I've wondered the same thing about Microsoft Teams. Is Teams as horrible as people say, or do they just hate it because it's what they happen to use for video meetings at work? Conversely, I don't hear much hate for zoom.
> Is Teams as horrible as people say, or do they just hate it because it's what they happen to use for video meetings at work?
So, let's sum up my personal gripes (on a Mac):
1. Teams keeps locking up the dGPU for whatever reason randomly after calls, draining the battery and grilling my legs until I figure out that Teams has gone nuts again.
2. Since the macOS Sonoma update and the switch to the "new" Teams client, every time a call comes in, the ringtone glitches out (and I'm not alone in that)
3. There are three different ways of chatting with other people: Meeting chats and direct/group messages (these are summed up under the "chat" tab) and "teams" with "channels". The latter don't produce instant notifications when someone writes there, I guess because Microsoft doesn't want to deal with "I get an instant notification every time someone posts a kitten photo in the off-topic channel" complaints.
4. There is only one uploaded-files repository which means if you have a "screenshot.jpg" sent to someone, and you try to send a different file with the same name in a different chat, it will say "you already uploaded screenshot.jpg, do you want to replace this?". This is fucking bad UX, likely caused by Teams using OneDrive under the hood to share files.
5. The search is slooooow as molasses and damn useless. You have zero chance of ever finding something again, the larger the org the worse the pain.
6. No window/functionality remembers your context when you switch away. Say you click on a notification from a chat because a colleague needs an urgent answer, while you're scrolling in a team thread... you go back, and your scroll position is lost.
Teams is the only reason Chrome (well, Chromium) is installed on my work laptop: it detects Firefox and refuses to function. So does Facetime, incidentally, which I found out more recently for a family thing, and that's why Chromium is also installed on my personal laptop currently.
I assume they're both doing something unfriendly that Firefox disallows on privacy or security grounds.
It says browser not supported, must use Edge or Chrome. (Pretty sure it didn't even say Safari, but I assume Facetime must have.)
That's why it's annoying really, that it isn't just not functional (or some specific feature doesn't work) unless you disable some built-in default safeguard say, it just completely refuses if it identities your browser is Firefox. Which I'm pretty sure is nonsense. Well, Jitsi, Slack, Discord, Zoom don't have a problem implementing chat & video conferencing in FF.
We switched from Slack to Teams several years ago because we were all-in on Office 365 products. Everyone hated the change, but with stuck with it. It was slow, crashed a lot, search was abysmal and you'd have to be a masochist to use it willingly....
But they pushed out a new version recently. Now you've got Teams Classic and Teams NEW (work or school)... at least on the Mac.
It's sooo much better. Way more stable. Search is a delight (relatively speaking). We get far fewer complaints now.
Worth mentioning: We only use the "Chat" aspect, we don't use the "Teams" aspect. If we want to discuss a project, we just spin up a new chat with relevant parties and rename the channel to the project. Works great. We could never get "buy in" on the Teams aspect, nor threaded discussions. The main reasoning was having to monitor two tabs in the product. Everyone just wanted to stay on the Chat tab, so we made it work.
> If we want to discuss a project, we just spin up a new chat with relevant parties
This part I struggle with, and maybe we're doing it wrong, but to me as a PM, this way is painful.
Search helps. But then I have to remember, "Was discussion about X in the chat with people A + B + C, or was it in A + B + D's chat, or B + D's chat, or..."
We also have significant challenges with knowledge silos (not intentional, and more about a cadre of new devs being brought on) that (not the only solution) I feel that pushing conversations to specific teams when appropriate might help, improving visibility.
The worst thing that I've found with teams is the latency in a video call is _just slightly_ too high (and noticeably higher than Google meet and zoom). I find this latency to be absolutely critical in keeping the flow of conversation and preventing people from accidentally talking over each other. After seeing a forced switch to teams when the whole company was WFH, it was extremely obvious the detrimental impact it had on every meeting. It's the most basic technical aspect of the product, it doesn't matter how great the rest is if you don't nail it. That's why I hate teams.
Not silly at all cause I do the same. I wonder if it’s a Mac issue displaying modals or a teams thing. I have the same issue with slack messages so I always assume it’s a Mac problem.
Teams is nice enough when it works, but it tend to break far more than any other chat app I used. Stuff like getting the call notification (won't work on Firefox, I have to launch Chrome even though I can join a meeting on Firefox). The most annoying is that sometime it just doesn't display anything. Like no notification on my phone, or the lastest message will sometime not appear on a device.
Teams also have some very nice things going for it with it's Office 365 integration, but as a chat app it's just way more buggy than it should.
Despise is not the word I'd use either. But it's this feeling that I have with so many Microsoft's products: Mediocrity.
Something like slack really feels good and intuitive to use. It had to be to make it on its own from nothing. Most alternatives for MS products and services are much better, simply because they have to be, they don't have the installed base to coast on.
With teams it feels like it's mainly chosen because it comes with O365 subscriptions for free anyway and it's not bad enough to justify paying separately for a better product. In fact most Microsoft products have this strong feeling about them. The same with Windows, Office, Yammer, Sharepoint, Edge.. It's not great experiences for the end users, though for the IT guys it's all pretty handy because of the integration. It's that feeling of missed opportunity, that it could actually have been great if someone had cared.
I think part of this is the failure of MS leadership to set a customer-centric vision. There seems to be a lot of infighting within business units. For example, they started out ok with Edge (even though it was just a chrome ripoff) but then some low-level exec had to go and enshittify it with coupon ads and loan schemes to inflate their own department's KPIs, but totally undermining the product and company as a whole. This is really something that a company with a strong vision wouldn't permit.
I, and the rest of our dev team use Linux, and found Teams ok when there was a stand-alone client for it, but the browser-based stuff they forced on us a year or so ago was horrible. The notifications were particularly atrocious, to the point of making the whole thing unusable.
The .deb of the stand-alone package disappeared, so it seemed we were stuck with the pain of the browser-based stuff. Then I remembered archive.org and found the .deb. If anyone else is in a similar situation, it's at https://web.archive.org/web/20221130115842/https://packages....
Thanks, archive.org
