I love MS Teams.

Long live MS Teams.

Because it actually makes a lot of sense from a business perspective to have your meeting software integrated with your messaging software integrated with your document storage, etc. MS saw the success of things like Zoom and Slack and said “we can do that!”

And the thing about large companies with big budgets is that they get things done. Maybe it is shitty, but it is done. And the thing about an IM client is that anyone can think up the idea… So the difference between MS and a startup like Slack is that there were 100 other Slack-like startups that failed to make a useable product. Slack made a product that worked because statistically, someone has to - and then everyone uses the product because it works. But MS is not going to run out of venture capital or new CS grads eager to work 80 hour weeks to “change the world” - they will keep plowing money and manpower into a product until it is ready to ship, goddammit!

So Teams stumbles across the finish line, strictly inferior to its competitors. Except that it has an ace in its back pocket… the fact that so many businesses already run windows. Already have MS 365 subscriptions. MS can pitch ecosystem integration as a selling point, and then undercut their competitors on price to paper over any deficits in functionality. And 55 year old CFOs of accounting firms see this and say “yes, let’s do that!”

And thus, Teams

I have to use Teams for work but I’m on Linux so I just use the web app in Firefox. Other then minor, irritating UI decisions (WTF is the ‘Activity’ tab for?) I don’t have any issues. Video calls work fine, screen sharing works, notifications work. When something breaks I just reload the page. If people have so many issues maybe try using the web app?

Seriously, teams is one of the worst apps I have to use on a regular basis. It’s insanely buggy, especially if you are a freelancer working in multiple teams.

• parts of the app don’t load correctly
• parts of the app don‘t support touch very well
• you get useless notifications, i.e. for a thread you have open or an action you caused yourself but completely miss others
• the UI has SO MANY flaws like giving people different colored placeholder avatars in different parts of the app which made me assign tasks to the wrong person a few times
• it needs its own audio driver on macOS which is probably invasive and does a shit job with airpods

There’s probably more I can’t think of right now but teams actively kills my productivity and I dread having to open it. I don’t understand how businesses can rely on this so heavily and I‘m wondering how incredibly incompetent the team developing it at Microsoft can be.

It’s quite literally the worst chat app I ever had to use. It can’t even handle fucking copy+paste without messing up formatting every single time. Constantly crashes, can’t handle notifications across devices, doesn’t work properly with even “teams certified” headsets, uses 3 times more resources than any comparable app … it’s fucking bloatware with a chat function.

Fuck Teams and everyone that made it. I hope the get cancer.

• it gave them an excuse to kill Skype
• they weren’t willing to let Zoom hog the spotlight

Because they don’t have to. This quarterly report is good! Copilot use is up (because it was shoved into yet another app) and costs are down (because they layed even more people off). Businesses are locked in for the near future, so core sales remain high.

It doesn’t matter desktop Linux use drastically increased. That doesn’t affect this quarter. This quarter is all about cutting costs and pushing AI. If there is a problem in a few quarters, it doesn’t matter. You sold your stocks by then.

A long, long time ago, there was an online messaging tool called ICQ. You didnt even have callsigns in it, you had a randomly generated number you shared with your friends. You chatted. Had fun. Life was good.

Then there was AOL instant messenger. It largely replaced ICQ in the US. It added emoticons.

Then there was MSN Messenger. It tied into the MSN gaming zone(Before MS killed it to make Xbox Live. You could play games with your friends through it. You could do rudimentary video chats.

Then you had Skype(pre-MS. Better video, not tied to MS).

MS makes MSN Messenger into Lynx and adds it to office. Its not good.

Then you had Google Hangouts. Better chat, fun features, tied to your google account.

Then you had MS owned Skype as Skype for Business. Largely replaces Hangouts because Google enshittifies everything, not because it is good.

You also have former Vancouver startup Slack. Its fantastic. Until Salesforce buys it.

Now we have the bastard officespring of Skype for Business: MS Teams.

Why do you think there’s the growing mass exodus towards Linux?

Microsoft laying off programmers and staff like they’re having human diarrhea, while replacing experienced programmers with artificial intelligence ignorance…

You just figuring this shit out?

My old school had to switch to Microsoft Teams (from Google Classroom) and the head of ICT told everyone that he thought that Teams website was ridiculously slow, the app moreso, but it was necessary as part of a transition from Google’s suite (Docs, Slides, Drive, Classroom) to Microsoft’s (Word, PowerPoint, OneDrive, Teams)

Pretty much everybody complained about the switch to Teams since it was really slow, sometimes taking several minutes to load the app on older computers (e.g. school computers). I assume they switched to all-Microsoft to reduce costs (I remember being told that, since they were paying for both Office 365 and Google Cloud before), and they mentioned other reasons too (e.g. students overseas in mainland China can’t access Google) but I forgot most of them.

There is no market Microsoft won’t half-ass* their way into.

* Purely as an expression. Teams is nowhere near usable enough to give it that much credit.

That’s nothing, Google had almost a dozen different chat apps at different times, some of them simultaneously.

As for

Does it mean Microsoft can keep running any app which necessarily doesn’t appear on my task manager?

A lot of background services run as ‘svchost’, which loads the particular library implementing the actual service. Services can be added by applications, from what I understand. They all look the same in the task manager, and also can’t be properly selected in a firewall app because again it’s the same executable.

This is not to say that Teams specifically uses an svchost service, but they could if they wanted.

Shh… They’ll hear you. Stop using antichrist software.

Other tech companies — Zoom and Slack — were becoming successful. Microsoft cannot allow that, so they made another terrible product and then had their marketing team start felating incompetent executives.