Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?
It's buggy, and it crashes more often than any other app I use. God forbid you try to change the audio device from speakers to headphones in the middle of a call. And then if you try to just call back on your phone, and they want to share their screen, and you go back to your PC and try to join the call from your PC so you can see the screenshare (it's not going to work).
Seriously, with all the money and resources thrown at this company and this app, you'd think it'd be a little more stable, faster, and reliable. I am literally forced to use this app at work...
813 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 193 ms ] threadI support your need to vent, it's undisputably a magnificently huge pile of stinky garbage. Given the amount of resources poured in, it'd be hard to do worse.
(Okay, they also added a tiny bit of Markdown-based text formatting. Because why not use the least intuitive, most complicated possible solution, and then not document half of it.)
In this sense I think there is almost a stockholm syndrome element where the worse it is, the more people trapped in it feel that that's what makes it good and enterprisey. If it wasn't the only choice why would any put up with it otherwise?
I'm sure in 2043 they'll finally muster up the engineering resources to get copy/paste working in Teams though, for the last 10 customers on Trillion dollar a year enterprise maintenance contracts.
JPL isn't a large company.
Java remains a fluke, successful in spite of Oracle.
The Oracle DB internal team culture is just plain depressing. Stuck 30 years in the past in terms of development practices, little or no innovation is allowed. Function names are limited to four or five characters, and the source control is literally from the nineties. Maybe that's the secret to success: Trap enough H1Bs and use the whip.
I suppose it all depends on how you define "good quality". Across many dimensions, Oracle is somehow better than average.
Maybe it's because, for all it's faults, Oracle does always prioritize security what "quality", whatever management decides that means.
Sure beats the Google strategy of constantly murdering anything that isn't Gmail or Search. Is this even a real strategy, or just the lack of one?
I hate Oracle culture and their licensing as much as the next person and will avoid their product and services as much as possible, but Oracle database is one of the most scalable and stable database products around.
1. Neutralize the threat from Slack (AKA Salesforce)
2. Give Enterprise sales teams a checklist item
3. Don't spend a dime more than necessary on software development
4. Integrate with the rest of the MS enterprise product line
On top of those goals, the internal sponsors of Teams have to survive the savage internal politics at Microsoft, so the product is designed to threaten no important factions.
Their products targeted to other programmers seem to be nicer to work with. E.g. VS Code, C#, SQL Server. The products aimed at the ‘knowledge workers’, like Teams, and SharePoint are garbage.
Definitely wrong, I have worked there with a few of the best developers and designers, the problem is not with the development side
> My guess would be that someone believes they need to have every feature from slack, zoom, WebEx, meet etc, and also integrate tightly with every Skype/SharePoint/OneNote feature, and also run on at least four platforms.
This is probably the main reason, probably not just with Teams but the whole Office suite
> But they aren't willing to give people time to do this.
If you refer to the above you'll see that there is never enough time to do that, it's too bloated and sometimes with contradicting requirements. If you then add testing it is probably impossible to come up with a good enough product.
Disclaimer- I still think Teams is an OK product and I use it daily
So you get a pile of conflicting goals.
Generally to resolve this you need to demand a high level of user competency. Think emacs; does everything, things are mutually exclusive, competency is required.
The teams approach though is to try to satisfy this without requiring any competency. It's probably not doable
In fact, I believe Microsoft will replace the desktop client with a web app shell.
You can try it out today;
1. Install the Microsoft Edge Web browser on Mac or Windows 2. Log into https://teams.microsoft.com 3. Click … > Apps > Install this site as an app 4. Enjoy!
I believe all application logic is moving to .net with the visible elements being HTML & CSS, but do not remember where I read it, so take it with a grain of salt.
if there was mention of react native, I do not remember it, but I gloss right over mentions of most web frameworks, so it may play a role.
It's probably worth me mentioning that I'm building a Teams client using Typescript and Tauri! https://opercom.co.uk
https://github.com/ItzLevvie/MicrosoftTeams-msinternal/tree/...
Microsoft brutalised Slack with a C grade app that was “bundled for free”. For 80% of people, teams is just fine.
