Is it me or are there a lot of articles indirectly promoting Microsoft on HN these days?
It's getting harder and harder to tell if those are genuine news or a PR firm at work, but "MS breaks a records in meeting minutes" feels even more like advertising than "Azur is getting 10 times more traffic".
If this is advertising, is there a way to prevent them from staying on the front page?
Look for trends in the articles posted by the person who posted it. My guess is some people just post anything Apple/Microsoft/Amazon/Google/Facebook related.
I don't think Microsoft needs promotion currently, atleast during these times. Their main revenue is from Enterprise market and during such slow growth, no Enterprise shifts to newer platform over the night. I am just saying, we shouldn't be negative about everything, just because it's Microsoft.
It's not just Microsoft, I've seen similar articles from other telework apps (Zoom, Slack, etc) and from internet providers talking about the increased activity they are seeing. I think it just comes with out current situation.
I doubt anyone's being paid by MS here, but MS puts out blog posts and will release numbers that news publications can write easy, free articles based on.
My anecdote: I work for a F100 company that's in the midst of a (long) transition to Office 365. In a mid-level engineering staff meeting 2 days ago where we spent 20 minutes discussing the advantages of Teams over Skype for Business, and what could be done to accelerate our transition. All driven by WFH - Office 365 applications don't require a VPN connection in our org, while Outlook/Skype does.
Some companies (like today’s Microsoft, apparently) have PR arms that are actually good at their jobs—writing articles that are, independent of their ability to advertise their company, actually intellectually gratifying in some way.
People who post things to HN, independent of being shills for any given company, like to post intellectually gratifying things. Sometimes those things happen to also be PR pieces. I don’t think the people who post these things really think about them as being PR pieces; or, if they do, they post them despite that, because in the balance, the piece still works out to be worth reading (in their opinion) even after giving it a demerit for being PR.
I’m not denying that there are shills on HN, mind you. I’m sure there are many of them. But I would say that even those shills probably have some sort of “standards”—only posting the PR pieces available to them if they think they’ll do well here (which means, only posting the pieces someone else who wasn’t a shill would have posted anyway.) To do otherwise might get them banned as spammers (which I do believe does happen—mods want to chime in on that?)
And then we still have the filter of some amount of upvoting being required to get things to the front page, plus (I assume) some sort of behind-the-scenes voting-ring detection. So the upvote signal is likely to express genuine community interest, and therefore to signal that the piece does have value independent of its PR-power.
Good PR is not doing the post yourself, but creating a post that is passable enough to be posted by a regular user on your behalf.
Just because it is well done does not mean it has good value as news.
Indeed, even if it's an ok read, it's giving a lot of attention to a company just because it has the money to attract said attention, no matter the quality of their service. Since the reader's time and energy is limited, it's taking the place of another possible read.
In the same way, by allowing this to happen, this lets a company create a fantastic image of itself, that is independent from it's real quality, just because it has the budget to do it. Cumulatively, this can, after years, end up rewriting history, and lead even educated people to make altered judgements and decisions in the future.
I'm not saying that as an anti-microsoft attack, I dislike the concept of such powerful PR in general, MS is just here a potential example for this.
As an HN reader, I wish there would be a policy about this. But I have no idea what it would look like, or how one could enforce it.
So maybe I'm just making a lot of noise for nothing.
HN has a demographic. If you're trying to influence the technocratic types you target this place, too.
Hell, HN is the organ of a startup incubator -- I'd argue that it exists to explicitly flog certain technical firms. That other companies are able to get their marketing teams on here too is may be a bug or a feature.
I know in my company Webex is slowly being replaced by MS Teams. From my experience, neither is great, but they mostly just work, which helps since our team has a big spread when it comes to basic computer skills. Even them, why MS Teams? I don't see any real advantage between the two.
