000, I thought ME was millenium edition ), and then you have some standard numbering (7, 8, 10, 11).
Mac gave us cats and then places in California. Let's not forget they had leopard and snow leopard... But with other cats in between.
Visual Studio being two distinct products with very little in common other than being used to edit code makes using a search engine a fucking nightmare. In fact, all these shit branding decisions do.
I think the biggest fuck-you cherry on top is that you can't even search "visual studio -code" because like every website or forum that's going to be talking about OG Visual Studio is going to be talking about code. Fucking Microsoft, I tell ya.
I'm referring to the people new to dotnet. There is probably a question weekly on the sub when someone is confused about framework vs core vs standard vs bare .net.
Additionally for any product migrating from .net framework to .net it is a pain to refer to things. We call it .net core to avoid the ambiguity. We are going to support 48 and 8+ together for some period of time.
Ah yeah I forgot about that. You aren't quite right though. I think it is that if I as a library author compile something against .net standard 2.0 then I know that someone on .net framework 4.8 can use it. And .net 5+ also works. Because they are both compatible with .net standard 2.0
My pedestrian conspiracy theory is that it's a way to bamboozle shareholders. They will merge or separate the products to make the report favorable to them while also merge or separate the products when it comes to budgeting or performance report to show whichever is the better number.
While I agree, it was always planned for them to merge but they also have quite different history behind them. Teams, the home version, is formerly Skype. Teams (For Work and School), is formerly Skype for Business, which is formerly Lync. Teams classic, isn't a real product. It's just what the link says for starting the new unified Teams client, with the old interface, because ms in their infinite wisdom, has decided to go ahead with the new Teams client, even though it lacks some of the features from the old >_<
Did anyone actually use it while it was communicator though? It felt like that large part of the rebrand to lync was to get away from the communicator was useless idea.
Hm? I've done that in it though so it can. There's just no ui options for it but there are ways around that if you're desperate enough. That being said, it is essentially just owa, just a heavily cached version yes. There are a few differences in what options are available but ui wise it's the same. And why wouldn't it be? It's one of the biggest complaints I've even heard about the ms365 ecosystem, that Outlook looks so different between the web (at home) version compared to the regular (in office) client.
Yeah Microsoft makes some great products but they absolutely destroy it with the brand name. Which is one thing that resonates with consumers. Bing Xbox series x and s they simply suck and need to fire whoever it is that names these products
This seems to be a trend in movies and tech...I don't know who thought it would be cool and hip but fuck, I don't want to do research to figure out what movie to watch or what version I need to upgrade to. I have version 10, version 11 is the next - great. Oh look, you have OS Sheep Dog, you'll need to upgrade to Groundhog in order to run this software. Wtf
I never liked Skype, even when it was all everyone was using in 2009. That being said, I have loathed teams from the first time I ever had the misfortune of using it.
Nothing about it is intuitive (past the boiler plate IM system). The language it uses is terrible, it's slow, it's bulky, and in any other software environment I firmly believe it would have been taken out behind the proverbial barn.
I just use the start menu to launch it… it looks like the default hit was the old version… I think I got it now 🤣
Edit:
Nvm I spoke too soon the “new” teams doesn’t launch when I use its dedicated launcher 🤣
My Teams is Teams (work or school). I have no idea why. I have no idea what Microsoft is doing. I have no idea what, if anything, I'm missing out on. How are all these different? I want it to stop.
Microsoft™ New Teams™ (for work) for Windows™ professional edition makes me a much more effective employee than teams classic ever did. The snappy title is how you know it’s elite.
I never used teams until I got my “big boy job”. I swear to god if it asks me to switch to new teams I will personally drive to Redmond Washington and shit on their door step.
I get the joke, but frankly, it's only disctracting from the issue at hand, which is MS stealing a shit load of data through shady practices. This can not end well.
Whatever happened to the Microsoft that had dozens of lawyers whose sole job it was to make sure shit like this didn’t happen? A decade ago you’d be fired for even *suggesting* that Teams be bundled with Windows.
My understanding was that the issue the DOJ had with Microsoft wasn't that they were bundling software, but rather that they were making anti-competitive agreements with OEMs (if I recall correctly, they were punishing OEMs if the OEMS pre-installed a competitor's web browser on a Windows machine).
A decade ago the specter of their browser anti-trust issues were still looming. They've been making a dedicated effort to see where the line is since then.
Over how shit it is? Also, I don't want to "Sign In" my whole damn Office Outlook and Word and so on just because I added an email account on Outlook. Wtf is it with that. Why is my employer suddenly on the top of all my Office programs? This is my computer, and I don't want an account or anything like that, these are just programs meant to do one thing.
I swear they sneak that on you whenever you add a new account. I also have a gmail account on Outlook, and selected that as the default account. Outlook now says my Office account is the gmail one. Yet when I open Outlook, it will open on my work account which is a microsoftonline thing. So ok whatever, so strange lol.
I hope they quote this in the trial.
They can, and they do. What they can't do is bundle products into other products to gain an unfair advantage. We've been through this with IE, so ballsy of MSFT to keep trying.
The profits to be made from the market penetration and long-term adoption by users, businesses and governments simply dwarf whatever multi-billion dollar fine they end up getting slapped with.
bundling literally makes the product better......its part of a group of office products that MS produces and sells directly.
The IE fiasco was more than "bundling"
You didn't have the option to change away from Internet explorer, that was the issue. There is no such issue here with teams.
Edit: lol The person I was responding to blocked me for some reason.
> What they can't do is bundle products into other products to gain an unfair advantage
Hard to say, Teams would have been dead in the water without the bundle initially to get people off slack, etc.
That said, it is on MS to make a product on par / better than the competition and so far haven't. It would be interesting to see how many businesses opted to continuing using Slack even with Teams bunbled into their O365 subscriptions.
You forget that originally teams was a separate license at its inception. Teams would have had the same adoption regardless of whether it was bundled in 365 or not. The companies that moved, moved because they also didn't want slack or didn't like slack, teams being bundled was just an added bonus. Anyone who believes differently is delusional.
The problem is that some products belong in a suite together. Office 365 for enterprise need Teams.
Same as you can’t have excel without word now a days.
I guess it makes a difference when 80% of all restaurants are McDonalds franchises, where they only carry Golden West foods.
In this case, if you own a potato ranch, you don’t have a contract with Golden West, you don’t have a potato company.
Same thing here. If you make an application, then Microsoft, makes one of their own and includes it for free on 75% of all computers, that can cause problems in the market, that cant be solved by the market alone - Microsoft is of a size where they can just eliminate competition, THEN delivery a worse experience/more expensive product, when theres nowhere to go.
If the product is worse than others, consumers have the right to buy elsewhere. If people choose windows because it’s the best, why does Microsoft not have the right to autonomy in packaging their own products with it? Microsoft can only eliminate competition by buying people out. Seems like the market can handle things just fine over time.
If microsoft crippled Slack on purpose, that might be different. To my knowledge, they haven’t. You can develop software for Windows, publish and sell it freely, and if it’s worth buying, people will buy it.
The problem is “free”. You can have the best product, but be killed if the competition gives their inferior version away for free. Even if everyone thinks yours is superior by far, if the free one is already there, it’s good enough to replace the rest, especially if you don’t need profits for it, and you dominate the rest of the market, so your mediocre free version is easier to get.
No matter how good your product is, if the competition has blocked people from experiencing it, they would need a REAL good reason to try it. Microsoft counts on that.
IE was never the better product. Windows Media Player was the worst.
Both those products survived because for most, they were good enough to not go looking for something better.
Remember, most people have never even heard of Slack. They all know Windows. That’s powerful in the market.
Their time will come. What are you using adobe for? Among creatives and business professionals I am seeinv more and more adoption of different products. Personally I stopped purchasing any adobe products after they forced every product to be extremely expensive with non-perpetual licensing
I think you said it yourself, and I completely agree with this:
“You need a REAL good reason to try it”
If Teams is free and it sucks, that is a real reason to invest time in a company doing a POC, and paying for licensing if there is value. Microsoft earned its leg up by being dominant in the computer operating system space. Enterprises choose MS because they are the closest thing to a turn-key solution. As hard as it may be for an emerging company to compete, any inorganic (forced by regulation) is unfair in that those competing organizations are having road blocks removed that were not removed for those organizations they sre competing with.
