Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?

Teams doesn't have to be good to succeed. It just has to exist. It's not even very important how good it is. Given it exists, IT will make everyone use it on Microsoft's behalf regardless of how bad it is.

Or another way to look at it is that the real customers for Teams are IT departments. It makes their lives easier because they don't have to do anything and it meets all the compliance requirements they are supposed to enforce.

Which in turn reflects that the real customers of IT are regulators and auditors. Nobody with decision making power actually cares whether any of the software in use in enterprises works well or not.

Long ago Microsoft had MSN Messenger, which was one of the leading messaging apps. It worked well, and many 'normal' users were using it. Then Microsoft dissolved the team behind it and screwed up the product so bad with bloatware and ads that everyone moved to WhatsApp (except in the US where people went back to texting).

Then Microsoft came out with Communicator, renamed it to Lync, which was a corporate messenger/meeting software. It used its own server, that could federate outside. It worked very well. They added LiveMeeting as a separate app for meetings, built on the same protocols. Our company used it with the "roundtable" camera from 2008, and it all worked amazingly well. We had meetings with people joining in from home and other offices over the internet using inexpensive webcams, 15 years ago.

Then they bought Skype and it went downhill from there. I don't know what happened, but they took a lot of time integrating technologies from Skype (peer-to-peer) with their own tech (which was more telecom/server based) and tried competing with ever-changing perceived competitors by copying parts of their features and UI, without ever making any feature really good. They integrated everything into a single program, Skype for Business, now renamed Teams, and made it bloated and obnoxious. Just try to get it to not start at login... It's like MSN all over again.

I think the Communicator/LiveMeeting software combo they had 15 years ago would still (conceptually) do pretty well as messenger/meeting software now, when modernized. It was much less intrusive and behaved like nice software that you actually wanted to use.

My 2 cents of venting on this sorry excuse of software

- Backtick formatting in a chat post only works after typing the closing backtick, deleting it, re-typing it

- Text copied from a conversation is polluted with names and time stamps. "I really want this feature" said nobody ever

- The mute/unmute button is hard to find, I don't think I've ever attended a Teams meeting without someone struggling with this. Teams should change its name to "You're on mute"

- Multiple windows, I never know which is the 'main' window, which is the meeting window, where are they, which has focus

- Too hard to know which chat you're replying to, who is in it

- Updates in chats are not consistently acknowledged, you have to change focus, and back again. Even then the "Activity" tab still shows unread items that I have read

- Random crashing

- Random communication freezes, everyone else is chatting, I don't see any updates nor notification of any problems until I restart the app

- "Reply" is sometimes in the chat context menu, sometimes not.

- Media handling is inconsistent, sometimes I can't paste photos, sometimes I can

- The size of the text chat column in a meeting cannot be changed and is very narrow, forcing you to find the same chat in the 'main' window

This happens because of how Microsoft approaches product development and design. On many product teams, PMs end up doing not only the product design decisions but even designs much of the products themselves.

This works for them because it focuses product cycles on releasing what "matters" to the customer, but it ends up cutting craft and quality. This makes their products poor to use, but is also what drives revenue into their hands.

They don't really need to be the best or the fastest. They just have to have decent products that aren't the worst (I prefer Teams over Webex), and glom those products together into an affordable package.

For better or worse, Microsoft product suites are like the Olive Garden of the product world.

edit: whoa, got more comments than I thought. For disclosure, I did a brief stint as a PM intern there way back in the day. Wanted to join as a UX designer intern, but got shoe-horned into the PM role

Because it doesn't need to improve. It just needs to check some checkboxes. It's "free" as part of Microsoft Office 365. It allows the IT department to check a checkbox and de-incentivize them from looking at Slack. With Slack you have to pay for and is yet another app to administer. Many IT departments who are already Microsoft customers will have an easier time rolling that out than a new app. No new purchase order nor legal review. Microsoft just needs to suck the air out of Slack to "win". Any additional investment by Microsoft is wasted.

It's the iPhone effect: If you use Teams, and something goes wrong, everybody is patient and sympathetic. If you use something else, then it's your fault for being "weird" or "cheap." In my case, my computer came from IT, pre-loaded with Teams, and it runs nearly flawlessly.

But I've noticed something else about computers and software. You can have two people with similar jobs, similar computers, similar software, etc. One person will have crashes and problems all the time, and the other person, smooth sailing. Nobody knows why. It doesn't matter whether they're IT experts or homemakers. In the words of a former office-mate: "I got a new computer, and spent two days setting it up exactly the way I want it, and yet it still crashes all the time." That person was a very sharp and productive programmer, yet he was swearing at his computer almost continually.

We use zoom but are switching to teams. As an engineer my absoutley must have feature is screen sharing with collaborative annotation. I waited with bated breath for the 'active annotation' feature that was on the teams roadmap for months to be released. And then it was. To my horror it was the epitome of bloat. It essentially takes a screenshot of the presenters desktop and then starts a whiteboard session. It takes a good 30 seconds to enable, and as it's a screenshot the screen being presented can no longer be interacted with until annotation is stopped. The 'active' part of the name active annotation is just adding insult to injury. It's static annotation at best. I couldnt have imagined a more poorly conceived feature, but here it is. Microsoft, please for the love of engineers fix it!

I teach visual effects and digital art. I am used to the madly compLex interfaces (Maya, Blender, Nuke etc). I have no fear of such software. But I am completely defeated by Teams.

- Why two windows when you are in a meeting? The second window is sometimes hard to find intuitively.

- Why, when opening an attachment, is the user locked out of chat? Again, with many windows open, the preview can look and function like whatever app is native to the previewed file.

- is there a way to disable camera previews when sharing screen? The two together take up way too much interface. If there is a way, I should not have to search for it.

- Upload a file to chat and sending that file are two separate actions. Why? I can’t count the number of times I have to remind students to press the send button after upload.

On linux, Microsoft teams will change your system sound settings to match its preference. This includes Bluetooth headphones no longer being available to the system. Then, it decides the system settings are beneath it and will only use its own device settings. And it will decide now that your fancy Bluetooth headset is gone, there is also no need for that crappy internal microphone either, so enjoy not having any microphone. Once you get all this working through however many steps it requires of you, teams will happily forget your settings and will require you to do it all over again.

Teams binds to the previous account, so if you want to login to another account (say, if you're both a student and have a job) you have to log back in to the last account, totp and all, before you can logout and log back in to the account you want. There are no back buttons.

Teams is shit. I use it because I have to, but its ridiculous how bad the UX is and its a shame, because I think microsoft can do better.

I've heard the interoperability with teams and office365 is phenomenal though. Multiple people editing the same document, while in a call presenting that document, security of the files all settled in the cloud with easy to use interfaces. It sounds great, I don't really use any of that. To me, teams will always be a crappy voip tool.

Our gymnasium extensively uses Microsoft products - Outlook, Windows, Office, ASP.NET. We've had some proprietary software before for writing on digital touchscreen displays in classrooms, but it was ditched in favour of OneNote. Now some professors prefer to use the classic whiteboard with the regular marker due to very usual malfunctioning of the software, sudden crashes, freezes, VERY SLOW undoing times, etc.

It's the same with other Microsoft products. Like someone else said, it doesn't matter how bad they are, money streams are basically guaranteed.

It's weird how their software almost feels like shareware or debian packages lurking in the repos unchanged for 10 years, just with ads and unresponsive UI.

Students and teachers really have no interest in being informed on the bottom of the screen that it's currently raining (we have actual windows for that), nor do we care that Ethereum's Ether fell by 10% in value this day.

Such things make no sense in an educational setting. Moreover even browsing the web when the teacher wants to show us some JS animation on a website (you know, such website that doesn't get updated, yet works, it's path starts with a tilde, and is only served via plaintext http) is uncomfortable, as Edge browser starts up with a screen filled with ads and random news articles about the war in Ukraine or political situation in the US.

