Which is fine if your chat UI doesn’t totally suck for 99.9% of the other use cases. I’d readily take the additional pain of switching applications if it means I don’t have to deal with Teams for chat.

Also all video conferencing and chat applications support sharing files. This isn’t some unheard of feature that Microsoft have pioneered. It’s been possible since the BBS days. It’s possible in XMPP and IRC. It’s possible in every other commercial service I’ve used. And I happen to think Teams does it the worst out of everyone of them because of the weird UI decisions and Sharepoint integration. Compare Slack to Teams and you see what I mean. Files are in lined in Slack and it’s easy to preview and work with them. It’s a pain in the arse in Teams. Slack also has all the other features of Teams that you’re boasting about. And Slack isn’t even perfect itself yet it still runs circulars around Teams in terms of usability.

Literally the only thing Teams gets right is the way of marking the confidentiality of shared content. But that doesn’t justify the mess Microsoft have made of Teams UI.

I’m not one of these FOSS evangelists who throws their toys out of the pram if we don’t use IRC. But Teams UI is really just a clusterfuck of bad design decisions. It’s easily the worst designed solution out there. Except maybe WebEx - which is a pretty fucking low bar, scraping the barrel really.

Microsoft know they automatically win the enterprise because of AD and Office integration. So they don’t need to compete on quality. They just need to be present.

You’re complaining a lot about the UI which is perfectly usable. The mobile app is especially nice. I can carry a meeting from my phone to my desktop without skipping a beat. They are constantly adding features and polishing, but already meetings with hundreds of people it handles no sweat. Yes the app is relatively new compared to slack but improving quickly, for example the last update - https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-blog/...

> You’re complaining a lot about the UI which is perfectly usable.

Usable is in the eye of the beholder.

Usable as in "I can get a video call going and can send chat messages and files": true.

Usable as in "Easy to use, frustration-free to use, easy to discover functionality": false.

It's an incredible slow application for chat. I don't particularly care if it's just bad programming or an overuse of animations, but it shouldn't feel slow on a beefy computer. Mobile is even worse on a midrange android.

No easy way to quote or forward messages, the stupid distinction between teams channels that have threaded messaging and chat that doesn't, intermittent problems loading images; I could go on for hours.

“Usable” isn’t acceptable when every other solution is intuitive. I don’t just want something “usable”, after 30 years of research in GUI design I expect something better than just usable from one of the largest software developers in the world.

And this is why myself and others keep saying Teams is garbage. Why settle for something that is only just barely usable when there are a dozen other solutions on the market that are highly intuitive.

I’ve lost count of the number of textual messages I’ve missed in Teams because of the appalling way groups are handled. Or the number of lost conversations because video chat conversations are blended into private 1:1 chats. It’s a fucking mess of an interface. Literally everyone else does it better.

> The mobile app is especially nice.

I couldn’t give a crap about how nice the mobile app is when 99.99% of the time I’m chatting and running meetings from my laptop. I want MS to produce a 1st class productivity tool, not TikTok.

> They are constantly adding features

I don’t want new features. As I mentioned at the start, Teams already has too many features. I just want the core user experience not to suck.

> but already meetings with hundreds of people it handles no sweat

Yet text chat between people sucks and I (like 99% of Teams user base) spend more time messaging people than we do in video conferences for 500+ people.

Your shilling here really does demonstrate just how much Microsoft have swung and missed imo. Both you and Microsoft have completely lost touch with the kind of usage that most people actually need Teams to be good at. I mean yeah, some of the features you’ve described are handy in niche situations but if the average use case is appealing (and it really is in Teams) then you find yourself lusting after other solutions most of the time.

Case in point: At my company I literally pay for Slack despite also having Teams around just because Teams sucks so badly for anything non-video. I guess we could use IRC for free but Slack has better support for in lining files (better than Teams too), better support for Markdown (better than teams too), better search in chats than Teams, better ways of organising conversations. And it’s a thousand times easier to read conversations too. It’s just better in every way for messaging. And with huddle support, it’s also not better than Teams for quick voice chats too.

And if I had to drop Slack then I’d switch to Discord, IRC, XMPP or literal anything before being stuck with Teams for all our non-video communication.

You call me a shill and then say you’d switch to IRC over teams. IRC has no features compared to teams - screen sharing, voice/video, threaded discussion, calendars, a mobile client with all these features, etc..

This implies you don’t really care about capability at all. You have some beef with Microsoft where you’d rather have nothing than something to avoid using a product you have a irrational bias against.

> You call me a shill

No, I said you were shilling. I don’t think you’re a shill but your posts are definitely shilling the product

> and then say you’d switch to IRC over teams.

For text chat. Yes. I also said that was an extreme case however IRC is still more intuitive than Teams for text chat.

> IRC has no features compared to teams - screen sharing, voice/video, threaded discussion, calendars, a mobile client with all these features, etc..

Have you even read a single bloody thing I’ve posted? How many times have I said I don’t give a crap about mobile support because 99% of my usage is on a laptop? How many times have I said that Teams suffers from having too many features rather than doing one thing well.

It’s like talking to a brick wall…

Also I did say IRC specifically for text chat.

> This implies you don’t really care about capability at all

You’re conflating comparability with feature bloat.

I’m all for comparability as long as it doesn’t harm usability. But comparability can be in the form of supporting 3rd party API hooks - it doesn’t have to mean bundling every feature into a confused user interface.

This is where the UNIX philosophy comes in: everything in UNIX is compatible with each other but each individual program is designed to do only one thing and do it well.

Now I’m not saying we should have separate video conferencing, calendars, text chat, etc. However in the case of Teams it suffers from trying to do everything. It’s the “Jack of all trades, master if none”.

So naturally I will use a program that specialises in a specific area well if it improves my productivity. For me using a better text chat solution improves my and my teams productivity vs using MS Teams for everything.

> You have some beef with Microsoft where you’d rather have nothing than something to avoid using a product you have a irrational bias against.

Enough with the name calling. There’s no need. Especially when the issue here is your own reading comprehension.

I’ve given clear reasons why I don’t like Teams. You obviously disagree, which is fine. But at least read my comments before replying with your ridiculous bullshit. “Ridiculous” because you’re consistently citing examples of stuff I’ve already discussed as not a requirement in literally the previous post. Which you’d know if you’d bothered to read my entire posts properly.