It does better than most with meetings, especially outlook integration. Beyond this, outlook calendar in teams... along with a better interface for documents/files (sharepoint on the backend, but mostly don't need to know) .. those same files can be accessed via OneDrive .. not to mention the wiki and other extension (devops feeds into channels).
There are bits and pieces better in other apps, but it does all of these things good enough, and as a whole, I find it better as a collaboration suite.
My company also uses both. I've never been able to figure out how to properly use webex. Teams basically makes sense to me. Part of the problem is that I need to use separate credentials to launch webex, and I never seem to know what those are. Sometimes I can convince a webex power user to invite me to something, but then I need to install a downloaded executable each time. Teams just makes more sense to me.
Our IT department is pushing Teams very heavily, due to the integration with Outlook etc. But one important feature that seems to be missing is for people to view a shared presentation full-screen, or even better on a second monitor. Perhaps I'm just too stupid to find the option.
Probably they found the title an interesting fact on its own, with the article itself being kind of vestigial.
I’m guessing people are hoping there’ll be interesting tangential discussion in the comments re: the infrastructural challenges imposed on IT departments (and especially cloud vendors) due to WFH. People expecting the title to have high “comment potential” seems to be a theme where “trivial” things being upvoted are concerned.
For what it's worth, I like MS Teams... I'm not even a big Windows guy at this point... most of my dev at least targets linux, and most of my time is in VS Code with an ssh or wsl remote session. I use Linux directly, but not as much this past few weeks as a couple projects I'm on don't work in Linux.
I think that Teams is better than most at most of what it does... That's kind of hard to quantify, but like most things from MS Office, it's not that it's the best at any given one thing.. it's that it does many things good enough and things the competition doesn't.
Teams is however _weird_ when it comes to files. Apparently a Teams team has a shadow sharepoint site behind it. The attachments from teams are stored there. However, when I want to embed an Excel sheet from the _actual_ Sharepoint site of my team, I have no way to do that.
That I cannot speak to... I've only really used it either via teams and/or web ui and/or dropbox...
What I do hate is that I can dump the wiki via onedrive, it's a goofy format, rather than simple markdown, and you can't update via onedrive (it doesn't go back to the wiki).
Again, I don't think it's the best at anything... just a pretty good combination of things.
It's not meant to be a "shadow" SharePoint site from what I gather, it is meant to be the same O365 SharePoint site as every thing else for the Team. My impression is that it may be really easy for O365 admins to misconfigure, though, especially in (likely) scenarios of migrating (or avoiding migrating) on-premises SharePoint sites to O365.
Microsoft products are sometimes loved by IT departments because they have lots of configuration options; Microsoft is just really bad about leaving tons of footguns lying around in those configuration options, and IT departments apparently love footguns.
Some tangential conversations from this otherwise-boring lede:
• Has any Slack-based org tried actually using Slack’s now-integrated video calling for your meetings?
• Has anyone tried using Discord for meetings? It seems to have the required infrastructure...
• Is anyone here at an org that’s skipping integrated video chat, where they’re just doing regular company-PBX audio-only conference-call dial-in? (I’ve always thought there’d be nothing lost by just emailing everyone a link to a presentation, and then looking at it together over a conference-call via “now turn to page 3”-like instructions. Maybe together with a freely-editable Google Doc that serves as a “whiteboard” for the people in the conversation.)
• Is anyone here having synchronous meetings as regular group-chat text exchanges, where everyone is supposed to “synchronously” attend? (I’ve always felt like this would be the best approach for enabling accessibility to differently-abled employees; and, coincidentally, would enable machine-searchability later without anyone needing to transcribe anything.)
> Has any Slack-based org tried actually using Slack for your meetings?
Most of my work's teams use slack for their daily calls. Seems OK in testing with up to 10 people. Anything bigger usually moves to GoToMeeting.
> Has anyone tried Discord for meetings?
I use Discord for my team, since it allows you drop in & out of voice chat during the day so peeps can float in & out of chat as they go to other meetings/lunch etc. Lot more convenient than doing a call, and results in the entire team closely collaborating for most of the day.