I went quite off course, but Teams is no different. As soon as the teacher logs in to the computer, Teams is starting to launch. Why? It would be somewhat okay if it just launched in the background, but no, after 20 seconds a Teams window opens, wastes 5 seconds of lecture time, because it doesn't immediately have the Close button drawn.

Maybe theese are all just issues our IT team could solve, but given the immense amount of money siphoned into MS both by the school and the country's educational ministry, some reasonable defaults could be expected.

My company is transitioning to Teams and I find it frustrating. So much so that I collect my complaints in a confluence page. I could be wrong on some of these, so happy to be corrected!

No links

You can’t link to conversations. This means if you want to add context to a Jira ticket or in a code comment, you can’t easily do so.

Inconsistent UI

The UI between a Teams channel and a chat with multiple people is not consistent. Direct chats:

- do not have the ability to thread; so you end up with quotes all over the place and interleaved conversations.

- don’t support ``` for code blocks. Channel chats do. Why? I have no clue.

Notifications in channels are easy to miss

It’s really easy to miss notifications from channels unless you get messaged directly about it.

The emojis are bad

They aren’t customizable, but even the ones that are available are not great.

Compared to Slack

Teams lacks these features that I find useful in Slack:

- Don’t have time to address something immediately and don’t want to forget about it? Right click → Remind me later.

- Instead of struggling to communicate a screen location, draw on the screen when a co-worker is sharing their display. Ok, Teams introduced this recently. But the first time I tried it, I ended up stuck in annotation mode and had to quit Teams to be able to interact with my applications…

- Integration with Jira for automatic linking to mentioned issues by Jira Issue Key, e.g., PROJ-123. I think this one is just a limitation because my company hasn't added the integration.

- Notifications when when activity occurs in Bitbucket or Jira. Ditto.

The hold music sucks

The music played when alone on a call sucks. I suppose this is more subjective than the rest…

It isn't because Microsoft lacks good programmers. My guess would be that someone believes they need to have every feature from slack, zoom, WebEx, meet etc, and also integrate tightly with every Skype/SharePoint/OneNote feature, and also run on at least four platforms. But they aren't willing to give people time to do this.

Absolutely incredibly garbage, how do they have the audacity to ship something so bad? The few times I tried to use it for large important meetings were a total shit show. I experienced a situation where everyone could see and hear only about half of the other meeting participants, but not the same set for everyone. It was really incredibly confusing for everyone involved.

This thread is incredibly negative, this is a suprise because our entire company relies on teams for remote working and it works pretty damned well.

Interestingly teams usage seems to be still rising post-pandemic, something competitors are not seeing (and competitors include its own Skype product), teams even managed to surpass Slack in third part plugin support. So i'm not really buying this thread as repsentative, but it more function of the extremly high usage whcih is suprising on a forum which is heavily Mac/Linux oriented.

I had to use Teams a lot in the past years as I worked for companies that they went all-in for O365. While O365 is not bad (and even some of components of O365 are quite good) Teams is the epitome of terrible software. Terrible UI, unreliable delivering notifications, terrible at handling external devices (headphones, webcams). It's very untrustworthy when it gets to automatically updating status based on activity (happens more often than you think). The concept of "Teams" (group chats) in MS Teams is the worst I have ever seen. It clearly promotes isolation between groups! I can go on for hours about how bad it is but I will stop here. I will say though that when I interview with a company, if they don't use MS Teams, they get extra points! :-)

Edit: also this came up recently: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/microsoft-tea...

Good ol' MS!

I had the joy of helping with a Teams to replace Slack rollout at the start of the Pandemic. During which I had multiple meetings with Engineers and Product folks at MS. Two reasons struck out as significant problems.

The first was that Teams is Skype and Sharepoint mashed together with duct tape. When you'd ask for improved UX, it would all fall to "Ah yes, the Sharepoint team would have to do X so the other team can do Y. They aren't built like that, though, so you cannot have it". Teams is not one product and will never feel that way.

The second was scarier. I was trying to encourage communities of practice and having open communication by default, with some private rooms when needed. Like in Slack, you have multiple channels rather than disappearing into your own Team. Promoting openness was anathema to their Product people "Why would you want people to see what you say? Privacy is the default". I got the impression MS internally is not a safe space to speak, and Teams has that same cultural baggage.

Try this: select all the text in a text box input in teams with your mouse, click and drag the cursor to select the text. Start typing. It will type the correct characters, right to left. So instead on "hello world" it will display "dlrow olleh". No joke. Selecting by triple clicking doesn't trigger the right-to-left typing. Using shift and arrows doesn't. Just by dragging the cursor. I can't imagine what could possibly cause this, even as a bug. Truly impressively bad software.

Simple answer:

It is a badly coded mess of spaghetti code, written with an ancient framework (AngularJS, currently running version 1.5.15), then ported to different platforms with Electron.

Have a look at the source code in your browser, it is not obfuscated in any way.

It is a single file of almost 17MB (!) of minified JavaScript, and I'm surprised the browser doesn't outright crash and actually manages to parse this, run and display a web application.

I'm not sure I share the view that Teams is terrible although I do occasionally have problems but I think it does share a lot of traits with modern software that I will call "spongeware" because it feels spongy.

Back in the day with pure desktop apps, you had crisp quick feedback when you clicked things, a window would open or be dismissed. It was hard to cause serious timing bugs because 1) Most things were written in code compiled to platform sdks and 2) Not much was network based 3) THe app worked more quickly than your clicking

What happens when you add not only network, but app frameworks that feel more like browsers than desktop apps, you click things and it takes a second to spring back, you think you clicked a button but nothing happens so you click it again, maybe the app is sending telemtry back to base or maybe it is needlessly loading a dataset from the network instead of just a local dll. What does it add up to? 1,000,000 unrepeatable bugs based on random timings and lockups, based on people doing things they didn't realise like double-clicking at the same time that anti-virus is scanning the network or your internet provider is having a blip!

There are still apps from the old-school like Notepad++ on Windows which feels solid and which auto-updates really easily instead of dynamically updating when you are trying to work but somehow they are not cool or don't tick the promise of "cross-platform development" which mostly means it's a bit crap on all platforms instead of great on one.

OK, let's not mince words. It is so bad because you, all of you who suffer under this, don't give IT managers and decision makers enough shit for choosing this crap. You don't stand up for yourself, you don't refuse to use it, and you do nothing to improve your situation because you think you can't.

Right now most of you are shaking your head. "It isn't that simple". "I can't do anything about this". "It isn't my place". You are wrong. You can do something about it, but it is going to take a bit of backbone and a bit of initiative. You may lack a backbone. Grow one. Don't whine. Whining accomplishes nothing and communicates that you have given up.

You find better alternatives, recruit others to your cause and force badly run organizations to change -- essentially by leading a revolt. There is only so much a manager can do when employees say "no". And it is easier to say "no" when more people say "no".

If you have ever been a manager you know perfectly well that if you can't get your people to do as you say, you are done. A leader who can't make people follow isn't a leader. It can be a career killer. Lots of managers have nightmares about this.

You can use that to your advantage.

If you don't want to use Teams: find an alternative, start using it, recruit others to your cause and stand up to whomever says "you can't".

2022 and Microsoft still can't write a program that correctly uses the clipboard.

When I select "some text" and press Ctrl-C I want "some text" in the clipboard. Not this monstrosity:

    [09:57] John Smith:
    some text

I can't believe anyone inside MS uses Teams for serious communication. It must surely drive them mad!

From a financial point of view the answer is because you’re not paying for it

Teams is bundled with Office 365 to steal marketshare from other companies like Discord who charge a bit more and are a stand alone service. It’s why Salesforce bought Slack.

CFOs at Fortune 500 companies want to be efficient with their spending so they won’t buy an extra license if their existing bundle is “good enough”

Teams is “good enough” so Microsoft doesn’t invest in it as much as other more profitable areas

Because the people making enterprise deals are doing it face-to-face (probably at a nice dinner sponsored by MS.) They don't use tools like this and they're more interested in "checking the box" than analyzing what would improve people's work life (missing that it would probably improve efficiency.) If you're still having your administrative assistant print out all your emails - and dictating your responses back to them - then it's time to retire and let a digital native fix things in ways you can't even imagine!

