My employer is a prime example for this case: We use Microsoft 365 because we need Microsoft Office and use their email hosting.
And then we use Teams simply because it's already included in the package anyway, even though many employees hate it, but it's hard to argue for another solution because why pay for Slack when we already have Teams "for free"?
And since Teams doesn't really need to compete on functionality it's extremely slow and with a borderline unusable group chat.
Saw the same pattern with 3 employers over the past 5 years. One killed Slack and all institutional knowledge in its search engine within a month. One replaced all remaining Intel Macs (not an insignificant amount) because Teams would being them to a standstill. The last one is currently happening and I'm wondering what unexpected cost will come to haunt this decision this time.
Though one thing that always suffers in Teams is the ability to self-organize. Slack makes it very easy to let everyone write an automation or open a channel. Teams feels like it is imposing a culture that seems antithetical to most of the organisations that I saw adopt Teams, at least until they did.
I think Slack really dropped the ball in 2020, and that's ultimately why the inferior Teams and Zoom platforms have been able to solidify their market shares, and Discord was able to bastardise some of Slack's old market share. It took Slack nearly 2 years after the pandemic started to introduce features like Huddles - by which point, everyone who needed video conferencing software (which was basically every white-collar worker in the world) had adopted one of its competitors. Now, even at companies where Slack is used, they'll also have a Teams account where video calls happen. This is the case, even though Slack had a video call feature hidden in their UI all the way back in 2019.
Although it's bad now, in Feb 2020 Teams was genuinely unusable hot garbage, chats didn't work, calls dropped often, files wouldn't attach to messages etc. Microsoft, for all their sins, recognised the imminent need for mass work-from-home tools relatively early, and made huge improvements to the platform before the end of March. By mid-April was in a usable state.
Slack's better software, but better software's not going to be adopted if it's missing or hiding huge key features.
Do you mean April 2024 or 2025? Because the Teams I use on a regular daily basis is still unusable garbage. Granted it's better than February 2020, but it's still a train wreck of chats that don't work, calls dropped often, and files that won't attach to messages. Not that I am all that fond of Slack either.
I must be an unique snowflake, because I switched jobs around March 2020, and the new place used Teams exclusively, and... it was good. Not stellar, but good for the standards of software in this decade. Better than Slack, anyway. There were some weird glitches happening couple times a year, but nothing major.
So either I'm incredibly lucky, or - my going hypothesis - Teams actually does work quite well, if you deploy it along with SharePoint, Exchange, and other Microsoft products it integrates with.
My experience aligns with yours. Calls almost never drop, it's easy to do ad-hoc calls/meetings of arbitrary groups of people, it's easy to attach a teams call for an outlook event, having persistent chats associated with recurring meetings is great. I really just don't have any complaints whatsoever.
Other than it using more CPU than it has any right to, Teams generally has worked well for me as well. The workplace has pretty fully embraced onedrive and SharePoint. Running on Windows.
sharepoint / onedrive integration with teams is one of those "just works" things. its really great for collaboration. teams has a lot of issues, especially regarding performance but its very feature-packed.
I have experienced the same as well. I've been using team (on Linux for Christs sake) for past 3 years. Never had any major issues. Everything continues to be working as expexted. I'm using the web app on Chrome as a pinned tab since they are going to kill the Linux teams client.
Same experience here, at most I might've run into file attachment issues a handful of times, but otherwise Teams has been flawless for video conferences. Zoom has given me way more trouble than Teams on Windows, Linux and Android devices.
looking at my teams interface right now. there are three separate "..." menus. Behind one of them is the settings, one is the installed apps, the third is to install more apps. Everyone involved in the decision making process that resulted in this UX should be banned from computers.
My experience is the same. It was OK but flaky in 2020 and I un-fairly blamed the React native and JS for the subpar experience. Improved considerably by mid-2023 though I still wish it took lesser system resources. Probably will never happen.
Not the OP but I do run Teams on Apple Silicon and it is still a bug-ridden mess. Crashes, rendering bugs, file attachment bugs. At least once a week, usually more. Searches fail to find results that I can manually locate by scrolling through the chat history. I have reinstalled the app more than once.