Admittedly, Teams uses a lot more RAM, but I have a lot of RAM. I would never know this unless I checked it.
It's borderline unusable on Linux, and I've reverted to using it on my android tablet where it is only marginally better and still has issues constantly with audio, as well as crashing when starting up, or "updating" and somehow running two simultaneous instances of the app with only one visible. Also the notifications for when someone calls has never once worked on the tablet, while simultaneously I'll get nonstop repeating notifications for meeting chat messages from a week ago.
I'm sure for many people it works just fine, but for many others that aren't exactly on the Microsoft happy path, it's a nightmare.
Meanwhile I bought a personal computer for myself with none of my work stuff on it, and I got one with 4GB of RAM because for me that's plenty.
Younger people have only ever used bloated laggy stuff like teams and don't know any better.
I miss the days of just having a dedicated desk phone - it rings, you answer, and talk instantly.
Teams in comparison pops up a call dialogue box, have to navigate the mouse to answer (because the answer hotkey doesn't work most of the time), wait for it to connect, fuck around fixing your audio devices which have changed for some reason, then finally get to start talking.
Yes teams is better if you are moving around a lot, but if you just work from home or office in a fixed location its a regression in usability.
I don't really. It tied me to my desk. Now my extension is wherever I want to work, not just at my desk. Its on my cell phone, its on my work laptop, its wherever I am.
Loads of desk phones didn't have any Bluetooth support so using a headset meant getting a probably expensive maybe proprietary thing with EHS support (or a mechanical handset lifter!!!).
When I want to call someone about an email they sent me, I just click the Call button and it connects me. I don't have to then think about "what was their extension?", context change to an entirely different physical device, and then dial that extension. And then if that call connected on Teams, I'm ready to share video or have the chat pulled up to easily send them additional context right away. With a desk phone, we'd have to context change to yet another platform to then share a screen.
I do get some nostalgia for desk phones. I did our office's deployment of SIP phones and continued to be the manager of the PBX until our migration to Teams. Working on that phone hardware was honestly fun and interesting. But looking at my experience today, having it on my work machine and on my cell phone is just better.
FWIW, my Thinkpad has a call answer and decline/hangup keys on the function row which works with Teams. Makes it pretty easy. But I still don't necessarily have a hard time answering a call with the keyboard/mouse when I'm not in front of my laptop keyboard.
I had an pre-voip Avaya phone with 24 speed dials - for each contact it had a red/green LED next to the speed dial button that showed if they were busy. If it was green you could just press it and call. It had a proper headset port so no ghetto lifter :)
Teams has available status also, but I find its pretty much useless as people either fake their status to avoid being hassled, or its synced to their outlook calendar that has so much junk in it that they show as busy all day.
Roaming around wasn't much of an issue either, I just had forward to cell phone if it wasn't answered after a certain number of rings.
We also had integration with windows so tel: links and dialling from contacts worked as expected.
In the end I've learnt to live with teams, I made a small "chat" script that uses a teams url [0] to open a chat with a person from the command line vs hunting through the awful laggy ui, another AHK script to make a global mute hotkey based on a library I found on github, and another script I wrote to fix the audio device.
[0] https://teams.microsoft.com/l/chat/0/0?users=xxxx
Having more speed dial buttons would have made the desk phone a bit nicer to have. Some people in the office which used the phone a 10 speed dial buttons but a lot of the phones just had four buttons which one showed your cureent status.
Forward to cell is fine but it's only half the full feature of having your extension actually on your phone. You can receive calls, but placing them and having it show up as your office number is trickier. Our VoIP system eventually came out with halfway decent phone apps but it was a bit clunky how it actually worked internally migrating the presence from the desk phone or soft phone to the phone app.
But few things can compare to Zoom's astonishingly cavalier attitude toward security and privacy, and Zoom seems unavoidable in many contexts.
Still not...great. But at least trending in the right direction.
On the other hand, the privacy situation... jesus I've never seen more analytics and cookies in my life than when I inspect my profile page on zoom.us.