If we're listing pet peeves, there's an infuriating one that Microsoft steadfastly refuses to fix: MFA re-authentication prompts that often occur in a middle of a meeting.

Recently I was presenting to 30+ senior staff, and in the middle of my sentence Microsoft Teams decided to shove its virtual hand in my face and prompt me to AUTHENTICATE RIGHT NOW. Not after the meeting, not in idle time, no sir! Right now. This instant. Or your presentation to the CxOs is over, you hear me? Got it?

Press the button on the phone, now. Press it. PRESS IT.

This is a regular comment on hn. It doesn't chime with my experience.

I have used Teams every day for 3 years. It is a memory hog, it sometimes takes a moment from connection to hearing people...but I never once had it 'crash'. I swap from phone to screen fairly regularly with no problem.

I wonder, do people who pay for Teams as an organisation get better service? We pay and I have no problems with it.

I hate how Teams really can’t handle full-duplex conversations, at least with transpacific calls. You pretty much need to speak, pause, and then hope that only one person speaks next, or there’s a series of “sorry, you go ahead…” until someone manages to get started again. Background noise removal and feedback removal is poor compared to the competition. I much prefer Zoom for video/voice conferencing and Slack for text chats.

However, what Teams has done well is dethrone WebEx and other legacy stuff from really big companies during the pandemic/WFH era. As has been mentioned, many big companies already had huge Microsoft accounts (likely O365) so turning on Teams was easy. When WebEx fell over under load, users moved to Teams.

One feature that’s pretty cool is the real time closed captions and the ability to do text based searches for recorded meetings. But that’s not enough to make up for some of the most basic audio quality issues.

It's a natural side effect of adoption. Slack and other messaging apps are typically adopted organically by the end-user . They are "sold" via good product experience. Teams on the other hand is adopted by IT administrators who receive the product bundled an appreciate the ease of activation over the user experience.

Pretty simple root cause: Bureaucracy combined with lack of shared vision.

I support your need to vent, it's undisputably a magnificently huge pile of stinky garbage. Given the amount of resources poured in, it'd be hard to do worse.

I'm convinced Redmond is using Slack on macbooks internally.

We're Microsoft hardware (surface line), Microsoft OS, and Microsoft software.

You'd think things would work with that combo? Sleep is utterly broken, Excel crashes, snip works sometimes, audio levels are all over the place with teams doing its own thing separate from system, BT connections are unstable, teams is dog slow, Onenote search gives up with even smallish amounts of data saved

I'm just not buying that MS is dogfooding this

> I am literally forced to use this app at work...

Exactly. You are not the customer. Your IT admin is. And they have to convince your security team while managing spend. Why wouldn’t they pick the “free” option that your company has already approved for deployment?

We use Teams for group calls at work, but Slack for all other messaging. This is because Slack's video calling feature has always been a pain, particularly for our Linux team members. It could have improved, but we moved to Teams for calls so I wouldn't know. Because I only open teams when we have a meeting and then immediately close it, my experience is generally positive. I _wish_ I could just use the browser based version to save opening the slow-slow-slow-to-open desktop app but: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/safari-browser-su... says I need to disable cross-site tracking which is, frankly, an insane ask.

I think that sort of poor engineering is a sign that the team behind teams must have very limited resources. It's hard to prioritise a desktop browser with such small market share, especially when a work around of 'just use the app' is there - but this is hardly a lean startup here.

Today I had to use Windows. I installed Teams and called a colleague to pair program. He then left me on hold, and the hold music kicked in; I search everywhere in the app's settings to no avail. I searched how to stop and disable this hold music, and then, to me disbelief, I found out that I had to go to "Teams admin center" and manage policy to disable this, there's even a a dedicated page for this madness [0]!

Burn this wretched creature!

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/music-on-ho...

Because microsoft got to big, which distorts the market. We learned this in economy 101 on high school: a monopoly is bad for the consumer. This here is technically not a monopoly but it is close.

The producer of good A is using its momentum in market A to push a product in market B. This way, any big conglomeration can use its big fat ass to push innovation out of market B. All it has to do is offer product B for free, with a purchase of A. This promotes lazy consumerism, nothing good ever comes from it.

This is why coupled sales should be banned. This is why the EU tried to uncouple browsers from OSs, why you now have to explicitly choose a browser.

Microsoft focuses entirely on MVP (minimum viable product) and they expand their use-cases to include more features at a minimal amount of effort.

Polish and use-ability don't matter when they can sell anything if it has XYZ feature.

If you look at the teams roadmap it's more and more features.

- MSN Messenger

- Windows Live Messenger

- Microsoft Office Communications

- Microsoft V-Chat

- Microsoft Lync

- Skype

- Skype for Business (completely different piece of software than skype)

- Microsoft Classroom

- Microsoft Teams

(no guarantee of completeness)

Some of these did better than others, but in the end they all went down the drain. That makes me suspect that it's not the software itself, but some corporate requirements that Microsoft imposes on their chat programs, that's the root cause of the problems.

Teams is buggy, clunky, and unreliable, though fairly feature rich. I find things like Google stuff/Slack/Discord to be somewhat more reliable and less unpleasant to use (even if Discord is another clunky Electron app.)

But few things can compare to Zoom's astonishingly cavalier attitude toward security and privacy, and Zoom seems unavoidable in many contexts.

It's not just chat. It hooks into dozens of MS products (planner, excel, ...), Office365, Azure and a bunch of different services. It has to be compliant with government and Military standards if the domain falls into one of those categories.

If it was just chat, it would probably by much less of a bloated mess of crap. The problem is that MS never makes just a simple tool anymore. They want it to hook into every other MS platform and product line and before you know it, the new product is slow and bloated again...

A peeve: Last week I got invited to an online meeting. I am using Firefox on Arch Linux on a Framework laptop. One hour before I opened the invitation link and was just told to wait till the meeting starts. OK. But when the time was up, Teams suddenly told me to install something in a hurry.

I fished out my wife's Chromebook instead but we missed two minutes of the meeting.

That's clearly a failure: I didn't get a chance to check my setup before the meeting started.

Sample size of "me", but I couldn't even tell you the last time Teams crashed for me. I frequently change cameras and microphones in the middle of a call (I change the microphone because I have a USB microphone that is shared to multiple PC's with a USB switcher which means it is essentially being unplugged and plugged. This causes Teams to switch to a different microphone.)

And there's one thing that really bugs me: in the new Win11 build 22H2 - supposed to let you regulate how much power each process is allowed to use through the 'economy' feature of Task Manager - Teams seems to be amongst few apps on which that functionality is not allowed. It's only possible to limit individual processes within Teams, but not the entire app. Basically making the feature useless, since Teams uses at least 20 processes on my system. I can limit all of Edge. I can limit any of my own apps. Teams is the single most inefficient app I have installed. And it's the only one I can't easily limit. Why Microsoft, why? (edited for clarity)

I have a different experience. 5-10 calls/day on Windows or iPhone. Seamless transition if I want to switch the conversation to another device. Use multiple webcams and headsets. Screen-share a lot. Both Teams App and browser version. Never had any problems with it.

I really like Teams and what it brings to my team. But reading the comments here I'm the minority.

I use teams, slack and zoom for video conferencing. Of all of them zoom is the best imho. (Not that I'm a fan of any of them). It seems to just work the most. Slack has weird issues with screen sharing only working sometimes apart from that it's not bad. Teams randomly doesn't launch and for the past month the calendar integration has vanished with no sign of return. Why are they so bad? It's Microsoft. Everything they do is bad these days. Hell earlier today I tried to block pushes from admins to a GitHub repo could I find the button? Nope. In Gitlab it's a drop-down. [/endrant]

I can only throw out a series of ideas:

1) It's built on top of Sharepoint ... somehow.

2) It is a "Me, too" product without any kind of compelling vision, which usually leads to a mentality of "survey existing competitors in that 'space' and nab their features."