I have shared these observations in their feedback pop ups and I know Microsoft loves collecting telemetry. Why should they dedicate more money/resources to fix defects when it clearly hasn’t stopped them from growing their market share?
Teams is the first example I use to begrudgingly explain to someone that quality doesn’t matter.
As per the hypothesis I stated, I think your problem is running Teams on an Apple system. I'm not defending Microsoft releasing a shitty product here, but I think it's most likely they didn't bother to properly test/debug it for other OSes and configurations than "embracing Windows and the Office ecosystem".
So, I had this exact same experience, until IT turned on whatever group policy allows you to see the New Teams toggle switch. [1] You might still be on the “old teams”. In classic Microsoft fashion, it’s 1000x more complex than it has to be.
Guess what? It still sucks. I still hate using it. I still do less work because of it. Can you scroll back thru messages without seeing a 10sec loading spinner every 15 messages? No. But it’s faster… in the general sense!
I think Microsoft managed to get it to "functional garbage" in April 2020, as did Zoom. Both sucked, but the UI made enough sense that even your most antiquated & computer-illiterate colleagues, friends, & family could join a videocall from the isolation of their own home.
That was the real MVP for video conferencing software in the early pandemic, and Slack missed it by years.
I don’t like Teams either but in my corporate environment it’s mostly without bugs at the moment. They dropped support for disabling incoming video for some unknown reason but that’s my only complaint right now.
The UX for teams is terrible compared with slack, but it pains me to say it, I find the video conference part better than zoom. I use the linux clients.
Scrolling the teams channels is also far from smooth. when you scroll up the message threads load slowly. You see they tried to improve it using virtualized lists but it did not work out.
Several coworkers and me also had the problem that we were unmuted but it said we were muted. Just today the teams screen blacked out when someone presented something.
Notifications are a mess too. And when you have multiple teams with the same channel names (project with microservices) it only shows the channel name, but not the team name in the notifications and in the UI.
Huddles... I never understood what they are for. Slack already had video calls with screen sharing. They were easy to start and they worked well. Then they added these huddles, more difficult to see (sometimes people do not realize they are invited to one) and they seem like the old video calls with a worst onboarding. There are only huddles now. So nothing changed except the setup of the call.
By the way, I'm not a native speaker. I know what a call is, I eventually checked what's a huddle now. "a close grouping of people or things."
Slack dropped the ball earlier than that on audio/video. They acquired Screenhero in 2015 and did nothing of substance with it. Also, the lack of any real meeting features means that Zoom or Teams always has to be in the picture.
Screenhero was the best screensharing software I've used to this day.
If anyone here knows the inside story of what went down with that acquisition, please share because I was expecting such great things when I heard Slack got them and then ... just nothing.
Was it a tech integration problem? A key team member leaving? Like what happened?
I think part of it was because around the same time that Chromium (which Electron is based on, thusly inherited by Slack) added baked-in support for capturing the user's screen and individual application windows - so Slack had no incentive to spend money to build their own native screen-capture and sharing code when they could simply wait and do nothing and then get it for free.
...but that still doesn't explain why Slack otherwise seems frozen-in-time: none of the significant end-user usability and quality-of-life issues I've had with Slack since I started using it in 2016 have been addressed (e.g. we can't right-click a message to get its context-menu: you still have to hunt for that awkwardly-placed "..." menu button).
See https://slack.com/release-notes/windows - this is their changelist for their Windows release and most of the releases since 2020 are described as "tweaks", was "tinkered with", or is "tuned-up" which, or "minor security updates" - which, as any npm user will tell you just means they ran `npm update` and not much else (well, besides the bare minimum of automated testing).
> In 2013, I co-founded Screenhero, an app that enabled remote pair programming and made developer collaboration over the internet “better than being in the same room” (to quote our old slogan).
Also, Teams integrates with the other MS stuff. If I share files in a channel, in the background it is "just" a SharePoint which in turn I can add to my OneDrive. Meaning I can save a file in Word to that SharePoint and everyone in the channel can access it.