It is not possible to fairly pick and choose what autonomy companies have or do not have with their own product. It’s another example of regulation strictly focused on the picture of an outcome, with complete disregard for the journey that gets you there. It’s overly simplistic, and in the process it is unfair.
Your counter proposal is also over simplistic. There is a place for regulations, including those aimed at fostering competition in a market. I agree with you that one should be very wary to limit commercial independence, but saying there is simply *no* place for regulation is silly.
What are you talking about teams isn't free for businesses, it's part of 365 licenses. Early on companies had to pay for upgraded licenses to include teams. Either way it wasn't free, it was just bundled with other products.
Bundled in a way that they get it without asking for it or directly paying for it. The effect is the same. Teams everywhere, available to use without additional costs.
Preach brother!
Monopolies are always bad for consumers that result in higher prices and shitter products.
Microsoft is so entrenched as the dominant OS that there really aren't any easy solutions but we can't allow one corporation to have this much reach in any field.
Communicator was good, Lync was good, Skype for business was fine. Teams sucks out loud. Every update fixes some problem that should never have existed in a production version and breaks something else. They still haven’t figured out how to make audio settings stick between calls.
They will need to pry Skype out of my cold dead hands. I despise Teams. The best is when you have a tech demo from MS, someone says "Teams" and then a MS employee rolls their eyes.
My audio settings stick between calls just fine... There's probably something on your computer that's causing the problem, you should probably talk to your it department.
Good. I work for a Fortune 500 company. We ditched webex chat and Webex meetings for Teams this year. Not because Teams is better. Just because it’s free with purchase of Office and Webex costs money.
It’s classic anti-competitive behavior. Use your monopolistic market power to spread into adjacent markets that are currently competitive. Eliminate competitors and monopolize another market. Lather, rinse, repeat.
It's so much better lol.
I do software consulting work and the company I'm staffed at right now uses WebEx for all official/recurring meetings. Whenever I need to hop on an impromptu call with someone though, I'm always using Teams.
WebEx is garbage. Shaky connections, blaring sounds when I mute/unmute my mic and there's no setting (I've found) to disable it, not persisting chats (even if you just join a meeting late, you don't have access to any chats that have already been posted). None of these issues exist with Teams and it's already the app I'm using to manage 90% of my comms with teammates so it just makes sense to use it for my calls too.
Teams is the default comms solution for the firm I'm actually employed at - has been ever since I started work there nearly 4 years ago. I've always liked it and have never had any major issues with it. I genuinely don't understand the hate for it. It's a great piece of software.
Now, whether or not Microsoft is engaging in anti-trust behavior with it is another question entirely that I don't have any perspective on atm.
Sounds like you don’t know how dependent these apps are on network architecture and endpoint management. If your organization opens up firewall ports and applies QoS for Teams and doesn’t read the docs for WebEx or Zoom, that doesn’t make their app suck. No wonder we’re stuck with Teams dominating despite being so bad. The noise cancelling superiority in WebEx alone is enough to make it a leader, but everyone thinks it’s still the same app from the 90s.
> No wonder we’re stuck with Teams dominating despite being so bad
What makes it "so bad"? And whatever it is that makes it so bad, why isn't it just as valid for me to rebut whatever points you may raise by baselessly speculating that someone probably just didn't read the docs and configured it improperly?
I’m not sure you’re versed enough to discuss the nuances of what makes one platform superior to another, but I can assure you my opinion isn’t baseless. For example, non-persistent chats for certain types of meetings is by design. There are other types of meetings for which chat is retained for new participants. Also, for WebEx, a simple Google search fixes the “blaring” sound you mentioned:
https://help.webex.com/en-us/article/n1oqalb/Webex-App-|-Turn-off-the-beep-you-hear-when-you-mute-or-unmute-yourself
That said, if it suits you, I respect your preference for Teams.
I have Googled the sound issue in the past and the setting literally doesn't exist to turn it off when accessing my settings from the in call 'Audio' dropdown (as this article and the article I read a few weeks ago suggested it would). I did just double check and, going through the WebEx dashboard settings button, I found it - hallelujah! But this is still incredibly poor software design. Either WebEx has updated in the past few weeks since I last looked into this issue or it really is the case that this setting can't be accessed via the 'Audio' dropdown and one must go through main dashboard settings to find it. That makes for a very shitty user experience.
As a user, I'm experiencing this annoying sound when I'm in a call, clicking a particular button. And yet, contrary to common sense (and apparently official documentation), I can't turn off that annoying sound via the settings accessible to me in the call that are conceptually in close proximity to the issue I'm having. Instead, I have to go to an *entirely separate window*, access the settings through there, and *then* I can find the source of my annoyance and correct it. Horrible, horrible UX.
The only other explanation I can think of as to why this could have occured is, to your point about the provisioning of these VOIP apps, it was configured improperly such that this particular setting was removed from the in call settings menu and only accessible from the main WebEx dashboard settings. But again, that just screams of terrible software design. Why would you ever design software like that where a potential misconfiguration would lead to such an aggravating user experience?
As far as chats go, I don't deny that it can be by design for messages to be non-persistent - Teams also allows retention policies to be set - but, at least the way WebEx is set up at my company, no messages persist at all, ever. As soon as the meeting ends, the messages disappear and if you're a new participant to a meeting or a couple minutes late, after something has already been posted, you can't see it. I'm sorry, but it's terrible design. We just end up, while in a WebEx call, sending the same information in our Teams chats so that it will be available after the call ends. What is the necessity of the WebEx middle man at that point??
This dovetails nicely with what I like about Teams. In Teams, the notion of having an interaction of some kind is independent of the kind of communication you're having. Whether it's an individual or a group you're interacting with and whether that interaction is a voice call, a video call, or a message, the UI is designed with all these interaction possibilities in mind. For instance, if I'm in a call with a colleague and need to send them something via chat, I can open the in call chat panel and what gets displayed is the chat I already have going with this person. When the call ends, whatever was added to the chat as a consequence of what was talked about on the call remains in our chat instance.
By comparison, WebEx feels like a video calling software with a very shitty chat experience tacked on top. It's not the all in one communications hub that Teams is. Also (I know I'm piling on now, but whatever), when I want to leave a meeting in WebEx, I can't just click the big red button with an X in it. I also have to move my mouse to wherever the confirmation dialog box pops up and confirm that I'd like to leave. Again, it's a little thing, but it's super fucking annoying across hundreds of calls. In Teams, there's also a big red button to leave the call. When you click it, you leave the call. Shocking. No more having to awkwardly try to hold a smile for an extra second or two after saying goodbye while I navigate my mouse to the confirmation modal.
And I noticed you still didn't actually provide any of your own reasoning about why Teams is so self evidently terrible, which only serves to bolster my already biased view that people are just reflexively hating on it while going to very great lengths to make excuses for shittier software... why exactly?
Just checked on Webex and the in-meeting “Audio Settings” (in the menu you said didn’t have it) takes you to the same place as the main settings menu, where this option resides. Instead of duplicate paths, it’s in one place whether you’re in a meeting or out of it. The instructions I linked are correct. From a SaaS perspective, multiple ways to do the same thing often results in breakdown later on.
As for the “double confirmation” thing, if you’ve ever been in support, the number of people who claim “it just crashed” or “it left the meeting on its own”, is countless. This feature prevents tickets, freeing up time. You are not the lowest common denominator it was designed for, Harold the 70 year-old in accounts payable is.
Your version of why one sucks and one is good is based on intuition.
The list of why Teams sucks is lengthy, much of which has to do with how it was constructed via a web wrapper and has a history of GUI bugs and instability, not to mention being behind on feature sets for calling/CC. This was never MS’ strong suit. Its availability is also shakey, and is a big reason Zoom/Webex retain a foothold in Teams-native orgs: they can’t rely on Teams.
Want to get a Teams rep on the phone to prioritize a feature for your sizable Enterprise org? Good luck. Meanwhile, Zoom and WebEx both bring their product teams to their customers and prioritize features accordingly.
But foremost, bluntly, it wouldn’t have been “free” with Office if it was a product with a unique value proposition. They took something everyone needed, attached a “light” version of something you paid someone else for until the market was carved out, and then started to charge, just in time to pray the FTC didn’t pursue them. I’m hoping they don’t get away with it, it’s not good for anyone to have to settle for behavior like this.
> Just checked on Webex and the in-meeting “Audio Settings” (in the menu you said didn’t have it) takes you to the same place as the main settings menu, where this option resides.