3) Because it is free, they feel the need to push it everywhere, even if isn't appropriate for most people. Go to your File Explorer and stare at that "3D Objects" Folder, marvel at the concept that so many people would have 3D printers that of COURSE you are going to need a 3D objects folder, the same way you have one for Music. Wait...

My biggest gripe isn't teams-specific, it's that MS office products still won't support multiple logins. With Google I can be logged into my 4 different work, personal and business accounts simultaneously and switching between the active one is a single button click.

MS won't even support two accounts, so 3 out of 4 times I get invited to a teams meeting I'm in the wrong account, and it's a huge pain to sign out and sign back in; there's no single sign-in (even in Windows!) that works for Outlook, Onedrive, Teams, etc. all at once. Ridiculous.

One thing that has been referenced but not really talked about is that Teams doesn't want to be a tool, but the complete solution.

With the built in SharePoint, and Office editors you can see that it is designed for a very particular use case. The problem is that most people on Hacker News are not just document sharing and editing. Most people are not doing this, and especially not in the half baked Office online tooling.

As a chat tool isn't not great. It isn't supposed to be a chat tool though, which is why it will never be good.

Their goal was to get a bunch of users. Their team figured out how, and went out and got a bunch of users very rapidly. Mission accomplished. Microsoft was very happy.

Oh– It's a buggy video call solution and poor replacement for Slack? Yeah, not important.

They're at over 270m users in an ecosystem of 350m Office 365 users. There's no "less buggy version of Teams" out there with market share to attract by making minor improvements to the software.

It does exactly what it's supposed to, and what Skype for Business already did. The biggest thing moving the roadmap forward is Teams capability to do "Office 365 Enablement" - i.e. win new users into the Office 365 ecosystem.

There's a lot of things Microsoft can do to accomplish that. Some of them may be new Teams features. Some of them are tweaks to pricing and bundling and other unsexy things like that. Some of them may eventually be bug fixes or fun features that make Teams more enjoyable to use.

But, at this point, your best chance of getting minor features built, is to hope internal Microsoft employees find it annoying enough to prioritize, just so they can see the feature fixed.

Because Teams does what it's supposed to, decently well, and well enough to succeed massively in the marketplace for "generic video call software I don't have to pay a bunch of extra money for".

Like Dick Jones says in the Robocop movie about the failed ED209: “I had a guaranteed military sale with ED209! Renovation program! Spare parts for 25 years! Who cares if it worked or not!”

Teams is corpocrapware.

Employer was using Skype for Business. I hated it. Had to install pipeline jobs to detect non-ascii crap that developers copy pasted from message chats. The text processor on Skype loves to convert quotes to curly quotes add some weird character that looks like a space but its some rich text aberration.

When company announced it was moving to Teams I was very happy. We could finally ```exchange some code``` right? I'm not happy right now. Its slow, it hangs all the time, it makes a mess with audio devices and behaves erratically when copy-pasting text. Sometimes it copies what you select but most of the time it copies the whole message along with the metadata.Some people can still use Skype. When you send messages to those people it flattens out everything into a single paragraph.

I suspect some of those issues might be caused by security crapware that the company implements on the locally installed Teams software. Doesn't change the fact that I kinda miss Skype now.

I'd blame Electrum but vscode is kinda ok. Not my choice for editor but still not as terrible as Teams.

Come on Microsoft. Discord which is a tool for gaming teenagers is miles ahead in usability and features. Slack lacks features but its a breeze to use. Even Element which is a company that probably has less than 5% of MS resources can output a decent product.

Teams has to be one of the worst products in its class, of all time.

It is a catastrophically corpulent and fickle mass of errors, wrapped in a UI that looks like Prince shat it out circa 1998.

I wonder how many of these complaints are due to Teams itself or if it's due to the crappy "corporate" builds deployed to the PCs? My guess is that it's more due to the crappy corporate builds since I've seen so many of them that don't have up-to-date drivers (or have missing drivers), and many of them have multiple competing security scanning software, along with over-strict policies and restrictions that affect Teams.

I never experienced any crashes, and neither can I recall a team mate complaining about that.

Bugs I encountered:

1. Opening the link to a scheduled meeting opens the browser (good), but then clicking the "open in teams" and confirming the external URL handler in the browser does... Nothing. Restarting teams fixes that. (Happens for my team mates as well).

2. I have a dedicated USB mic that's always on, while my speakers are on a different USB device that's not always on. I have to reconfigure the audio settings very often, which is especially annoying since I can't do that before answering a call. But changing the audio device works without error (unlike Discord on my private PC, which lets me select the newly connected USB device as output, but needs to be restarted to actually output audio to it).

That's about it. Of course memory and CPU usage are rather impressive. And afaik we don't use the phone (as in landline, not as in app) feature; at least I don't, so I can't comment on that.

I've to add: I tend to bash MS first and ask questions later. I'm unhappy I can't use Linux on both my work PCs. But if I'm honest, teams works pretty well for us.

Worst bug IMO is that Teams seems unable to reconnect after my machine goes to sleep.

This feels like an extremely basic state to detect: after n seconds of no heartbeat, reconnect.

Everyone saying teams is garbage. It’s not. It’s like you’re complaining about the kid who got a C in class. Guess what? They passed the exam.

Microsoft brutalised Slack with a C grade app that was “bundled for free”. For 80% of people, teams is just fine.

The backend tech for Teams is so bad that you receive notifications of something even before it appears on screen which is terrible UX wise, the UI tells you something is happening but it's actually happenning 2sec later.

And don't forget about multi-tenant support.

If you have multiple accounts or your account has access to multiple tenants, you can only really work in one of them at a time. You have to log out and log in to each of them. Totally unusable.

Slack got this well from day zero. I can't understand how 6 years later MS Teams still doesn't support well this simple and common scenario.

As a Microsoft employee I can say I hate teams. It's just terrible. The search is bad. Formatting code in the message is bad. It bloated. I just need a messaging app. Like lite version of teams.

I remember when teams dropped - I was so excited for a Slack alternative.

Slack is still the best thing for work and man I hate that fact. I'm so ready to jump ship - someone please!

[Follow up] At the end of the day I want something as snappy and reliable as Whatsapp for work. I have my gripes about it, but it absolutely excels at one thing - getting my message to the other end.

I have been using teams for 3+ years on mac and windows and I have never had any issues. Perhaps you are a linux user? If so, they recommend the PWA app. I have used zoom and plenty others but nothing comes close to Teams for me.

Perhaps, having used Teams' predecessor "skype for business" I am just grateful the torment is over.

Kind of amazing to see the contrast in quality between VSCode and Teams (both Microsoft productivity apps that are relatively new/greenfield and also Electron-based)

At least it doesn’t totally change the UI and hide all important elements when you start a screen share (Zoom).

My experience has been pretty positive overall, at least for calling. Channels don’t work as well as slack, but it’s decent.

The big trick is to run it in a browser so you avoid any electron overhead. It is fully featured in browser.

UX is garbage on Teams. Specially for chat compared to something like Slack. Video calls, I can live with it even though I prefer Zoom and Google Meet over Teams.

If a company uses Teams for anything more than video call, to me it's a sign that they don't care about productivity of their employees.

It's almost like Teams would perform better as a bunch of VS Code extensions

I wish open sourcing would go beyond dev tooling

I had issues for weeks (form the point we found there was even an issue) with some users not being able to create meetings with breakout rooms. Strangely, I also noticed their UI was different. Speaking with Microsoft support, after being elevated to engineers for a while, we found out the clients were being put into VDI mode which is used in virtualised environments and has features cut like breakout rooms (and a different UI). No solution was offered except delete %appdata%\Microsoft\Teams and HKLM:\\Software\Microsoft\Teams on each client when this comes up. We still have no idea how this is happening, we have Citrix Workspace installed for other purposes, but if it was that I'd expect it to affect all clients.

