Because Microsoft owned Skype at the beginning of the pandemic, had 100% mindshare, a practically genericized trademark, and an install base of a gazillion users, and yet still managed to somehow fumble the ball to Zoom.

Because life is suffering.

• it gave them an excuse to kill Skype
• they weren’t willing to let Zoom hog the spotlight

Teams and Teams Calling exist because it way past time for hardphones to disappear.

Any organization that does not fully embrace remote employees are stuck in the fucking 1980s.

All collaboration software has issues. Women is wonky as hell, Zooms has just as many issues as Teams and Teams is just as buggy as Webex…

Seriously, teams is one of the worst apps I have to use on a regular basis. It’s insanely buggy, especially if you are a freelancer working in multiple teams.

• parts of the app don’t load correctly
• parts of the app don‘t support touch very well
• you get useless notifications, i.e. for a thread you have open or an action you caused yourself but completely miss others
• the UI has SO MANY flaws like giving people different colored placeholder avatars in different parts of the app which made me assign tasks to the wrong person a few times
• it needs its own audio driver on macOS which is probably invasive and does a shit job with airpods

There’s probably more I can’t think of right now but teams actively kills my productivity and I dread having to open it. I don’t understand how businesses can rely on this so heavily and I‘m wondering how incredibly incompetent the team developing it at Microsoft can be.

Because they don’t have to. This quarterly report is good! Copilot use is up (because it was shoved into yet another app) and costs are down (because they layed even more people off). Businesses are locked in for the near future, so core sales remain high.

It doesn’t matter desktop Linux use drastically increased. That doesn’t affect this quarter. This quarter is all about cutting costs and pushing AI. If there is a problem in a few quarters, it doesn’t matter. You sold your stocks by then.

I love MS Teams.

Long live MS Teams.

There is no market Microsoft won’t half-ass* their way into.

* Purely as an expression. Teams is nowhere near usable enough to give it that much credit.

I have to use Teams for work but I’m on Linux so I just use the web app in Firefox. Other then minor, irritating UI decisions (WTF is the ‘Activity’ tab for?) I don’t have any issues. Video calls work fine, screen sharing works, notifications work. When something breaks I just reload the page. If people have so many issues maybe try using the web app?

It’s quite literally the worst chat app I ever had to use. It can’t even handle fucking copy+paste without messing up formatting every single time. Constantly crashes, can’t handle notifications across devices, doesn’t work properly with even “teams certified” headsets, uses 3 times more resources than any comparable app … it’s fucking bloatware with a chat function.

Fuck Teams and everyone that made it. I hope the get cancer.

My old school had to switch to Microsoft Teams (from Google Classroom) and the head of ICT told everyone that he thought that Teams website was ridiculously slow, the app moreso, but it was necessary as part of a transition from Google’s suite (Docs, Slides, Drive, Classroom) to Microsoft’s (Word, PowerPoint, OneDrive, Teams)

Pretty much everybody complained about the switch to Teams since it was really slow, sometimes taking several minutes to load the app on older computers (e.g. school computers). I assume they switched to all-Microsoft to reduce costs (I remember being told that, since they were paying for both Office 365 and Google Cloud before), and they mentioned other reasons too (e.g. students overseas in mainland China can’t access Google) but I forgot most of them.

why/how do these guys design a product this way

Its just one of many business applications that MSFT provides as you get vendor locked into the Windows platform.

Technically it was the successor to skype for business, and skype itself was its own product that was acquired by MSFT.

It doesn’t matter how crappy it is because MSFT can sell it to you as part of a complete package with stuff like Azure, M365, etc, and you would find it annoying to pay extra for a better platform like Slack.

Does it mean Microsoft can keep running any app which necessarily doesn’t appear on my task manager?

iirc it shouldn’t be hidden in task manager but it might be easier to use process explorer from sysinternals: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/process-explorer

Haven’t touched hot garbage windows in a long time so I don’t remember if teams has a non obvious process that runs in the background.

Shh… They’ll hear you. Stop using antichrist software.

A long, long time ago, there was an online messaging tool called ICQ. You didnt even have callsigns in it, you had a randomly generated number you shared with your friends. You chatted. Had fun. Life was good.

Then there was AOL instant messenger. It largely replaced ICQ in the US. It added emoticons.

Then there was MSN Messenger. It tied into the MSN gaming zone(Before MS killed it to make Xbox Live. You could play games with your friends through it. You could do rudimentary video chats.

Then you had Skype(pre-MS. Better video, not tied to MS).

MS makes MSN Messenger into Lynx and adds it to office. Its not good.

Then you had Google Hangouts. Better chat, fun features, tied to your google account.

Then you had MS owned Skype as Skype for Business. Largely replaces Hangouts because Google enshittifies everything, not because it is good.

You also have former Vancouver startup Slack. Its fantastic. Until Salesforce buys it.

Now we have the bastard officespring of Skype for Business: MS Teams.