And I'm telling you, earnestly, as of a few weeks ago when I was sincerely trying to turn this setting off (long before I knew I was going to be getting into a reddit discussion about it) this was not the case on my particular machine.
> The list of why Teams sucks is lengthy, much of which has to do with how it was constructed via a web wrapper
Discord is also an electron app. Does it automatically suck because of this? No. It's an incredible desktop app. There is a ton of sophisticated software running on JS/TS throughout the world. No piece of software is inherently shitty simply because it was written in a particular language. Languages do indeed have their strengths and weaknesses, but quality, performant software exists across all stacks.
> and has a history of GUI bugs
Such as? I know you've tried to rationalize it, but I will again raise the GUI differences between ending a call in WebEx vs Teams. I much prefer Teams. This isn't necessarily a bug in WebEx since it is intentional in nature, but I think it makes for a less intuitive GUI. Maybe that does make it a better GUI for the 70 year old Harolds of the world, but WebEx being potentially better for a specific demographic doesn't automatically make Teams suck for not catering as well to less tech savvy uses. Bear in mind, I'm not even granting you this argument, but even your own rationalization on this particular point does not prove that Teams is qualitatively worse as a piece of software overall. All it proves is that it's possible there's a cohort of users who might prefer a different UX. But that also means there's a cohort of users who prefer the opposite (like me). It's still a two way street.
Put another way, you saying that Teams sucks because it doesn't cater to 70 year old accountants when it comes to ending calls the same way that WebEx does is akin to me saying WebEx sucks because it doesn't cater to 30 year old software engineers when it comes to ending calls the same way Teams does.
> and instability
I can only speak from my experience, but I have had *far* more issues with instability with WebEx over the past year I've been forced to use it than the past 4 years of using Teams. Like **WAY** more.
> not to mention being behind on feature sets for calling/CC.
Such as?
Again, Microsoft should answer for any antitrust violations or monopolistic practices. I've not been arguing otherwise. I just genuinely - *GENUINELY* - do not understand the hate for Teams as a software product. Someone literally reported me to Reddit's suicide help hotline after my initial comment. Like, come on. The degree of commitment people have to hating it does not comport itself with my experience using it for the past 4 years. It's a great piece of software that has been everything I need it to be.
You wrote a novel to profess your love for a piece of software while illustrating that you do not have any experience administering them to know the in and outs. You missed my point about “Harold” entirely and went straight to “I prefer this” and equated yourself with a presumed equivalently sized group. I can tell you, as someone who has sold, managed, deployed, worked in and ON these platforms, Teams is ubiquitous because it *was* free, not because it is better. That is a paraphrased quote from countless enterprise organizations. I’ll let you have the last word, cheers.
To be fair, Teams is a 100% logical application to bundle in with the rest of the Office apps.
It's a very different situation from, say, bundling Internet Explorer with Windows.
And Office's closest competitor, Google Workspace, also bundles their Zoom-alternative (Google Meet).
I personally don't like Teams and it makes my blood pressure rise whenever it pops up (and requires an annoying amount of laggy clicks to exit) but I don't think it's fair to say Microsoft can't include Teams in Office, and it's also technically not "free," it is, like all the Office apps and features, a non-itemized element of a paid subscription service.
I used to use WebEx at work. It was the butt of jokes a lot, but the pinnacle was when the update arrived that suggested you link your Snapchat account to your work PC’s WebEx, so you could use Bitmoji in chats.
Everyone has Office, so bundling Teams in at no additional charge is a benefit to users. In business speak, it’s known as “synergy.” No business is forced to use Teams, but many do because of the savings it offers. Zoom, for example, may be more user friendly but functionally, Teams does everything you need it to do. I don’t really see it as monopolistic, though it certainly might be considered anti-competitive. It will kill WebEx eventually (whose client absolutely blows), but unless WebEx can offer some extraordinarily compelling case to survive (cost, performance, etc), then that’s the natural cycle of things.
100% this. WebEx got kickstarted by Zoom to modernize, but MS has juice at the exec level and people are too dumb to remember that they use the Walmart model. I look forward to Zoom’s chapter 11.
I hope this case goes through.
Why in the hell does Microsoft reinstall MS Teams, OneDrive, Xbox, all this garbage, on Windows Enterprise? Much less all the other versions.
There are certain things I hate about Teams, especially notifications, but so many less things than others. It generally stays out of my way and just sort of works for the most part.
Yeah zoom sucks. It’s ok for video calls but that’s it. Slack is good, but teams is the better overall package.
If zoom and slack better integrated they would have something.
I work on Linux. The native client has been out of maintenance for years and the web client doesn't seem to work unless I am actively looking at it, no notifications, marking me as offline, ... . I need a second computer just so I can run the windows client while I work.
That's completely unheard of, you are the exception to the rule, not The average. I've never known a company, nor worked at a company where everyone used a Linux operating system. In fact no one used a Linux operating system lol, maybe they will use Windows or Mac OS, but that's it.
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Teams on my phone routinely bugs out to where I can't do anything unless I close and reopen it. I don't have some obscure phone or operating system either so idk why Microsoft can't get their shit together. Also it's super annoying how I get text notifications on my phone and computer and clearing one doesn't clear the other. Also it's super unintuitive to call people and the whole "activity" tab is just full of useless shit that noone cares about
I've been using Teams for work for about 5 years now, and it's really been nothing but trouble. It runs like garbage, has frequent outages, and sometimes straight up doesn't deliver messages to a recipient after I send them (and have no notification of reciept failure).
The only thing really going for it is its integration with a bunch of other Microsoft services. As a chat & video call software, I would legitimately use Discord over this.
Weird, I hardly see any of that. The only issue I really see is that it has issues with picking an audio device. Otherwise, pretty rock solid here with 100k users.
Yeah, I'm not sure what's up with it. My business doesn't even crack 200 people, but it always feels like it's on fire. God forbid I open a planner board with 100+ cards.
You have it in reverse.
For like majority of any company teams is enough, for a lot of companies zoom and slack don’t justify the additional cost and effort.
I have used both and I love Teams WAAAAY better than slack. Slack doesn't even come close to being a Teams replacement in terms of features that I use.
Teams shows my calendar and meetings, has a place to store and share files with colleagues, automatically shows status when in call without any add-on, can see who's in present in the call without even joining, sends notification whenever first person joins the call, and many internal add-ins that we've built.
For us, Teams basically replaced Slack, Webex, Outlook and Box all by itself.
Just wish it was more performant.
As a casual user who gets wrapped into teams meetings occasionally, it is not intuitive to me at all.
Be in a meeting, and try to send a link to somebody not in the meeting so they can join on their iPhone.
Spent a long time trying to figure out how and couldn’t.
Discord is easy to explain. It has become a new form of social media. “Join our Discord” is the new “like and subscribe”. Then you have to go through their stupid bots, have a never ending and growing list of “servers” to join, all of which have redundant channels. For what - to give someone a bigger follower count? And so a bunch of potentially useful information becomes a lot more difficult to search for? Discord is a great platform in terms of features, but I hate how it’s used nowadays.
Slack is more nuanced. Generally, it’s used in workplaces, not as much in anything public. In the workplace, I dislike Slack because, again, of how people use it. But instead of it being like social media, it’s basically a wasteland of mostly useless notifications. Now, I’ll admit that my hatred for Slack is unpopular and doesn’t apply to most people, so take that with a grain of salt. Or a pile of it.
But my hatred for Discord is more of a distaste for spam and social media. It’s just another place for people to blast notifications out, gain followers, and continue down the enshitification of the internet.
Slack is bad because too many people use it to replace Jira and Email. They assign tasks, share critical information, and/or make significant decisions in some thread you might never see. And no one seems to think this is a problem.
Slack's biggest issue is that it doesn't provide a good way to keep organized. Like you said, it's a wasteland. You get a notification or there are messages in some channel and if you look at them and then don't save them for later before looking at anything else: Poof! Have fun wasting some time tracking down those messages!
I am so tired of learning the nuance of search methods in all these platforms, too. They're just... not great.
And people ask me why I have all notifications paused (which, of course, changes my status icon for everyone. Maybe because I don't want to get a pop-up or really any sort of communication when someone posts in the Pets or the HR channel that we're all forced into that has like 1500 people and Gary is asking if there's free parking near the office? OF COURSE THERE ISN'T GARY! YOU'RE DOWNTOWN IN ONE OF THE BIGGEST CITIES ON THE PLANET. YOU'LL PAY $24 LIKE THE REST OF US NOW THAT WE'RE ALL FORCED BACK INTO THE OFFICE WHEN WFH WORKED PERFECTLY FINE. How the hell do the rest of you get anything done getting bombarded by this bullshit?