Teams is a security nightmare, and Sharepoint as well. Access permissions are nearly impossible to grasp for normal users. The feature that all files dropped are shared instantly by everyone through sharepoint is a huge security risk. People in general have no understanding that they are sharing files with everyone that can join a Teams channel, meaning that confidential and sensitive information frequently gets added to Teams chats in "public" channels. Managing the correct permissions on thousands of Teams channels is hard to impossible, even with extra tools. Channel owners often adopt a "allow anyone who knocks" policy when they get permissions requests, because they are busy and do not really understand what they are doing.
Sharing files needs to be more cordoned off for security reasons. Not harder or more difficult, just less integrated and not inheriting permissions.
Why would anyone not think that putting a document in a public channel would result in people who can join that channel having access to it? Isn't that the whole point?
Because the correct minimum set of people is those who are in the channel when it was shared to the channel… and most people aren’t thinking of possible future information leaks when sharing documents directly into a channel with specific people the document is intended for…
The mismatch makes sense to programmers and IT types who have internalised the “computers are stupider than we make them look” way of thinking… but most normal non computer professionals are probably just thinking “I am sharing this with these people right now.
I’m still not at all sold. If someone put a file in the Ops Team folder of a shared drive then they’re sharing it with all current and future members of that team. The same is true if you post to #ops-team.
To be brutally honest people need to just stop and apply some basic critical thinking to their actions instead of expecting magic.
What if there was a free, open source alternative for Teams? I don’t mean Matrix or Mastodon. I mean something you could run on-prem and it would have chats, meetings, attach files etc. Do you know anything like this?
Well, I think so, but i'm probably biased given it's my company. Empirically we dogfood it successfully as a Teams/Slack replacement (and a WhatsApp/Signal replacement) while building it, and lots of others use it for that use case too: https://element.io/customers.
The biggest problems have been that the 'classic' mobile apps are stale, and are currently being replaced with Element X: https://element.io/blog/element-x-experience-the-future-of-e... - which far surpasses the Teams mobile clients in terms of UX & performance. Also, the E2EE reliability and UX on the old apps was also not great, but that's also fixed (at last) by Element X.
Will it allow my calendar to automatically attach Matrix/Element video calls to every appointment invite? Will it chime when such appointment is about to start?
This is the kind of stuff that corporate customers care about. They want systems that integrate well.
> This is the kind of stuff that corporate customers care about. They want systems that integrate well.
Great. I just want a system that allows me to view a PDF file that my teacher sent me without having to click through a dozen menus and wait several minutes.
Yes. That's what you get from a well-integrated system. At work, I can open PDFs and Excel sheets and Powerpoints directly within Teams with a single click (and, one or two extra clicks to download an off-line copy).
We have <20 employees and managing an extra vendor for a chat application is a non-negligible % of our time.
Our new hires can log with their work account using a shrink-wrapped machine from Best Buy and will have all of their needed applications ready to go & signed-in without going to random vendor sites or file shares.
Quick contrary datapoint: I'm a heavy Windows user but the only interaction I've ever had with Teams is to figure out how to delete its icon from the task bar.
> Teams feels like it is imposing a culture that seems antithetical to most of the organisations
My employer, a large university, has moved to Microsoft, and I've definitely noticed this in MS's software. It feels like the software is designed with certain office culture and workflow patterns in mind.
For example, previously I was able to use standalone email software. Outlook, in contrast, pushes its calendaring features, which are not something I care to use. I've gotten an increasing number of meeting invitations through this calendar, and Outlook "helpfully" tells me whether I'm available or not. I'm in fact always "available", because I don't use Outlook to manage my schedule.
Outlook, in contrast, pushes its calendaring features
I've never understood Outlook being both email and calendar. Does no one at Microsoft ever want to read an email and reference their calendar at the same time, or vice versa?
No, people at Microsoft just didn't realize most users forgot how to work with multiple windows. You can have a separate calendar window if you care for it, you can even read individual e-mails in separate windows (that one is annoyingly bound to double-click...). That works on the web too - at least for people realizing you can have the same app open in two tabs, and then break them out into separate browser windows...
Beyond that, maybe I'm thoroughly infused with corporate culture at this point, but I find this perfectly obvious and natural bundling. E-mail, calendars and TODO lists belong together.
My attitude -- and I acknowledge that this comes from a place of privilege -- is that I don't care to share my calendar with my employer.
