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.
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.