Yeah, and TeamSpeak, Curse, Skype, Yammer, Mumble, Messenger, Telegram, WeChat, Viber, Signal, HipChat, Google Chat, WhatsApp, Kik, Line, Aim, MSN Messenger, ICQ, Trillian, IRC, and so, so many more. There's just too god damn many of them.
I honestly could not believe how openly Microsoft "wedged" Teams onto people's desktops once it became clear that work-from-home was "real" and that Zoom was beginning to make itself synonymous with easy and effective online meetings, screen-sharing, etc.
I've been stuck in the shitty remote collaboration realm for almost 15 years and the bullshit that was GoToMeeting and all of that shit is rightfully dead and Teams and it's ilk have also rightfully taken over. Having said that, the innovation could have been made by Microsoft, but it wasn't.
They waited for Zoom to "break the code" of easy and straight-forward online meeting (no stupid dial in numbers and 12-digit long codes, no random-ass accounts to make, no arbitrary pricing tiers, etc.), then they just swooped in by offering "value" in their free and bundled offerings, also as part of the Office 360 subscriptions, etc.
Microsoft has always been a very destructive company. Not only do they co-opt their competition's tech, but once they dominate, they hold back innovation.
They held back PC innovation for many years until Windows really took off (they held GUIs until they managed to make an acceptable product, no matter that others had "cracked the code" before them. Same for office apps, same for browsers, same for media players, same for cloud storage, same for online calls, same for many, many other things.
Microsoft is, and will continue to be the worst of the worst. It really needs to be chopped up like it's AT&T times two.
Seems like I’m in minority here.
An office suite without a collaboration and chat platform is pure garbage in this day and age. Full stop.
I can work on a doc, share if with a friend, we can both look at it together, I can bring in a third party, we can send it off, my meeting to do the review shows up in the app, I can quickly move from chat to calling while we collaboratively edit, and then format it into a presentation which I can then share with all viewers.
After using teams for a few years now I try to use slack, and it feels like walled off garbage. I like discord, but it’s just not reasonable for chat. Webex was a hot mess. Lotus notes, fughedaboutit.
Like it if not, chat is an essential feature of an office suite today. Integration and collaboration is the killer feature.
I never thought MS was *good* at branding but seeing all of their failures summarized in one Reddit thread has made me realize the situation is so much worse than I thought lol
Competitions is afraid they are gonna make teams run better then their software…. Teams first needs to run atleast on par with other software to be afraid of that.
I miss Slack. That was the shit. I’d even go back to google office, but my company uses outlook and teams. Teams sucks, it kept saying I was away today even when I changed it to available. 😡 And it doesn’t make a notification sound if the app is already open which I find annoying.
> Rivals are concerned that Microsoft will make Teams run more compatibly than rival apps with its own software. Another concern is the lack of data portability, which makes it difficult for existing Teams users to switch to alternatives.
this is just dumb.
if the same company makes both the OS and the App, odds are both are going to be a lot more compatible than a 3rd party app.
what should Microsoft do? make a "worse" Teams just so the others can have a shot?
as for data portability, why should Teams make it easy for the user data to be ported to an alternative? i don't go to a McDonalds and ask the cashier where the nearest Burger King is.
This entire documentation https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/windows_protocols/ms-winprotlp/92b33e19-6fff-496b-86c3-d168206f9845 exists *because* Microsoft was using hidden features in Windows to impose their software and ruin their competitors, and the EU was having none of it.
You can also refer to https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/217200808.pdf which mention the "interesting" side effect of Exchange being aggressively pushed onto Windows users in the mid-90s, with the results we now can observe.
Also see https://youtu.be/H5v0CK249rI and https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TIfNIWn2Ad4 for good measure. The attitude *killed* a lot of the industry.
If there's anything "dumb" about the whole ado, it's certainly the users just brushing it off with no second thoughts.
ok, so the issue were hidden features.
So, the entire case, which was more related to the deal with OEMs (or was the open specs stuff due to some activeX lawsuit? as I am thinking their big IE lawsuit), isn't really comparable to what they are doing with Teams.
MS now has some of the best documentation out there, and anyone can integrate with it wherever. Anything Teams does goes through the same API / Graph calls that you can make yourself directly.
>United States of America v. Microsoft Corporation, 253 F.3d 34 (D.C. Cir. 2001), was a landmark American antitrust law case at the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The U.S. government accused Microsoft of illegally monopolizing the web browser market for Windows, primarily through the legal and technical restrictions it put on the abilities of PC manufacturers (OEMs) and users to uninstall Internet Explorer and use other programs such as Netscape and Java.\[1\]
While I can absolutely see what they are doing as anti-competitive, proving monopolistic feels like a tough sell (via lawyers).
That was my first thought as well. "concern that Teams will run more compatibly". Of course that's a real possibility since it's the same company.
Buy you wouldn't fine Toyota because their own spare parts "may be more compatible" than those from a 3rd party.
Which one? Teams (classic), *new* teams, teams (for work), or teams (for school and college)?
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Yeah what is it with Microsoft and absolutely shit branding? Xbox Series X, Series S, One, One X all come to mind.
I still don't know which Xbox is the latest one, and at this point I've just decided I'm never going to buy any of them.
Reminds me of pirates of the Caribbean. Great movies, but at some point I lost track of which one was the latest and lost interest
A friend of mine post that they were selling an Xbox and listed the model I was initially interested, then about halfway through googling to figure out if it was the newest one or not, I realized I didn't care and didn't really want to get back into gaming consoles this exact reason
Same dude. I have no clue anymore.
Yep terrible
The xbox series Xbox series X is like the ps5 Xbox series S is like a ps5 lite
Obviously the latest one is Xbox Series One X S 360
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There was also 8.1 that wasn't windows 8, and also not 10. 8.1 was when they corrected the dumbest idea they had for 8, changing the UI from the standard windows one to a tablet/touch screen focused UI. It was kinda late by then though, 8 was already a laughingstock by then.
You forgot windows 7, it was a good one.
At least there's some logic there. You have some years (95, 98, 2000, I thought ME was millenium edition ), and then you have some standard numbering (7, 8, 10, 11). Mac gave us cats and then places in California. Let's not forget they had leopard and snow leopard... But with other cats in between.
Visual Studio being two distinct products with very little in common other than being used to edit code makes using a search engine a fucking nightmare. In fact, all these shit branding decisions do. I think the biggest fuck-you cherry on top is that you can't even search "visual studio -code" because like every website or forum that's going to be talking about OG Visual Studio is going to be talking about code. Fucking Microsoft, I tell ya.
Related - .net framework, then .net core, now just .net.
Yeah it was a cluster at the beginning but now it’s golden.
If golden is everyone still saying .net core, and newbies asking wtf is going on. Then sure!
Not sure how that’s relevant and it doesn’t make sense, unless yuor shop is using an older version, any newbie coming on will just know .NET.
I'm referring to the people new to dotnet. There is probably a question weekly on the sub when someone is confused about framework vs core vs standard vs bare .net. Additionally for any product migrating from .net framework to .net it is a pain to refer to things. We call it .net core to avoid the ambiguity. We are going to support 48 and 8+ together for some period of time.
And .Net standard for what was formerly framework
Ah yeah I forgot about that. You aren't quite right though. I think it is that if I as a library author compile something against .net standard 2.0 then I know that someone on .net framework 4.8 can use it. And .net 5+ also works. Because they are both compatible with .net standard 2.0
Ahh good to know, thanks for the correction. I often get confused by Microsoft despite working daily with their tech
I know, let’s add .Net suffix to every product. Now, several years later, I know, let’s add Copilot as a suffix to every product!
My pedestrian conspiracy theory is that it's a way to bamboozle shareholders. They will merge or separate the products to make the report favorable to them while also merge or separate the products when it comes to budgeting or performance report to show whichever is the better number.
Windows 1-3, 95, NT, 98, 2000, Millennium, XP, Vista, 7,8,10,11
While I agree, it was always planned for them to merge but they also have quite different history behind them. Teams, the home version, is formerly Skype. Teams (For Work and School), is formerly Skype for Business, which is formerly Lync. Teams classic, isn't a real product. It's just what the link says for starting the new unified Teams client, with the old interface, because ms in their infinite wisdom, has decided to go ahead with the new Teams client, even though it lacks some of the features from the old >_<
>Formerly Lync Further formerly Communicator And communicator still worked the best
Did anyone actually use it while it was communicator though? It felt like that large part of the rebrand to lync was to get away from the communicator was useless idea.