I'm a university professor; there's always pressure to join this or that initiative, to participate in more committees, and the like. But in the long term, success depends on maintaining much of my focus on my long-term research goals, which means saying no a lot.
PG wrote about "makers' schedules vs managers' schedules"
> My attitude -- and I acknowledge that this comes from a place of privilege -- is that I don't care to share my calendar with my employer.
Neither do I. Fortunately, my employer doesn't care about it anyway.
> Outlook feels designed around the manager's schedule.
That is 100% true.
However, relevant to this entire thread, it's typical to put "focus time" blocks on the calendar. If you set your free/busy status to "busy" on those blocks (which is the default anyway), then come focus time, MS Teams and Outlook will both show you as "busy" / unavailable for the duration. A little bit of automation, but it does a good job at deterring casual interruptions, as anyone who tries to "invite you" to a meeting, or ask you "a small question, 30 seconds tops" will have their Outlook tell them there's a scheduling conflict, and their Teams that you should not be disturbed and won't get the notification anyway.
Could be slightly worse... I can't access my personal calendar and my work calendar on the same device. I have to constantly check both (dr appts on personal) vs work meetings on the company laptop.
Sure they do - but you can have Outlook show your upcoming meetings in your Outlook sidebar, so you can see everything upcoming on a single computer screen.
Individually all of these apps are shit, the value is that they work well together. This is not unlike, say, the Apple computer which can do things like go back from sleep in 1 to 2 seconds because the software is written for one particular chip.
As a side note, it is not obvious to me that Teams is a separate product that you get for free. I would say it is just as correct to look at what you buy from MS is a standard office communication and organization service and Teams is just a part of that.
I hate that I can't view the calendar separately from the email editor... it is convenient to have the integration in terms of invites/notifications and the availability for scheduling meetings is nice.
My biggest gripe is the distributed db that backs exchange/outlook365 mail on their server... I operate on inbox-zero and when I clear all the filtered mail out, then try to empty the "trash" I either have to wait 2 minutes for all the other deletes to sync to the trash, or empty the trash multiple times.
It's significantly worse than it was in the 90's on dedicated server(s), though back then the hardware was really easy to overwhelm with too much email/activity.
I have some sympathy here, mostly because Outlook's calendering is horrible. I also think most people don't exclusively use Outlook for their calendar, even in environments where your calendar there is meant to reflect your availability for meetings.
I've never understood why neither Google or MS have the ability to give their calendar tool an ical feed and have the availability from that reflected in your corporate calendar.
I guess it made sense in the days of everyone being in offices on a fixed schedule, but in the modern world where people's work life and personal life increasingly intersect I'd love to be able to drop things like needing to pick my son up from school in the calendar and have that shared with my partner without also needing to duplicate that same entry in my work calendar so no one books a meeting with me.
They all support adding an iCal feed I can see. I want one that other people in the organisation can see the free/busy state from that gets merged with that from my work calendar.
To be fair, video calls on Slack were below par at the time when Teams came out, and little effort was made by Slack to improve the call feature in the months that followed.
Not sure if that counts as a success or a failure. More like a failure because you learn after wasting a whole month. And then everybody has to learn the same lesson.
I'm not sure what you expect everyone involved in such a culture to do, but the same disregard from executives that caused a lack of documentation (and runbooks for software I was on call for) caused the overnight Slack shutdown.
Not just teams on intel macs... running anything under Docker would do similarly... the Intel macbooks in particular would run against thermal thresholds all the time, and freeze sporatically to be nearly unusable. The last one I was issued was replaced with an M1 max after 3 months of being bottlenecked by the thing. And I couldn't underclock/volt it because it was locked down corporate hardware, I could do a lot, but not that.
It was an i9 (10th? gen), and performed worse than a 4th gen i3 in practice.
I don't use teams, but doesn't it have a web interface that runs on any platform? I have to say we use slack and the web version work just fine for me and I don't need anything fancy, chat/share files&code/threaded chats off to the side.
but it's hard to argue for another solution because why pay for Slack when we already have Teams "for free"?