This has been my only real complaint in the ~8 months using the client

It’s funny that it apparently crashes for people. Never had a single crash or lagging, sharing works fine, but it also doesn’t work and is a mess.

Sometimes there are no notifications. I’ve had messages by my boss that I’d only see by chance hours later because Teams never notified me. I tried ingesting Seq alerts. But those are only possible in the groups tab, which has literally no notifications at all if one is in the chats tab.

The search feature has to be an elaborate joke. No one can think you can build a search feature that shows no context at all.

Their pseudo-markdown. What's going on there? If I press the wrong symbols or forget to paste with Ctrl+Shift+V I’ll be in some weird layout state that I can’t get out of, usually I just give up and send the broken looking messages.

No love for Jitsi in the comments ?

I'm running on Linux, Teams in the browser is 'okish' but always feels crappy/slow/buggy

Jitsi is always nice to use :)

I see that nobody here had to use Skype for Business or WebEx... This is the better future people!

I'm working with a client right now, trying to onboard them to O365 - I tried to push them the GSuite way (I prefer it, they prefer it, but their IT company is fixed on O365 and...other reasons) - so have been spending lots of time working with O365 from a top-down perspective.

Individually, things like MS Word / Excel work really brilliantly in the browser and as a cloud suite. But put them together and it's an absolutely clusterf*k.

The list of "apps" is absolutely enormous - and there is no coherent route between them, or consistency in operation. It looks like exactly what it is - a huge, overarching and insanely rich company just simply bought All The Things, slapped a bit of branding and a font on everything and then popped all the icons onto the same page. There's zero consistency, zero sense of how these things should be used together, zero explanation as to why you'd choose (say) Yammer over Teams, "Bookings" over Outlook calendars, or "Viva" over Sharepoint. The documentation is awful - again, not individually - sometimes this is ok - but the overall "this is the suite you're buying into, and here's how to use it" strategic overview. In fact it isn't awful, it's just simply non-existent.

This is before you even get to the absolute horribleness of the logging in / logging out / multiple windows opening / redirection hell user experience.

And then - layer on Teams on top of this - it is absolutely opaque about whether Teams is trying to be a sort of "glue" for all of the above (it fails) or a replacement (it fails) or a standalone thing (it mostly fails). There's a sort of half-assed attempt to make bits of Teams sort of work with bits of Sharepoint, but no, actually it turns out it doesn't, quite...

It's just such a weird thing. As I say, the individual experiences are sometimes quite good - Word is really excellent in-browser for example - but the overall piece is just absolutely insane. I'm slightly at a loss as to how to onboard and train organisations with few IT skills when a veteran like me (20+ years in the business) is absolutely baffled by it.

One of the worst programs I've ever used. I would LOVE to meet the guys in charge of it and ask them so many questions about it. It is like Peugeots, you can't make something so bad without it being intentional at this point

I'm using teams on macbook (teams have been a default communication channel of client i'm working with). It's truly terrible. Thing I hate about it the most is that it is absolutely not working well with other OS features. In example, when I do development I like to put on a 'focus' mode. Every other notification would go to the notifications bar without bothering me, but NOT TEAMS, it would stick itself out and bang my ears with a notification sound just like it would with a hammer. Once you try something great (slack) you don't want to go back.

Opposite experience: I use it daily and never had it crash on me. Everything works as expected and I see some slowing down only on very large meetings, but I am on a mobile CPU.

I would even say it's getting better and better.

At my previous job, MS Teams worked perfectly. It was used for everything, and it was great on my work laptop. Yesterday I had a Teams meeting with a teacher from my son's school, and Teams outright refused to work on my private laptop, with no indication why. The app when opened just hung on a white screen (even after reinstalling), and in the browser everything worked, except the camera. (The camera works fine in Discord or Google Meet.)

I have no idea what the problem is here. It works perfectly fine in one situation, and not at all in the other. Both Windows machines.

Disclaimer: I'm a long time Linux user, libre software evangelist and all round sandal wearer.

When Teams first arrived, I was startled at how good it was. Great UI, good telephony and just did what it was meant to do. It worked well, and did what it said on the tin.

I've watched it turn to shit over the last two years. Every update made it slower, buggier and more annoying. Surreptitious updates made me miss meetings as the background service on Android was stopped and never restarted after the update.

What was once a pleasant surprise is now a horrific buggy PoS. Kill it with fire.

I find it works extremely well. I can't remember a single crash, even though I started using it pretty early on in the pandemic, along with tens of thousands of other employees. It was clearly worse in 2020 though.

Edit: I do hate one thing, no way to share part of the screen! When using an ultrawide I always have to resort to lowering my resolution to a lowest common denominator 1080p to avoid people not being able to read what I share. Sharing one app doesn't work since I switch applications too much and want to share them all.

It may just be good enough.

I work as a consultant, and that also means I adapt to the videoconferencing solutions my clients use. In the last week, I used Teams, Zoom, Slack, Cisco Webex and Google Meet.

Each of these come with different advantages and disadvantages. None works perfectly, but interestingly, Teams is the one I experience the fewest problems with (closely followed by Google Meet) - and if my company was a Microsoft centered shop where lots of office documents are shared around, Teams would probably be what I choose.

Worst is Cisco Webex, which imho needs to die quickly.

It's all incentives. By bundling it with their Office offering, they've removed any incentive for themselves to put too much effort into one app.

Their customers are locked in for life. They won't leave. They tolerated Skype (Lync) for years, Teams is way better than that.

It's the same story with Google Chat and Meet. They can simply ignore it and what are you gonna do? Move your entire company off Gmail/Outlook? Even if you get irritated and start paying Slack or Zoom, you are still paying full price for Teams/Meet.

1) Bundling

2) Network effects

and 3) Who else is doing something different? No one cares about the quality of the product they make anymore. The only thing that's important is pushing new features. Fixing old features is useless because by the time someone finds out the feature they chose you for doesn't work, they've already paid you for a year long contract. And most of the time, by the time the year rolls around, they're used to dealing with the problem and don't want to take the disruption of moving to something else again.

Still? It started good and became bad, like most software. And, as is also the norm, there is no amount of money that can fix shitty software unless you Ship-of-Theseus it, which is fundamentally at odds with the ideologies of most project managers, whose rankings of how much they enjoy doing things are, from highest to lowest:

- Showing off optics bullshit like burndown charts

- Adding features

- Fixing extremely severe and well-documented bugs

- Committing some token time to pretending to fix tech debt

- Cleaning toilets with a toothbrush

- Actually fixing tech debt

- Fixing bugs

- Hammering nails through each of their own toes

- Making good software

I still can't be logged into multiple Teams accounts from my Windows desktop - but I can from my iOS phone! A Microsoft product that works more cleanly on Apple iOS than it's own Windows.

When you're a consultant working with multiple companies, it's vital to be able to access multiple Teams accounts. Now I have to log out and log in to the various accounts, or use the browser version.

Then fun ensues when you schedule a Teams meeting in Outlook and you don't remember which Teams account you were logged into - I've connected to my own meeting, and I (along with everyone else in the meeting) is waiting for the host (me) to start the meeting - but I created it while logged into some other Teams account. Now I have to log out and log in and try to find the right account.

There also needs to be a way to have it sort the attendee list by the ORDER THEY JOINED. Most recent people at the bottom. Right now, it sorts by name and I have to keep scrolling the list of attendees, which keeps changing as people join, and try to figure out if the person(s) I am waiting for are there.

After much frustration using Teams, I realised that the majority of my colleagues didn't care or even noticed all the small and not so small things that don't work. So, I accepted the sad reality that in a typical office environment, disinterest is the best ally of software companies.

Having said that, in the last year or so I noticed Teams is more stable and provides a better user experience. Or, perhaps, it's just me being succesful at lowering my original expectations.

They talked about this on All-In Podcast this week [0]. Essentially Microsoft teams doesn't need to be "good" to compete with Slack or others. It just needs to exist and part of the Microsoft bundle to be a viable option to the decision makers in a company.