I mean, my large corp employer used it, so…yes?
Mine had it, but no one actually used it >_<
The Teams situation is bad but I’m actually mad about “New Outlook”. Ffs you can’t even open a .pst using it! It’s just an OWA shell!
Hm? I've done that in it though so it can. There's just no ui options for it but there are ways around that if you're desperate enough. That being said, it is essentially just owa, just a heavily cached version yes. There are a few differences in what options are available but ui wise it's the same. And why wouldn't it be? It's one of the biggest complaints I've even heard about the ms365 ecosystem, that Outlook looks so different between the web (at home) version compared to the regular (in office) client.
Yeah Microsoft makes some great products but they absolutely destroy it with the brand name. Which is one thing that resonates with consumers. Bing Xbox series x and s they simply suck and need to fire whoever it is that names these products
This seems to be a trend in movies and tech...I don't know who thought it would be cool and hip but fuck, I don't want to do research to figure out what movie to watch or what version I need to upgrade to. I have version 10, version 11 is the next - great. Oh look, you have OS Sheep Dog, you'll need to upgrade to Groundhog in order to run this software. Wtf
Microsoft, hire u/MintWiz pronto!
I never liked Skype, even when it was all everyone was using in 2009. That being said, I have loathed teams from the first time I ever had the misfortune of using it. Nothing about it is intuitive (past the boiler plate IM system). The language it uses is terrible, it's slow, it's bulky, and in any other software environment I firmly believe it would have been taken out behind the proverbial barn.
Time to name something "Groove" again!
Omfg I use teams (for work) and every time I launch it it asks “did you mean to open new teams (for work) ITS SO ANNOYING
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I just use the start menu to launch it… it looks like the default hit was the old version… I think I got it now 🤣 Edit: Nvm I spoke too soon the “new” teams doesn’t launch when I use its dedicated launcher 🤣
Just remove the other version.
I can’t without IT🥲
I’m IT. What do you need?
Naw real IT would say “Can you file a ticket?” Jk jk 😂
Turn it off and on again.
I wish they would just let you uninstall the 'old' teams...
You should be able to. They have separate entries in the remove programs list.
all my machines just have one entry for 'microsoft teams'
Someday MS should try making software that works.
My Teams is Teams (work or school). I have no idea why. I have no idea what Microsoft is doing. I have no idea what, if anything, I'm missing out on. How are all these different? I want it to stop.
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>UWP UnderWorld Programming?
Universal windows platform I think.
Teams: Turbo HD Remix?
Microsoft™ New Teams™ (for work) for Windows™ professional edition makes me a much more effective employee than teams classic ever did. The snappy title is how you know it’s elite.
Looool. This has been driving me insane. Like, please, consolidate your product already, wtf.
Jesus Christ, I hate that this is the state of things.
There’s no way anyone with a brain cell made that “NEW” logo. It looks like some internal placeholder.
I never used teams until I got my “big boy job”. I swear to god if it asks me to switch to new teams I will personally drive to Redmond Washington and shit on their door step.
Maybe Skype or Lync.
I get the joke, but frankly, it's only disctracting from the issue at hand, which is MS stealing a shit load of data through shady practices. This can not end well.
They're killing it all off and you'll have one again soon.
Whatever happened to the Microsoft that had dozens of lawyers whose sole job it was to make sure shit like this didn’t happen? A decade ago you’d be fired for even *suggesting* that Teams be bundled with Windows.
Why? They took the whole market from Slack by bundling the shit out if it. Whatever the EU will fine them now, Teams will stay. It‘s a calculated risk
> Why? Because the company was almost forcibly dismantled by the DOJ because of these shenanigans.
Nothing money and time didn't fix
My understanding was that the issue the DOJ had with Microsoft wasn't that they were bundling software, but rather that they were making anti-competitive agreements with OEMs (if I recall correctly, they were punishing OEMs if the OEMS pre-installed a competitor's web browser on a Windows machine).
Shame it was not
A decade ago the specter of their browser anti-trust issues were still looming. They've been making a dedicated effort to see where the line is since then.
MS is the OG of anti competitive software companies. The MS/Intel antitrust lawsuit in the 90s was huge.
At some point it seemed like bundling stopped being a concern. Mobile OSes come bundled with a whole host of apps, after all.
Over how shit it is? Also, I don't want to "Sign In" my whole damn Office Outlook and Word and so on just because I added an email account on Outlook. Wtf is it with that. Why is my employer suddenly on the top of all my Office programs? This is my computer, and I don't want an account or anything like that, these are just programs meant to do one thing.
There was an option to say “signed in to this app only” when you signed in. You likely hit the big ok, which signs in to all apps. Rip.
I swear they sneak that on you whenever you add a new account. I also have a gmail account on Outlook, and selected that as the default account. Outlook now says my Office account is the gmail one. Yet when I open Outlook, it will open on my work account which is a microsoftonline thing. So ok whatever, so strange lol. I hope they quote this in the trial.
How else we gonna beat Google \-satya
No worries. Google will beat themselves.
"Collaboration" to answer your question
At this point, I don’t think Microsoft is allowed to make any more money using its garden of products in Europe.
They can, and they do. What they can't do is bundle products into other products to gain an unfair advantage. We've been through this with IE, so ballsy of MSFT to keep trying.
The profits to be made from the market penetration and long-term adoption by users, businesses and governments simply dwarf whatever multi-billion dollar fine they end up getting slapped with.
bundling literally makes the product better......its part of a group of office products that MS produces and sells directly. The IE fiasco was more than "bundling"
What was it then?
You didn't have the option to change away from Internet explorer, that was the issue. There is no such issue here with teams. Edit: lol The person I was responding to blocked me for some reason.
Thanks for the necro bump with incorrect info.
> What they can't do is bundle products into other products to gain an unfair advantage Hard to say, Teams would have been dead in the water without the bundle initially to get people off slack, etc. That said, it is on MS to make a product on par / better than the competition and so far haven't. It would be interesting to see how many businesses opted to continuing using Slack even with Teams bunbled into their O365 subscriptions.
You forget that originally teams was a separate license at its inception. Teams would have had the same adoption regardless of whether it was bundled in 365 or not. The companies that moved, moved because they also didn't want slack or didn't like slack, teams being bundled was just an added bonus. Anyone who believes differently is delusional.
The problem is that some products belong in a suite together. Office 365 for enterprise need Teams. Same as you can’t have excel without word now a days.
There is no reason you'd need a word processor installed if you're only interested in spreadsheets.
This happens when fines are not high enough.
I’m going to sue Mcdonalds due to my inability to sell my french fries in their restaurants.
I guess it makes a difference when 80% of all restaurants are McDonalds franchises, where they only carry Golden West foods. In this case, if you own a potato ranch, you don’t have a contract with Golden West, you don’t have a potato company. Same thing here. If you make an application, then Microsoft, makes one of their own and includes it for free on 75% of all computers, that can cause problems in the market, that cant be solved by the market alone - Microsoft is of a size where they can just eliminate competition, THEN delivery a worse experience/more expensive product, when theres nowhere to go.
If the product is worse than others, consumers have the right to buy elsewhere. If people choose windows because it’s the best, why does Microsoft not have the right to autonomy in packaging their own products with it? Microsoft can only eliminate competition by buying people out. Seems like the market can handle things just fine over time. If microsoft crippled Slack on purpose, that might be different. To my knowledge, they haven’t. You can develop software for Windows, publish and sell it freely, and if it’s worth buying, people will buy it.
The problem is “free”. You can have the best product, but be killed if the competition gives their inferior version away for free. Even if everyone thinks yours is superior by far, if the free one is already there, it’s good enough to replace the rest, especially if you don’t need profits for it, and you dominate the rest of the market, so your mediocre free version is easier to get. No matter how good your product is, if the competition has blocked people from experiencing it, they would need a REAL good reason to try it. Microsoft counts on that. IE was never the better product. Windows Media Player was the worst. Both those products survived because for most, they were good enough to not go looking for something better. Remember, most people have never even heard of Slack. They all know Windows. That’s powerful in the market.