The voice chat latency & screen sharing quality is also equal or better to other options due to Discord's gaming-focused optimisations.
I'd note that it isn't really suitable for the wider business as mass-meetings with webcams would require a manually created, private DM group (rather than just a an invite link as with zoom/goto).
I've been using Discord for meeting prior to the 'shelter in place' and have been trying to continue to use it afterwards. There's been a markedly degradation of it in the last 2 weeks. We've gone from nearly flawless voice/video to constant issues of Person A can't hear Person B, let's switch servers to see if it improves, etc...
That's the whole problem with Teams, because they get to ride O365's coattails they don't really /try/. The fact it is better than Skype for Business is more an indictment of how bad S4B was, not an actual defense of Teams as a stand-alone product/app.
Let's look at the popular things they haven't done:
- Show video for all people in Video meeting: Created 2016. 37K votes. "In the backlog."
- Multi-window for chats and more: Created 2016. 17K votes. "Internal testing."
- Compact mode: Created 2016. 16K votes. "Not even in the backlog, we cannot figure it out" (in spite of multiple third party CSS hacks that accomplish it convincingly).
- Move a project (channel) from one team to another: Created 2016. 15K votes. "In the backlog."
But don't take my word for it, review what they have actually accomplished from their own UserVoice here:
But it is popular because it is free and bundled with something successful, so the Teams team can sit around for four years with little to show for it.
When will Teams actually be good when measured against the market rather than the [worse] thing it replaced?
My problem with it is that Teams fails to do what Skype/Lync did do well, while trying to mimic slack and not achieving that very well either.
For instance you can't break out individual chat windows to take up less space. Dial-in numbers for meetings aren't there by default either, you need individual licenses - which is probably why it's 'free'.
32 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 68.8 ms ] threadIt's getting harder and harder to tell if those are genuine news or a PR firm at work, but "MS breaks a records in meeting minutes" feels even more like advertising than "Azur is getting 10 times more traffic".
If this is advertising, is there a way to prevent them from staying on the front page?
People who post things to HN, independent of being shills for any given company, like to post intellectually gratifying things. Sometimes those things happen to also be PR pieces. I don’t think the people who post these things really think about them as being PR pieces; or, if they do, they post them despite that, because in the balance, the piece still works out to be worth reading (in their opinion) even after giving it a demerit for being PR.
I’m not denying that there are shills on HN, mind you. I’m sure there are many of them. But I would say that even those shills probably have some sort of “standards”—only posting the PR pieces available to them if they think they’ll do well here (which means, only posting the pieces someone else who wasn’t a shill would have posted anyway.) To do otherwise might get them banned as spammers (which I do believe does happen—mods want to chime in on that?)
And then we still have the filter of some amount of upvoting being required to get things to the front page, plus (I assume) some sort of behind-the-scenes voting-ring detection. So the upvote signal is likely to express genuine community interest, and therefore to signal that the piece does have value independent of its PR-power.
Just because it is well done does not mean it has good value as news.
Indeed, even if it's an ok read, it's giving a lot of attention to a company just because it has the money to attract said attention, no matter the quality of their service. Since the reader's time and energy is limited, it's taking the place of another possible read.
In the same way, by allowing this to happen, this lets a company create a fantastic image of itself, that is independent from it's real quality, just because it has the budget to do it. Cumulatively, this can, after years, end up rewriting history, and lead even educated people to make altered judgements and decisions in the future.
I'm not saying that as an anti-microsoft attack, I dislike the concept of such powerful PR in general, MS is just here a potential example for this.
As an HN reader, I wish there would be a policy about this. But I have no idea what it would look like, or how one could enforce it.
So maybe I'm just making a lot of noise for nothing.
From the guidelines: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter."
Hell, HN is the organ of a startup incubator -- I'd argue that it exists to explicitly flog certain technical firms. That other companies are able to get their marketing teams on here too is may be a bug or a feature.