[0]: https://youtu.be/_UpczzfeAFA?t=1099

Alternatively - in the past 2 1/2 years of using it intensively every day I don't think I've had it crash once and have no trouble switching between headphones, speakers and my hearing aids. Slack on the other hand shudder.I do wonder if a lot of this is due to addons, poorly managed windows installations by corporate IT, or conflicts with other processes.

Large companies don't seem to be able to produce good software consistently.

I'm of the opinion that Microsoft Teams' badness is actually a feature, and makes people not waste time and gossip in it. I'm quoted in this article about this specifically: https://www.protocol.com/workplace/founders-sick-of-slack

I suggest you try the web app version, it’s faster and more stable.

In fact, I believe Microsoft will replace the desktop client with a web app shell.

You can try it out today;

1. Install the Microsoft Edge Web browser on Mac or Windows 2. Log into https://teams.microsoft.com 3. Click … > Apps > Install this site as an app 4. Enjoy!

Honestly, I don't find it bad at all. It hardly ever crashes or drops connections and we use it a lot.

My only beef is voice communication latency. It is definitely several hundred milliseconds - far worse than using a phone. This leads to very unnatural CB-radio type conversations (you almost need to say "over" when you are finished talking).

To be honest, it comes with the general Office365 package and if you are leaned on Azure(popular where I am from), then why not use it as is? Teams is convenient too, as adding a calendar invite means you get am auto generated meeting link. And in most cases business & accounting teams make the choice and implement it company wide as policy.

We also use it, but out of frustration, many of our colleagues use Slack as well as some hardcore engineering teams are too reluctant to use Teams and outright use Discord.

Many of the teams brought in the issue to upper management about Teams but they redirect us to our IT management company, who tells us it comes with subscription and our business strategists or something has to ask to change this but they want an “ubiquitous” company wide system and so on.

Now we are often stuck with messaging people in three different places because someone will never respond in Teams, someone may not be in Slack and someone may not be using discord :)

Teams on my laptop crashes in the middle of calls. The only way to fix this is to reinstall. And then hope it will stay stable for a while.

Teams on my smartphone crashes in the middle of calls. The only way to fix this is to reinstall from the App Store. And then hope it will stay stable for a while.

Also I’m paying a monthly subscription for this experience.

I've been told it's better running inside chrome (I've yet to test this).

I suspect the complicated features mixed with weird memory/performance management techniques and automated testing don't align well with user use cases (try copy pasting large conversations and notice I'll start deselecting text as you scroll).

It’s good enough.

Never had any of these issues but.

* The volume is STILL too low after all these years.

* You can't be in more than one meeting at the same time. Even working with Teams is difficult while being in a meeting even though this has been improved. If you stay within same account that is, otherwise, you still lose.

* You are much more limited as logged-in than as guest meaning half of the attendees are guests even if they have accounts.

* Multiple Teams accounts simple does not work.

* Creating a guest account in a third-party (Teams) tenant is among the biggest mistake one can do. MS seems randomly force you to login to any or all the associated tenants for your account. You downloaded that document from a customer once and VS like, now before you deploy something to your private tenant in Azure, let me force you to login to that customer that you once got a doc from.

I wonder if part of the problem is the team's OKRs always need to include some new feature since the existence (or lack thereof) is very concrete and measurable. Of course outside of Microsoft, no one notices these features and would rather have the software simply get faster and more reliable.

The chat button for Teams on my macbook pro does not show up. On another older macbook pro, it works. I've seen this random issue showing up on forums, and there's never any working solution. It's just so weird, and I can't participate in any chat conversations. :shrug:

Does teams still use emails on the backend for every message?

1 word - Electron. The next version will still make heavy use of Chromium, but no longer via Electron.

For an app made by one of the largest software companies out there, Teams devs can't figure out how to format code snippet/log snippet in a readable way. The font is way too big and they waste half the app's width for things other than the message.

It's actually getting worse and worse even on windows sadly. Meeting notifications are not working, and suddenly I have issues with audio which I never had before in two years. I need to unplug and plug my headphones for the mic to work.

With all the problems with Teams, I would rather use it then Google Meet. At least with Teams you can request control of the presenters PC which make it great for doing support calls. Google Meet is sooooooo resource intensive that my entire machine goes to a crawl when I am on a call with more than 3 people (which is often). Not to mention that Teams is so integrated with Office 365. I love that whatever chat you have in a Teams meeting, you have in the Teams app unlike Meet which anything you place in chat is lost after the meeting.

Teams might not be perfect by far, but it is light years better than anything in the enterprise right now.

Can't even copy and paste code etc

What a joke.

I've actually had a pretty good experience with Teams (and I generally have a lot of bad stuff to say about MS).

I used it in the browser with Linux and it wasn't great. But on a mac it is fine and I haven't experienced any real problems.

I've never had the application crash, not even once. The only problem I've had with it being slow is when it opens Office apps inside of it. It's been flawless otherwise, leaps and bounds ahead of Zoom and Slack.

I have had zero crashes since it came out (I use it on Windows and iOS), and I switch devices in call frequently. While some parts of its UX are questionable, it’s not stability or performance I have problems with.

Are you using it on Windows?

All of this thread I read so far is complaining on a very high level. Compare the teams era to the pre teams era where companies often either had no meeting software and experience at all and onsite visits or phone calls was the only option, or they used Skype for business which was arguably even worse. Then the minor annoyances of teams seem small in comparison.

That's not too say these things shouldn't be improved, but bundling teams with office for free sure made my communications with most of my customers 1000% easier.

Once upon a time we had Lotus Sametime in office for IM communication and we liked it. It was good. It worked and didn't have dealbeaking quirks or fails. I miss Sametime, always have.

Lync was not perfect, and Skype for Business even less so, but they at least had a UI that wasn't a chainsaw massacre to use or to stare at. Every time I have to use Teams because it's the de-facto standard I always come away from the conference call feeling dirty - like I just used a nasty shopping cart at a disgusting filthy walmart to get groceries - and makes me pine for SfB or Sametime.

Better days.

I am also forced to use it for work, and agree that MS Teams is annoying. However, it sucks less than some of the other stuff I have to use, which appears to have been designed by people intent on sabotaging our work

Only someone on the development team has the answer.

But it's normal for MS to rush with a product, only to get better after years. I remember that IE only gets good after IE 4, and SQLServer only after some versions too.

Microsoft tried to buy Discord for a reason. I think it would have led to better integrations + a for business version which surprisingly enough people are asking Discord to do for a long time now..

David Saks talked about this on the last All In podcast.

Teams just had to be good enough to be included into Microsoft’s “Bundle”. Once it’s free and available, it gets adopted by prior bundle purchasers.

Teams isn't great ( from a feature and memory perspective ), but anyone who hates it should be forced to use Webex, on a bad network connection to India with 50+ people on a call!

+1. How is it so bad on so many levels? Like just browsing and searching for files in the files tab. It’s impossible even with numbers of files Explorer could easily handle in Windows 2000.

I actually think Teams is pretty good and gets the job done. It could be better at video calling but for chat and most other collaboration it does what it's supposed to do.

It's interesting how the back-end part is "funny" as well. If you a Teams to Teams call, your internal call flow ends up being exposed to the calling party [1] - and that's not what you expect out of an office PBX. This happens only if both parties are on a Teams client, though.

[1] https://twitter.com/lenz/status/1571921532783587329

I agree, it's bad. We were on Slack before, but switched to teams when going all in on Office 365. I really wanted to use the "Teams" feature in teams, along with chat for general chats not specific to projects. That never panned out.

We'd never see communications, even with notifications, in the "Teams" area of teams. When I did think to look at the conversations, all of the additional whitespace and padding the Mac client adds (not sure if it's all clients) on the messages in the "Teams" area just made it very difficult to consume context around a single discussion. There were another annoyances, but we didn't use it long enough for me to remember what they were.

We now just use the "Chat" portion of teams for all conversations and rename multi-person conversations with the project name. Starting a new chat with the same group of people for a different project is far more difficult than it needs to be, but I understand that's probably not the use case with how we're using it.