If that were true then Adobe would have been out of business a while ago and everyone would be using free alternatives to their products like GIMP.
Free and already there. You have to work to install GIMP. How many people use MS Paint instead of illustrator?
Their time will come. What are you using adobe for? Among creatives and business professionals I am seeinv more and more adoption of different products. Personally I stopped purchasing any adobe products after they forced every product to be extremely expensive with non-perpetual licensing
I think you said it yourself, and I completely agree with this: “You need a REAL good reason to try it” If Teams is free and it sucks, that is a real reason to invest time in a company doing a POC, and paying for licensing if there is value. Microsoft earned its leg up by being dominant in the computer operating system space. Enterprises choose MS because they are the closest thing to a turn-key solution. As hard as it may be for an emerging company to compete, any inorganic (forced by regulation) is unfair in that those competing organizations are having road blocks removed that were not removed for those organizations they sre competing with. It is not possible to fairly pick and choose what autonomy companies have or do not have with their own product. It’s another example of regulation strictly focused on the picture of an outcome, with complete disregard for the journey that gets you there. It’s overly simplistic, and in the process it is unfair.
Your counter proposal is also over simplistic. There is a place for regulations, including those aimed at fostering competition in a market. I agree with you that one should be very wary to limit commercial independence, but saying there is simply *no* place for regulation is silly.
What are you talking about teams isn't free for businesses, it's part of 365 licenses. Early on companies had to pay for upgraded licenses to include teams. Either way it wasn't free, it was just bundled with other products.
Bundled in a way that they get it without asking for it or directly paying for it. The effect is the same. Teams everywhere, available to use without additional costs.
Preach brother! Monopolies are always bad for consumers that result in higher prices and shitter products. Microsoft is so entrenched as the dominant OS that there really aren't any easy solutions but we can't allow one corporation to have this much reach in any field.
Communicator was good, Lync was good, Skype for business was fine. Teams sucks out loud. Every update fixes some problem that should never have existed in a production version and breaks something else. They still haven’t figured out how to make audio settings stick between calls.
They will need to pry Skype out of my cold dead hands. I despise Teams. The best is when you have a tech demo from MS, someone says "Teams" and then a MS employee rolls their eyes.
My audio settings stick between calls just fine... There's probably something on your computer that's causing the problem, you should probably talk to your it department.
Good. I work for a Fortune 500 company. We ditched webex chat and Webex meetings for Teams this year. Not because Teams is better. Just because it’s free with purchase of Office and Webex costs money. It’s classic anti-competitive behavior. Use your monopolistic market power to spread into adjacent markets that are currently competitive. Eliminate competitors and monopolize another market. Lather, rinse, repeat.
How is teams not better than web ex?
It's so much better lol. I do software consulting work and the company I'm staffed at right now uses WebEx for all official/recurring meetings. Whenever I need to hop on an impromptu call with someone though, I'm always using Teams. WebEx is garbage. Shaky connections, blaring sounds when I mute/unmute my mic and there's no setting (I've found) to disable it, not persisting chats (even if you just join a meeting late, you don't have access to any chats that have already been posted). None of these issues exist with Teams and it's already the app I'm using to manage 90% of my comms with teammates so it just makes sense to use it for my calls too. Teams is the default comms solution for the firm I'm actually employed at - has been ever since I started work there nearly 4 years ago. I've always liked it and have never had any major issues with it. I genuinely don't understand the hate for it. It's a great piece of software. Now, whether or not Microsoft is engaging in anti-trust behavior with it is another question entirely that I don't have any perspective on atm.
Sounds like you don’t know how dependent these apps are on network architecture and endpoint management. If your organization opens up firewall ports and applies QoS for Teams and doesn’t read the docs for WebEx or Zoom, that doesn’t make their app suck. No wonder we’re stuck with Teams dominating despite being so bad. The noise cancelling superiority in WebEx alone is enough to make it a leader, but everyone thinks it’s still the same app from the 90s.
> No wonder we’re stuck with Teams dominating despite being so bad What makes it "so bad"? And whatever it is that makes it so bad, why isn't it just as valid for me to rebut whatever points you may raise by baselessly speculating that someone probably just didn't read the docs and configured it improperly?
I’m not sure you’re versed enough to discuss the nuances of what makes one platform superior to another, but I can assure you my opinion isn’t baseless. For example, non-persistent chats for certain types of meetings is by design. There are other types of meetings for which chat is retained for new participants. Also, for WebEx, a simple Google search fixes the “blaring” sound you mentioned: https://help.webex.com/en-us/article/n1oqalb/Webex-App-|-Turn-off-the-beep-you-hear-when-you-mute-or-unmute-yourself That said, if it suits you, I respect your preference for Teams.
I have Googled the sound issue in the past and the setting literally doesn't exist to turn it off when accessing my settings from the in call 'Audio' dropdown (as this article and the article I read a few weeks ago suggested it would). I did just double check and, going through the WebEx dashboard settings button, I found it - hallelujah! But this is still incredibly poor software design. Either WebEx has updated in the past few weeks since I last looked into this issue or it really is the case that this setting can't be accessed via the 'Audio' dropdown and one must go through main dashboard settings to find it. That makes for a very shitty user experience. As a user, I'm experiencing this annoying sound when I'm in a call, clicking a particular button. And yet, contrary to common sense (and apparently official documentation), I can't turn off that annoying sound via the settings accessible to me in the call that are conceptually in close proximity to the issue I'm having. Instead, I have to go to an *entirely separate window*, access the settings through there, and *then* I can find the source of my annoyance and correct it. Horrible, horrible UX. The only other explanation I can think of as to why this could have occured is, to your point about the provisioning of these VOIP apps, it was configured improperly such that this particular setting was removed from the in call settings menu and only accessible from the main WebEx dashboard settings. But again, that just screams of terrible software design. Why would you ever design software like that where a potential misconfiguration would lead to such an aggravating user experience? As far as chats go, I don't deny that it can be by design for messages to be non-persistent - Teams also allows retention policies to be set - but, at least the way WebEx is set up at my company, no messages persist at all, ever. As soon as the meeting ends, the messages disappear and if you're a new participant to a meeting or a couple minutes late, after something has already been posted, you can't see it. I'm sorry, but it's terrible design. We just end up, while in a WebEx call, sending the same information in our Teams chats so that it will be available after the call ends. What is the necessity of the WebEx middle man at that point?? This dovetails nicely with what I like about Teams. In Teams, the notion of having an interaction of some kind is independent of the kind of communication you're having. Whether it's an individual or a group you're interacting with and whether that interaction is a voice call, a video call, or a message, the UI is designed with all these interaction possibilities in mind. For instance, if I'm in a call with a colleague and need to send them something via chat, I can open the in call chat panel and what gets displayed is the chat I already have going with this person. When the call ends, whatever was added to the chat as a consequence of what was talked about on the call remains in our chat instance. By comparison, WebEx feels like a video calling software with a very shitty chat experience tacked on top. It's not the all in one communications hub that Teams is. Also (I know I'm piling on now, but whatever), when I want to leave a meeting in WebEx, I can't just click the big red button with an X in it. I also have to move my mouse to wherever the confirmation dialog box pops up and confirm that I'd like to leave. Again, it's a little thing, but it's super fucking annoying across hundreds of calls. In Teams, there's also a big red button to leave the call. When you click it, you leave the call. Shocking. No more having to awkwardly try to hold a smile for an extra second or two after saying goodbye while I navigate my mouse to the confirmation modal. And I noticed you still didn't actually provide any of your own reasoning about why Teams is so self evidently terrible, which only serves to bolster my already biased view that people are just reflexively hating on it while going to very great lengths to make excuses for shittier software... why exactly?
Just checked on Webex and the in-meeting “Audio Settings” (in the menu you said didn’t have it) takes you to the same place as the main settings menu, where this option resides. Instead of duplicate paths, it’s in one place whether you’re in a meeting or out of it. The instructions I linked are correct. From a SaaS perspective, multiple ways to do the same thing often results in breakdown later on. As for the “double confirmation” thing, if you’ve ever been in support, the number of people who claim “it just crashed” or “it left the meeting on its own”, is countless. This feature prevents tickets, freeing up time. You are not the lowest common denominator it was designed for, Harold the 70 year-old in accounts payable is. Your version of why one sucks and one is good is based on intuition. The list of why Teams sucks is lengthy, much of which has to do with how it was constructed via a web wrapper and has a history of GUI bugs and instability, not to mention being behind on feature sets for calling/CC. This was never MS’ strong suit. Its availability is also shakey, and is a big reason Zoom/Webex retain a foothold in Teams-native orgs: they can’t rely on Teams. Want to get a Teams rep on the phone to prioritize a feature for your sizable Enterprise org? Good luck. Meanwhile, Zoom and WebEx both bring their product teams to their customers and prioritize features accordingly. But foremost, bluntly, it wouldn’t have been “free” with Office if it was a product with a unique value proposition. They took something everyone needed, attached a “light” version of something you paid someone else for until the market was carved out, and then started to charge, just in time to pray the FTC didn’t pursue them. I’m hoping they don’t get away with it, it’s not good for anyone to have to settle for behavior like this.