I definitely understand this argument and I definitely understand how it plays out in the real world. At the same time, it strikes me as one of the ways companies can be foolishly cheap. If a product like Teams is making employees so unhappy, it's definitely worth spending some money to fix that. I've never used Teams, but I hear so much complaining about it. When friends are complaining unprompted about a piece of software from work, that seems pretty striking to me.
Yes, it's included with Microsoft 365, but it seems like the cost of it in employee pain make it far from free. I know the appeal of "free" for companies, but Teams seems like an occasion where they're really ignoring a lot of time/effort/frustration that their employees have to go through and the impact that has on their work.
Slack isn't cheap, but if you have reasonably compensated employees do you really want them wasting time and energy over Teams? Though, as I said, I certainly understand how this plays out in the real world. Many companies look at what something is costing them in their budget without having the ability to measure the pain and lost productivity those decisions might be causing.
>I've never used Teams, but I hear so much complaining about it.
People will complain about anything, though.
The nature of my work has me dealing with all of these platforms, depending on the clients. Guess what? I don't find Slack to be some joyous piece of software to use. It's better than the alternatives, I guess, but not to the point that I really care one way or the other. Some people complain about the bundling, but that can be really convenient for your organization.
> Some people complain about the bundling, but that can be really convenient for your organization.
If you have <50 employees and you are standing on principle against the completely bundled cable TV vertical that Microsoft is offering, I genuinely question how much you care about the success of your business. We should be able to have a rational, business-oriented review of their value proposition - as of 2023, not 2010 or 2018.
Organizations that have a lot of loose capital and cowboy investors might be more interested in playing in traffic with 20+ vendors and horrible integration stories, but we (aka our <20 employee org) really need to ship solutions to paying customers or we don't have any jobs in 12 months.
I always hear everyone complain about how expensive it is, but I feel like John Travolta meme each time I look at our Azure/Microsoft account. The per-seat & consumption/serverless billing models feel like dust in the wind when you have so few employees. Everyone is doing a lot, so why not put a lot of power under each seat? If you intend to do more with less people, I really feel like Microsoft is the answer. If you are a F100 org, I totally get it. Fuck Microsoft. Use something totally different. Build your own datacenters.
For many remote workers, this is the single largest connection they have to their coworkers and work. It is your main communication method you use. I think the argument is that if you define the problem as "all of them let you chat with one another", then they all satisfy it.
But when it's your main communication method, you want people to enjoy it, use it, and want to use it more. You don't want people to avoid communication because they have to use a crappy IM client. These small differences have huge impacts.
I've used all of them in the past, and Teams was, and still is, the one I avoid chatting with someone unless absolutely necessary.
If you're going to go by "people complained about it" then I guess you just won't use any software, ever. I hear complaints about how terrible Teams is. I hear complaints about how terrible Slack is. I hear complaints about how terrible Mattermost or Element or Jabber or whatever is.
For practically any given piece of software, you'll find a crowd of people who will tell you how absolutely trash it is.
I have seen companies being even cheaper, everything required for project delivery, including hardware, trainings and licenses has to be provided and paid for by the client.
The consulting company is providing only warm bodies.
It costs Microsoft ZERO dollars to remove the asinine keyboard shortcut control + shift + c to start a call.
Who does that?
Why is this right next to the ctrl + shift + v (for unformatted paste)
What is the point of collecting all this metrics (kusto, whatever) if you don't ACT on it?
My complaint against Azure DevOps:
Why is there no "date" field?
From what I've heard there are internal people at Microsoft who suffer because of this nonsense.
How hard is it to give a date only option?
And no, 00:00:00 is not the same as date only.
Oh, my one complaint about azure devops is that when somebody goes to the build or release pages and interacts with a build or release, the default action should never be to edit them. That's asinine and makes onboarding people way harder than it should be.
> What is the point of collecting all this metrics (kusto, whatever) if you don't ACT on it?
To sell it later together with other data.
There are a lot of bugs and stupid UI decisions which go unfixed by MS and telemetry hasn't improved anything.
It's particularly galling how Outlook invites *by default* include a Teams link. You can disable this on a per invite basis or in your settings, but it's pretty icky behaviour.
It may a per-tenant setting but I checked that and a new meeting created in Outlook doesn't contain a Teams link - you have to either select "New Teams Meeting" or select "New Meeting" and then explicitly make it a Teams meeting.