Search is abysmal. When clicking a result, you jump to the message but it is invariably devoid of any contextual information. It's just the message, by itself, in the chat window. It's only use is finding the date/time for the message you need, then scrolling back (for minutes sometimes) until you find the conversation from 3 weeks ago. And then, all the reverse infinite-scroll loading makes the client slow down to a crawl.

We routinely have issues with images not displaying. Sometimes loading the larger version works, many times it does not.

We routinely have issues with messages going completely missing in 1:1 chats. The sender can screenshot and show the message was sent, but the recipient never receives it, even after restarting the client.

I often get notifications of a new message in a 1:1 chat and when I goto the chat, I'm at the end of the channel and the message isn't there. I have to scroll up and then scroll back down so the infinite-scroll will load the missing message.

When in the new message box, I can CMD + UPARROW to edit my last message. This is useful because I make a lot of typos and fix them after sending/reading. A bad habit, perhaps, but it's how my process works. Anyway, this doesn't work if I someone has sent a message after mine. Teams is not smart enough to let me edit my last message with CMD + UP unless it was the last one sent. I have to switch to the mouse to make the edit. Also, if I CMD + UP in time to make an edit, submit it, then realized I missed another typo (it happens), CMD + UP no longer works. I have to manually focus the "Type a new message" box again and then it'll work. At that point I've touched my mouse, so I usually just opt to right click + edit the last message.

Sometimes after waking up my Mac, the teams window is missing. This happens to outlook too. CMD + TAB to focus the app doesn't retrieve it. I usually have to "launch" teams or outlook again (while it's still technically open) to get the window to reappear. No other App on my Mac does this, just Teams and Outlook.

Given how we use Teams, I like to "pin" chats for specific projects. I'm limited to how many I can pin. Why?

This one is minor: Gifs loaded with giphy can be paused. Copy/pasted gifs cannot. They auto play forever, which is annoying when it's the team chat I keep focused 90% of the day, but the conversation is slow that day.

I'm sure there are other things I'm missing.

Because they can't figure out how to do something in this space that catches fire and everyone loves. So instead, they bundle Teams in with their other stuff in order to cut the legs out from the competition i.e. lower the prices other companies can charge (because there's a mediocre free alternative), and hopefully slow down their growth until Microsoft can come up with (or acquire) something cool.

Because Microsoft the company is and always has been a POS that was only ever good for writing proprietary locked-in software for big corporations

This provides a neat datapoint when looking for a new job. If they chose Exchange365 as their office toolset, I can immediately ignore them.

I think you have not used Webex, Bluejeans and others.

I work for a very large insurance company.

Pretty much the whole company is on Teams.

If Teams was as bad as this thread suggests we would have heard about it (I know this because company-wide we complain bitterly about the anti-malware cruft that gums up our machines daily)

So it seems to me that we either got very lucky with our rollout or this thread represents a very vocal minority of people that are experiencing issues

Because it doesn't need to be better. What are companies going to do, stop paying for Office 365? Who will give them Word and Excel then?

Interesting. I'm not experiencing any of these problems running Teams on a Mac. What I have noticed is Teams doesn't seem to manage it's memory very well and after a few days of use it'll really bog your system down. Simply restarting Teams solves the problem for me. I find I need to restart Teams every week or two.

Layers of abstraction. Too many cooks. Too much modularity. No testing. No user feedback. No telemetry. Low price point.

Maybe many people in the thread are using Teams on Mac/Linux, because for me I haven't had a crash in like, ever. I don't have any issue with the UI, but then I don't know any better and I've used Teams enough these last 3 years that I know its idiosyncrasies.

Search is still beyond retarded, though.

Instead of asking this question you should be asking "how do I parley this into a new MacBook Pro M2?" :)

I've had many critical bugs, including the video on/off & audio mute button failing during calls, the "join call" UI being broken / missing, join links being broken despite working for other callers.

I don't honestly think they are taking responsibility for quality issues or feedback.

Start asking if they use teams in job interviews and use dealing with it as a justification for higher salary.

Status changes to "Away" when you've gone for few minutes is the most shitty feature. Another set of issues I have found are, - Crashes randomly - Updates are not synced, sometimes it takes couple of mins to see the messages that were sent from the mobile phone.

Clearly because they've done a poor job of integrating and then forcing adoption of the stickers and gif inputs. They should've threatened to call forth a Skypening if the users failed to enthusiastically and relentlessly toss questionable stickers and gifs onto every other line in a work IM. From every colleague. From LoB to shining LoB. Cross-silos and spanning every Org... until the market is fully forcefully penetrated.

One day we'll all make the switch to sticker based conversating, but until they push it feverishly and madly like the world is ending that evolution will be just out of our grasp. They simply halfassedly work to make it actively bad and don't really have the drive to make it truly sinister like they should. Somehow it would drive gains in the share price quarter over quarter like any sufficiently evil dark pattern spec software always does automagically.

Frustratingly Microsoft is just not laser-focused enough on driving the adoption of a campaign to hit those KPI's it seems.

/s

(I weep for the death of Lync daily)

Teams is alright imo. But working on collaborative documents in other apps is brutal, especially compared to GDrive and Figma's experience. I guess there are little incentives for them to improve when they already have 100s of fortune 500 companies under contract.

It is fine if it crashes, almost better even, otherwise I have to deal with trying to format my messages

> God forbid you try to change the audio device from speakers to headphones in the middle of a call.

I've been using it for a couple of years, and I have never had this issue. I can switch between my built-in soundcard and my USB headset without any problems. On Windows FWIW.

Pop is good: https://pop.com

The IntelliJ Code With Me feature is worth trying: https://www.jetbrains.com/code-with-me/

It works OK for me. Not my favorite app, but it gets the job done for the most part.

The search is frustrating (find a result but can't jump back to the full context?) and the UI is laggy on my laptop. The call/video features work as good as anything else I've used in the past.

Is it though? I use on in Mac and it never crashes… I routinely change mic and headset midcall with no issues whatsoever! Or seamlessly transfer calls from Mac to iPhone and back. My entire company uses it (and we are thousand employees) and we are pretty satisfied!

Microsoft's entire business model is holding corporate IT hostage. All their apps suck, except maybe VS Code. There's no reason to choose the Microsoft stack over Google Workplace or Zoho except, well, inertia. And there's a lot of that...

That’s why they integrate it directly into Windows 11 and force everyone to have/use Trams whether they like it or not. They are already rubbing their hands when they can report their DAU to make it look like people actually like Teams.

considering how massive & varied the MS ecosystem is, kinda surprised it works as well as it does tbh. for most biz/big orgs (MS bread-n-butter), good-enough pays the bills; non-functional requirements (speed, cool-factor etc) aren't much of a priority.

It's easier for IT deps at mid-to-big corps already invested in MS, wins on price, and connects well with MS infra (office, security/auditing etc).

With MS moving to Edge browser, their strategy looks interesting, and I think they will be solving much of their tech headaches (Teams, office etc) by shifting to mainly Web Technologies (even web3).

Because it is a GUI mashup built on top of a dozen dated, crappy, products that don't work well alone or together, and strung together with fishing wire and duck tape. The fact that it even runs at all is an accomplishment.

I never had it miss a beat, let alone crash, and I use it everyday for work.

It can be slow when joining very large meetings, though, but I use it mainly on a mobile CPU.

No issue with devices either and I can switch on the fly even when they are in use.

It certainly doesn't help that it's an Electron app and a fat one at that.

Because people who make decisions to use it are not the people using it. It’s a systemic problem with all enterprise software - it’s crap, because nobody who's opinion matter cares or knows it’s crap.

What will be the better alternative, that much functional with that much integrations?

In reality if you have to choose something for corporate section. In comparison to slack for example, MS Teams looks pretty solid

> God forbid you try to change the audio device from speakers to headphones in the middle of a call. And then if you try to just call back on your phone, and they want to share their screen, and you go back to your PC and try to join the call from your PC so you can see the screenshare (it's not going to work).