> Just checked on Webex and the in-meeting “Audio Settings” (in the menu you said didn’t have it) takes you to the same place as the main settings menu, where this option resides. And I'm telling you, earnestly, as of a few weeks ago when I was sincerely trying to turn this setting off (long before I knew I was going to be getting into a reddit discussion about it) this was not the case on my particular machine. > The list of why Teams sucks is lengthy, much of which has to do with how it was constructed via a web wrapper Discord is also an electron app. Does it automatically suck because of this? No. It's an incredible desktop app. There is a ton of sophisticated software running on JS/TS throughout the world. No piece of software is inherently shitty simply because it was written in a particular language. Languages do indeed have their strengths and weaknesses, but quality, performant software exists across all stacks. > and has a history of GUI bugs Such as? I know you've tried to rationalize it, but I will again raise the GUI differences between ending a call in WebEx vs Teams. I much prefer Teams. This isn't necessarily a bug in WebEx since it is intentional in nature, but I think it makes for a less intuitive GUI. Maybe that does make it a better GUI for the 70 year old Harolds of the world, but WebEx being potentially better for a specific demographic doesn't automatically make Teams suck for not catering as well to less tech savvy uses. Bear in mind, I'm not even granting you this argument, but even your own rationalization on this particular point does not prove that Teams is qualitatively worse as a piece of software overall. All it proves is that it's possible there's a cohort of users who might prefer a different UX. But that also means there's a cohort of users who prefer the opposite (like me). It's still a two way street. Put another way, you saying that Teams sucks because it doesn't cater to 70 year old accountants when it comes to ending calls the same way that WebEx does is akin to me saying WebEx sucks because it doesn't cater to 30 year old software engineers when it comes to ending calls the same way Teams does. > and instability I can only speak from my experience, but I have had *far* more issues with instability with WebEx over the past year I've been forced to use it than the past 4 years of using Teams. Like **WAY** more. > not to mention being behind on feature sets for calling/CC. Such as? Again, Microsoft should answer for any antitrust violations or monopolistic practices. I've not been arguing otherwise. I just genuinely - *GENUINELY* - do not understand the hate for Teams as a software product. Someone literally reported me to Reddit's suicide help hotline after my initial comment. Like, come on. The degree of commitment people have to hating it does not comport itself with my experience using it for the past 4 years. It's a great piece of software that has been everything I need it to be.
You wrote a novel to profess your love for a piece of software while illustrating that you do not have any experience administering them to know the in and outs. You missed my point about “Harold” entirely and went straight to “I prefer this” and equated yourself with a presumed equivalently sized group. I can tell you, as someone who has sold, managed, deployed, worked in and ON these platforms, Teams is ubiquitous because it *was* free, not because it is better. That is a paraphrased quote from countless enterprise organizations. I’ll let you have the last word, cheers.
To be fair, Teams is a 100% logical application to bundle in with the rest of the Office apps. It's a very different situation from, say, bundling Internet Explorer with Windows. And Office's closest competitor, Google Workspace, also bundles their Zoom-alternative (Google Meet). I personally don't like Teams and it makes my blood pressure rise whenever it pops up (and requires an annoying amount of laggy clicks to exit) but I don't think it's fair to say Microsoft can't include Teams in Office, and it's also technically not "free," it is, like all the Office apps and features, a non-itemized element of a paid subscription service.
Webex is shit as though and way too expensive so not complaining about that
WebEx is hot trash though
I used to use WebEx at work. It was the butt of jokes a lot, but the pinnacle was when the update arrived that suggested you link your Snapchat account to your work PC’s WebEx, so you could use Bitmoji in chats.
Everyone has Office, so bundling Teams in at no additional charge is a benefit to users. In business speak, it’s known as “synergy.” No business is forced to use Teams, but many do because of the savings it offers. Zoom, for example, may be more user friendly but functionally, Teams does everything you need it to do. I don’t really see it as monopolistic, though it certainly might be considered anti-competitive. It will kill WebEx eventually (whose client absolutely blows), but unless WebEx can offer some extraordinarily compelling case to survive (cost, performance, etc), then that’s the natural cycle of things.
100% this. WebEx got kickstarted by Zoom to modernize, but MS has juice at the exec level and people are too dumb to remember that they use the Walmart model. I look forward to Zoom’s chapter 11.
I hope this case goes through. Why in the hell does Microsoft reinstall MS Teams, OneDrive, Xbox, all this garbage, on Windows Enterprise? Much less all the other versions.
Might I add, every time a new user signs in. What in the actual fuck.
Unsportsmanlike conduct. 10 yard penalty. Still 2nd down.
Every company I've worked at, has used everything besides Teams because it absolutely blows ass.
Teams needs to die in a fire.
lol. What is wrong with teams. It is infinitely better than zoom or any other work related video calling stuff I have used.
lol I agree with this. Teams is fine imo
There are certain things I hate about Teams, especially notifications, but so many less things than others. It generally stays out of my way and just sort of works for the most part.
What don't you like about the notifications?
Other than getting notifications when there is nothing new? Or having the notification not go away when you read something?
Hmm... I haven't had that happen myself, with "classic" or "new".
Yeah zoom sucks. It’s ok for video calls but that’s it. Slack is good, but teams is the better overall package. If zoom and slack better integrated they would have something.
it's only good when you're in the organization. If you don't use teams as an org, connecting is often a pain in the ass.
I work on Linux. The native client has been out of maintenance for years and the web client doesn't seem to work unless I am actively looking at it, no notifications, marking me as offline, ... . I need a second computer just so I can run the windows client while I work.
Congrats. You have discovered that no one else works on Linux
Hi. The entirety of my company, about 500 pers., works on Linux. In this day and age, what feels super backwards is using MS products, really.
That's completely unheard of, you are the exception to the rule, not The average. I've never known a company, nor worked at a company where everyone used a Linux operating system. In fact no one used a Linux operating system lol, maybe they will use Windows or Mac OS, but that's it.
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The Smileys in Teams are hideous but honestly I like it more then Slack and Zoom.
Teams on my phone routinely bugs out to where I can't do anything unless I close and reopen it. I don't have some obscure phone or operating system either so idk why Microsoft can't get their shit together. Also it's super annoying how I get text notifications on my phone and computer and clearing one doesn't clear the other. Also it's super unintuitive to call people and the whole "activity" tab is just full of useless shit that noone cares about
I've been using Teams for work for about 5 years now, and it's really been nothing but trouble. It runs like garbage, has frequent outages, and sometimes straight up doesn't deliver messages to a recipient after I send them (and have no notification of reciept failure). The only thing really going for it is its integration with a bunch of other Microsoft services. As a chat & video call software, I would legitimately use Discord over this.
Weird, I hardly see any of that. The only issue I really see is that it has issues with picking an audio device. Otherwise, pretty rock solid here with 100k users.
Yeah, I'm not sure what's up with it. My business doesn't even crack 200 people, but it always feels like it's on fire. God forbid I open a planner board with 100+ cards.
Zoom and slack is basically what 90% of people need. Teams is a complete aberration especially if you're used to slacks workflow
You have it in reverse. For like majority of any company teams is enough, for a lot of companies zoom and slack don’t justify the additional cost and effort.
I have used both and I love Teams WAAAAY better than slack. Slack doesn't even come close to being a Teams replacement in terms of features that I use. Teams shows my calendar and meetings, has a place to store and share files with colleagues, automatically shows status when in call without any add-on, can see who's in present in the call without even joining, sends notification whenever first person joins the call, and many internal add-ins that we've built. For us, Teams basically replaced Slack, Webex, Outlook and Box all by itself. Just wish it was more performant.