New meetings created in Teams do include a Teams link - but isn't that what you would expect?
In my work Outlook, it's similar to what GP says. There is only "New Meeting" (not "New Teams Meeting") and the message starts out with a Teams link, and then I actively have to opt out of that with an extra button press in the meeting composer.
I've been forced to use it because it's the only "allowed" one for a project I'm on (since the other party has the "we already have teams for free" syndrome). It's horrible to work with, sound fails to function half of the time and it is "incompatible" with firefox (our main browser of choice).
I tried using the linux client but it simply will not allow me to connect to anyone and keeps telling me I need to login and enable teams on my "account" (we do not have a microsoft company account).
This is the case with all of the management led (as opposed to technology led) clients I’ve worked with over the past 2-3 years. Pretty much everyone hates teams with a passion - even many of the managers now, but they’re forced to use it because the business gets it bundled with office365. Thankfully all of the technical teams I’ve worked with only use it for video calls and use Slack (not that it’s perfect) for all chat, bots and huddles.
Teams main feature is that it is a front end to SharePoint. Not chat. Not video. Even before the pandemic we were using Teams for project management (via the OneNote integration) and file sharing. Each team is a full SharePoint group.
Now that we are all back in the office and don’t use video, we are using Teams even more. The chat is a nice function we’ve adopted since the pandemic, but it’s a side offering really. MS 365 is a godsend for many small businesses.
I think the downvotes are unwarranted but I understand why people would disagree. Was SharePoint so bad before Teams? Is Teams that much better? I don't really know, my mega-corp work culture isn't "all in" and is not frankly that competent with a lot of tools so maybe we're missing out. But pre-teams we used SharePoint/OneDrive/WhateverBranding and it was fine. The big difference I've seen with document sharing is now you navigate a chat app to find stuff instead of a website and then you waste 3 minutes of a meeting trying to figure out how to open the document in the native app because the Teams embed is shit.
It was much more difficult to use SharePoint, at least for us, as we were a small team and had no dedicated IT person. You could use SharePoint and OneNote, sure, but it wasn’t obvious how to create a group with all the docs/notes in one place. We had Teams up and running in a couple of days. Anyone now can create a SharePoint site through Teams. Super simple.
MS has released a native app for Teams by the way. Performance is much better. I’m not an advocate for MS, I’m just saying Teams is far more than a chat or video app.
Yeah I agree it's more than chat/video I just don't see the need. And sorry I meant the native app for excel/word/powerpoint rather than the embedded versions in Teams. The embedded versions generally seem to be missing features or perform worse or get in the way of other Teams app use cases while using them.
It’s ridiculous this comment is downvoted. It’s a straightforward comment from the perspective of a long time user of Teams n a small business setting.
Many, many employers have done just that around the world. Because it's "free". It really is a massive anticompetitive move, made clear by the market-dominating force that is Microsoft. I have to say, I think the EU has them bang to rights, and they probably know it.
And the rest of the MS ecosystem is full of dark patterns to funnel you onto it also. Create a new meeting in Outlook - there's automatically a Teams link in it that nobody asked for. Even if it's a Zoom meeting.
There’s a bit more to it I think. Pricing and basic messaging aside, you can build robust applications on top of MS Teams and have complete freedom over the UI, functionality, etc., but you can’t do the same with Slack. In many cases, MS Teams can replace Slack, but Slack can’t replace Teams.
My company also killed Slack when Teams became bundled. With some bureaucracy and a written exception you can continue to use Slack if you're a "developer" which is like ?? but I'm not complaining because the code blocks and screen sharing on Teams are actual garbage so good to have an alternative.
What an awful experience, both the app and the forced move. The only people who like it are warm bodies who can barely use other Office products as it is.
I quite confident if there would be a group of people attempting to make Teams worse, exhibit a different buggy behavior on a weekly basis, they would absolutely fail miserably.
Teams is a peak example of what 'tying' looks like.
And then we use Teams simply because it's already included in the package anyway, even though many employees hate it, but it's hard to argue for another solution because why pay for Slack when we already have Teams "for free"?
And since Teams doesn't really need to compete on functionality it's extremely slow and with a borderline unusable group chat.