What voice/video client handles this much fiddling? When my friend and I get steam voice chat running, it’s a good day. We don’t touch anything after because these services notoriously suck.

Teams cloud based file sharing and overall UI/UX are nice. I don’t like how you can’t copy messages without a time stamp, or that black bar appearing on top when you screen share that obstructs any tabs or the rdp bar. But overall it’s a nice client in Windows as long as you don’t hop around too much which I don’t because I do my work on one machine idk what OP is doing lol.

Maybe Zoom and Slack are better, as a Windows developer, the integration is nice.

The only way it works for me under Mac OS, is through a private window at Microsoft Edge. If I try to connect any other way, I either fail to connect or connect to the wrong workspace.

I’ve used Teams every day all day for the past 4+ years and I have had minor issues with it ~5 times. Hundreds of my fellow co-workers use it and I’ve not heard anyone run into the consistent issues you’ve described.

We use it for 100% of our conference calls, sales calls, 1:1 working sessions, all-hands (hundreds of attendees), virtual trainings, new-hire onboarding, etc…

I’d say it’s the most useful software we use in my company outside of email.

Admittedly, I’m yet to experience the pure bliss that comes from collaborating on an NFT project with fellow Slack team members from my Mac Book Pro while riding in my auto-pilot enabled Tesla.

Until then, I’m pretty content with what I’ve been able to do with Microsoft Teams over the years.

It's comically bad. You can't indent text! As if text chat wasn't invented and being used for 40 years now. The text size limit drives me crazy. But hey, emojis!

Relevant: https://slack.com/blog/news/dear-microsoft

It only has to compete with Slack, and Slack is also garbage.

I’ve known people who work at Microsoft. Their attitude is we are the biggest so we don’t need to be good. This may seem too simple, but it’s their corporate culture.

The wors part is that it sets you automatically "Away" when using Teams mobile app. You are only "Available" when the app is opened.

Why is still so bad?

It's buggy, and it crashes more often than any other app I use. God forbid you try to

Seriously, with all the money and resources thrown at this company and this app, you'd think it'd be a little more stable, faster, and reliable. I am literally forced to use this app at work...

Response:

Mine doesnt crash and havent seen any bugs and I use it for 28 hours a day - unlike which is buggy, and it crashes more often than any other app I use. God forbid you try to .

Teams is probably the worst IT mandated software I've used in my career (which is saying a lot). I don't think Microsoft really cares about it.

We've been using teams in our org since inception and i haven't experienced any of these issues.

I don't think I've ever had Teams crash on me, or even hang noticeably in a few years of using it. I am always on fairly beefy devices though.

Amazingly I experienced a large MS shop choose Zoom over teams purely because they caught the MS salesperson lying about the Teams price.

The desktop version is buggy. The browser version works better. Don't even bother installing it. Just use the browser version.

Aren't all companies test for employee happiness (quarterly thing for us)?

If we had teams thrown at us, we would for sure complain a lot.

>God forbid you try to change the audio device from speakers to headphones in the middle of a call

I can not do this either in Cisco Webex.

No one was ever fired for buying IBM Sun Microsoft

Since only a few people are allowed to fix problems, problems tend to continue to exist. The Cathedral and the Bazaar.

Because it's a hodge podge of stuff, not a single thing made at a single time by a single team with a single vision.

Because it's just a webpage bundled with an obese web browser masquerading as a standalone desktop app.

Is it bad? It's the best meeting tool my company has ever used.

The things you're asking it to do seem normal, but each of those things is a different device with a different context. It's not surprising to me that it's hard to switch contexts.

I regularly start meetings on my home WiFi and then get in a vehicle and switch to cellular data. I've only have had short interruptions, which is MUCH better than most tools I've used.

Electron, heavy disk IO, many failed http requests to skype domains, no suitable historical search tool

As long as companies keep paying for it, the signal given is “keep going like this”. CIOs’ fault.

One reason may be that Teams is an Electron app.

There's a huge stack of APIs between you and your headphones.

I like Teams. Works fine on my Mac.

Just give me xmpp so I don't have to deal with your shitty chat client Microsoft.

This entire comment thread is a goldmine for any PM working on the Teams product!

Because it's built according to how Microsoft is organized and how they work.

Leonard's law: Software will be as bad as it's users can tolerate.

Time to look for a new employer who values your time and productivity.

by now I just pray it doesn't crash. but it just started crashing for me, in some channel where a lot of integration posting emails from alerts. works ok on desktop, crashes in ios constantly

it's a strategic move against Slack etc.

Quick dirty copy of Slack, bundle it ("for free") with the Office which people already pay for. Adjust the bundle price few months later...

It's hot garbage. The question is, why are you using garbage?

I just don't get why they won't give me push to talk.

My personal take is, that teams is bloated, so you end up buying a higher spec pc. My guesstimate falls on the surface line (as i have a surfacebook myself) and suddenly, with 16gb of ram everything is not -so bad- again :D

This is all I should need to say: "full screen".

I don't really encounter any issues with it on MacOS.

Im more wondering why core functionality keeps degrading.

Because it’s Microsoft, look at Skype, full of pain..

I dont mind teams for calls, i despise it for text chat

Teams works fine for me, it has never crashed on me.

Works fine for me.

Or fund one hundred Donnie Darko movies.

You didnt need the word Teams in the title.

it doesn't have to be good. it just has to be better than hipchat and webex

I miss slack at work

msft is going away from electron and will now use react native

Most things made by Microsoft are horrific. Just look at Azure.

It's because they have a bad culture and developers who could never care about their capitalist hell products.

Once your company is stuck into a contract with them it's almost impossible to change, so why do they care about fixing anything.

Because they have no boring Enterprise competitor. Why invest in something you don’t have to compete on because you know the competitor will always be better, but your price is what eats their marketshare.

They compete on price with companies that don’t give a shit about employees. Which is most.

Related question, why are Google products so good, relative to Microsoft?

Microsoft

Microsoft wants people to RTO /s

Hey, its Microsoft. Expect quality?

Corporate America is the problem.

is it?

I was applying for a job at a wealthy gaming corp. However, they wouldn't invest in a smoother video-calling software like Zoom, as they just used Teams bundled in their existing Office license.

I got late to a meeting because Teams would crash. When I opened Teams a few minutes before the call, my laptop froze. I thought my laptop performance would improve once enough memory has been allocated to Teams, but it never recovered from the freeze. I had to reboot and start Teams. It finally connected a few minutes after the proposed start time. The HR staff were in a bitter tone by then.

I couldn't get the job. I wish Microsoft would compensate me for a loss caused by their product. They shouldn't be allowed to ship sloppy software under their massive userbase and Microsoft brand (a supposed promise of quality).

It seems to be mainly the work of barely-passing programmers on a platform (the web-app-everything) that strongly popularises form over function, quantity over quality, and from a company that increasingly prioritises (controversial opinion) DEI over competence.

That said, MS has not always been like this; those who remember MSN Messenger, and perhaps even Skype for Business, may realise that despite all the various problems they had, they still seem much better than what Teams is today. Hence it's definitely a degradation.

If I had the time and strong need, I'd try to write a native client for it, but apaprently it's very close to Skype (the MS version, not the original one) for which several 3rd-party clients exist, so the effort there might not be so much. They've even documented at least some of the APIs, e.g.: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/chatmessage-post

Simply put, Microsoft has existed for 30 years with nothing but disdain for their customers and it has never once hurt them. So why stop now? Microsoft exists because of weak minded people who choose it because it's the front runner and are scared that choosing anything else may make them responsible for a choice they have made(same vein as no one ever got fired for choosing IBM, until that wasn't true anymore).

In this sense I think there is almost a stockholm syndrome element where the worse it is, the more people trapped in it feel that that's what makes it good and enterprisey. If it wasn't the only choice why would any put up with it otherwise?

I'm sure in 2043 they'll finally muster up the engineering resources to get copy/paste working in Teams though, for the last 10 customers on Trillion dollar a year enterprise maintenance contracts.