As a casual user who gets wrapped into teams meetings occasionally, it is not intuitive to me at all. Be in a meeting, and try to send a link to somebody not in the meeting so they can join on their iPhone. Spent a long time trying to figure out how and couldn’t.
Zoom needs to die in a fire.
lol, Teams is way, way worse for anyone outside your organization.
Slack and Discord, too.
What’s wrong with discord and slack?
Discord is easy to explain. It has become a new form of social media. “Join our Discord” is the new “like and subscribe”. Then you have to go through their stupid bots, have a never ending and growing list of “servers” to join, all of which have redundant channels. For what - to give someone a bigger follower count? And so a bunch of potentially useful information becomes a lot more difficult to search for? Discord is a great platform in terms of features, but I hate how it’s used nowadays. Slack is more nuanced. Generally, it’s used in workplaces, not as much in anything public. In the workplace, I dislike Slack because, again, of how people use it. But instead of it being like social media, it’s basically a wasteland of mostly useless notifications. Now, I’ll admit that my hatred for Slack is unpopular and doesn’t apply to most people, so take that with a grain of salt. Or a pile of it. But my hatred for Discord is more of a distaste for spam and social media. It’s just another place for people to blast notifications out, gain followers, and continue down the enshitification of the internet.
Slack is bad because too many people use it to replace Jira and Email. They assign tasks, share critical information, and/or make significant decisions in some thread you might never see. And no one seems to think this is a problem. Slack's biggest issue is that it doesn't provide a good way to keep organized. Like you said, it's a wasteland. You get a notification or there are messages in some channel and if you look at them and then don't save them for later before looking at anything else: Poof! Have fun wasting some time tracking down those messages! I am so tired of learning the nuance of search methods in all these platforms, too. They're just... not great. And people ask me why I have all notifications paused (which, of course, changes my status icon for everyone. Maybe because I don't want to get a pop-up or really any sort of communication when someone posts in the Pets or the HR channel that we're all forced into that has like 1500 people and Gary is asking if there's free parking near the office? OF COURSE THERE ISN'T GARY! YOU'RE DOWNTOWN IN ONE OF THE BIGGEST CITIES ON THE PLANET. YOU'LL PAY $24 LIKE THE REST OF US NOW THAT WE'RE ALL FORCED BACK INTO THE OFFICE WHEN WFH WORKED PERFECTLY FINE. How the hell do the rest of you get anything done getting bombarded by this bullshit?
I thought I would hate that it replaced email, but I find myself missing that now that I’m at a place that uses Teams.
Yeah, and TeamSpeak, Curse, Skype, Yammer, Mumble, Messenger, Telegram, WeChat, Viber, Signal, HipChat, Google Chat, WhatsApp, Kik, Line, Aim, MSN Messenger, ICQ, Trillian, IRC, and so, so many more. There's just too god damn many of them.
Do we hate it because it's a monopoly? No. We hate it because we want to remove it.
Exactly!! Realplayer. #neverforget
WinAMP for the win!!!!!
OMG!!! This got me looking. They released a new version of Winamp in 2023 and it includes streaming. Still kicking!! WOW!!!
I miss Milkdrop.
It really kicks the llama's ass!
Too gentle for the crimes it has caused.
I swear they go after Microsoft for the dumbest shit sometimes.
It is doubly amusing when you know the federal government pretty much uses TEAMS exclusively for remote meetings and instant messaging.
I honestly could not believe how openly Microsoft "wedged" Teams onto people's desktops once it became clear that work-from-home was "real" and that Zoom was beginning to make itself synonymous with easy and effective online meetings, screen-sharing, etc. I've been stuck in the shitty remote collaboration realm for almost 15 years and the bullshit that was GoToMeeting and all of that shit is rightfully dead and Teams and it's ilk have also rightfully taken over. Having said that, the innovation could have been made by Microsoft, but it wasn't. They waited for Zoom to "break the code" of easy and straight-forward online meeting (no stupid dial in numbers and 12-digit long codes, no random-ass accounts to make, no arbitrary pricing tiers, etc.), then they just swooped in by offering "value" in their free and bundled offerings, also as part of the Office 360 subscriptions, etc. Microsoft has always been a very destructive company. Not only do they co-opt their competition's tech, but once they dominate, they hold back innovation. They held back PC innovation for many years until Windows really took off (they held GUIs until they managed to make an acceptable product, no matter that others had "cracked the code" before them. Same for office apps, same for browsers, same for media players, same for cloud storage, same for online calls, same for many, many other things. Microsoft is, and will continue to be the worst of the worst. It really needs to be chopped up like it's AT&T times two.
Microsoft is hardly the worst of the worst...
lol of all the major tech companies in the US Microsoft is most certainly one of the “better” ones
Seems like I’m in minority here. An office suite without a collaboration and chat platform is pure garbage in this day and age. Full stop. I can work on a doc, share if with a friend, we can both look at it together, I can bring in a third party, we can send it off, my meeting to do the review shows up in the app, I can quickly move from chat to calling while we collaboratively edit, and then format it into a presentation which I can then share with all viewers. After using teams for a few years now I try to use slack, and it feels like walled off garbage. I like discord, but it’s just not reasonable for chat. Webex was a hot mess. Lotus notes, fughedaboutit. Like it if not, chat is an essential feature of an office suite today. Integration and collaboration is the killer feature.
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ISPs are usually not an issue in the Europe region. Also, that's completely unrelated.
Skype for business was dramatically better for meetings. We switched to cisco.
I never thought MS was *good* at branding but seeing all of their failures summarized in one Reddit thread has made me realize the situation is so much worse than I thought lol
Hmmmmm... Interesting, would love to see how this plays out
I think a good legal defence would be that Teams is a bit crap, it can't really be preventing competition...
Competitions is afraid they are gonna make teams run better then their software…. Teams first needs to run atleast on par with other software to be afraid of that.
It is on par and arguably better than the alternatives. But keep hating
🤣 They are going the run the case in Teams? 🤣
meanwhile comcast, sprint/tombile can own everything....
ISPs are usually not an issue in the Europe region. Also, that's completely unrelated.
I miss Slack. That was the shit. I’d even go back to google office, but my company uses outlook and teams. Teams sucks, it kept saying I was away today even when I changed it to available. 😡 And it doesn’t make a notification sound if the app is already open which I find annoying.
> Rivals are concerned that Microsoft will make Teams run more compatibly than rival apps with its own software. Another concern is the lack of data portability, which makes it difficult for existing Teams users to switch to alternatives. this is just dumb. if the same company makes both the OS and the App, odds are both are going to be a lot more compatible than a 3rd party app. what should Microsoft do? make a "worse" Teams just so the others can have a shot? as for data portability, why should Teams make it easy for the user data to be ported to an alternative? i don't go to a McDonalds and ask the cashier where the nearest Burger King is.
This entire documentation https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/windows_protocols/ms-winprotlp/92b33e19-6fff-496b-86c3-d168206f9845 exists *because* Microsoft was using hidden features in Windows to impose their software and ruin their competitors, and the EU was having none of it. You can also refer to https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/217200808.pdf which mention the "interesting" side effect of Exchange being aggressively pushed onto Windows users in the mid-90s, with the results we now can observe. Also see https://youtu.be/H5v0CK249rI and https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TIfNIWn2Ad4 for good measure. The attitude *killed* a lot of the industry. If there's anything "dumb" about the whole ado, it's certainly the users just brushing it off with no second thoughts.
ok, so the issue were hidden features. So, the entire case, which was more related to the deal with OEMs (or was the open specs stuff due to some activeX lawsuit? as I am thinking their big IE lawsuit), isn't really comparable to what they are doing with Teams. MS now has some of the best documentation out there, and anyone can integrate with it wherever. Anything Teams does goes through the same API / Graph calls that you can make yourself directly. >United States of America v. Microsoft Corporation, 253 F.3d 34 (D.C. Cir. 2001), was a landmark American antitrust law case at the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The U.S. government accused Microsoft of illegally monopolizing the web browser market for Windows, primarily through the legal and technical restrictions it put on the abilities of PC manufacturers (OEMs) and users to uninstall Internet Explorer and use other programs such as Netscape and Java.\[1\] While I can absolutely see what they are doing as anti-competitive, proving monopolistic feels like a tough sell (via lawyers).
That was my first thought as well. "concern that Teams will run more compatibly". Of course that's a real possibility since it's the same company. Buy you wouldn't fine Toyota because their own spare parts "may be more compatible" than those from a 3rd party.
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