I feel like I'm on a lower end of this with 2h 43m of my time this week, 36m 58s of which were yesterday.
There are bits and pieces better in other apps, but it does all of these things good enough, and as a whole, I find it better as a collaboration suite.
Anybody who upvoted this, why? It feels very weird to be on the front page with 27 votes so far.
I’m guessing people are hoping there’ll be interesting tangential discussion in the comments re: the infrastructural challenges imposed on IT departments (and especially cloud vendors) due to WFH. People expecting the title to have high “comment potential” seems to be a theme where “trivial” things being upvoted are concerned.
I think that Teams is better than most at most of what it does... That's kind of hard to quantify, but like most things from MS Office, it's not that it's the best at any given one thing.. it's that it does many things good enough and things the competition doesn't.
What I do hate is that I can dump the wiki via onedrive, it's a goofy format, rather than simple markdown, and you can't update via onedrive (it doesn't go back to the wiki).
Again, I don't think it's the best at anything... just a pretty good combination of things.
Microsoft products are sometimes loved by IT departments because they have lots of configuration options; Microsoft is just really bad about leaving tons of footguns lying around in those configuration options, and IT departments apparently love footguns.
• Has any Slack-based org tried actually using Slack’s now-integrated video calling for your meetings?
• Has anyone tried using Discord for meetings? It seems to have the required infrastructure...
• Is anyone here at an org that’s skipping integrated video chat, where they’re just doing regular company-PBX audio-only conference-call dial-in? (I’ve always thought there’d be nothing lost by just emailing everyone a link to a presentation, and then looking at it together over a conference-call via “now turn to page 3”-like instructions. Maybe together with a freely-editable Google Doc that serves as a “whiteboard” for the people in the conversation.)
• Is anyone here having synchronous meetings as regular group-chat text exchanges, where everyone is supposed to “synchronously” attend? (I’ve always felt like this would be the best approach for enabling accessibility to differently-abled employees; and, coincidentally, would enable machine-searchability later without anyone needing to transcribe anything.)
Most of my work's teams use slack for their daily calls. Seems OK in testing with up to 10 people. Anything bigger usually moves to GoToMeeting.
> Has anyone tried Discord for meetings?
I use Discord for my team, since it allows you drop in & out of voice chat during the day so peeps can float in & out of chat as they go to other meetings/lunch etc. Lot more convenient than doing a call, and results in the entire team closely collaborating for most of the day.
The voice chat latency & screen sharing quality is also equal or better to other options due to Discord's gaming-focused optimisations.
I'd note that it isn't really suitable for the wider business as mass-meetings with webcams would require a manually created, private DM group (rather than just a an invite link as with zoom/goto).
That's the whole problem with Teams, because they get to ride O365's coattails they don't really /try/. The fact it is better than Skype for Business is more an indictment of how bad S4B was, not an actual defense of Teams as a stand-alone product/app.
Let's look at the popular things they haven't done:
- Show video for all people in Video meeting: Created 2016. 37K votes. "In the backlog."
- Multi-window for chats and more: Created 2016. 17K votes. "Internal testing."
- Compact mode: Created 2016. 16K votes. "Not even in the backlog, we cannot figure it out" (in spite of multiple third party CSS hacks that accomplish it convincingly).
- Move a project (channel) from one team to another: Created 2016. 15K votes. "In the backlog."
But don't take my word for it, review what they have actually accomplished from their own UserVoice here:
https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public
But it is popular because it is free and bundled with something successful, so the Teams team can sit around for four years with little to show for it.
When will Teams actually be good when measured against the market rather than the [worse] thing it replaced?
I've seen so many UI bugs and weirdness in this software. The only thing that reliably worked so far is calling.
For instance you can't break out individual chat windows to take up less space. Dial-in numbers for meetings aren't there by default either, you need individual licenses - which is probably why it's 'free'.