Maybe. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32901768
But I've noticed something else about computers and software. You can have two people with similar jobs, similar computers, similar software, etc. One person will have crashes and problems all the time, and the other person, smooth sailing. Nobody knows why. It doesn't matter whether they're IT experts or homemakers. In the words of a former office-mate: "I got a new computer, and spent two days setting it up exactly the way I want it, and yet it still crashes all the time." That person was a very sharp and productive programmer, yet he was swearing at his computer almost continually.
So it depends on which direction you push the customizations.
People have different annoyances and preferences. Perhaps you are lucky enough to be close to the default where you don't need to change so many things.
While the defaults for other is death by a thousand papercuts...
Imo this is just a result of the chaotic, unreproducible install processes typical for proprietary software and a hesitancy to do root cause analysis on a workstation when you have time pressures to focus on other things.
The deep mystery of 'no one knows why' when it comes to issues is something I've never experienced on a personal Linux machine as an adult. But most of us work on machines where software installers can do whatever they want, we don't control the software update cadence, and our computers are bogged down with all kinds of instrumentation (AV, privilege management, data exfiltration monitoring, etc.) that affects performance and compatibility in complex ways and whose configuration we may have limited capacity to inspect or modify.
The hopeless sense of mystification here is not a fact of computing. It's a function of being alienated from our computing environments. We don't have to work this way, and I wish we didn't. But we largely do.
Which applies to nearly 100% of modern software. (Including Linux distros and a lot of their required software, other than the source bit...)
Of course, someone would debate that with me, but before the Windows NT kernel took over, I had to format to solve problems sometimes. I haven’t had to do that a single time since Windows 7. I ran eight or nine years on one Windows 7 install.
Nevermind the fact I have cross- platform issues (win/OSX/linux/android) with audio and bluetooth devices with teams...
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/Q/quantum-bogodynamics.html
In all seriousness, it probably has to do in large part with gestures broadly global state. Registry, configuration, what else is running on the system, how up to date it is. There are so many possible different settings, parameters, processes doing weird api calls, that it's a combinatoric explosion.
k
There is also an admirable type of person who has lots of tech problems because they’re genuinely pushing limits, but they’re rare.
Odd. I feel that people are sympathetic because everyone knows Teams is weird and cheap.
I can tell you from experience that issues stay well in known boundaries. I can tell which users will have issues and with what, by just looking at their installed applications.
Where things begin to fall off, users that want to be admins, developers that deploy random stuff. Power users in general are the cause of their own problems.
Developers sharp or not don’t always know how to run their own laptop. More often than not they are the cause of their problems.
There are some terrible applications out in the world. Creative cloud I’m looking at you.
Or I found this great application called Figma let me paste raw 500mb pictures & pdfs into it and watch it eat my machine alive.
Laptop & desktop hardware, Apple included, still has a huge randomness factor.
Forcing the square peg into the round hole often results in extra challenges. Sometimes its just easier to use the round peg, even if its not perfectly what you'd like.
I tend to just roll with the defaults and only change settings when I really need to. I tend to experience a good bit less friction than a lot of my coworkers who flip every switch into something other than the default.
Polish and use-ability don't matter when they can sell anything if it has XYZ feature.
If you look at the teams roadmap it's more and more features.
What a joke.
I don't know where I learned this eldritch incantation--it certainly wasn't in the documentation--but it works.
It's the spawn of an unholy union between Markdown and WYSIWYG. Triple backticks is the opening (and closing) sequence of characters used to denote multiline snippets of 'preformatted text' or code in Markdown.
Pressing enter 5 times is what happens because Microsoft insists on preventing you from writing actual Markdown, even as an option.
Single backticks works (and you can use a second backtick to close 'exit' that formatting mode), but delightfully, it only works if you're typing, and not if you copy and paste.
In the editor it inserted half a page of blank lines for no reason.
Then it sent the snippet with an ENORMOUS bold heading, also for no reason.
Then the 4-line script was truncated to 3 lines so as to confuse the person receiving it.
Fantastic quality.
This works for them because it focuses product cycles on releasing what "matters" to the customer, but it ends up cutting craft and quality. This makes their products poor to use, but is also what drives revenue into their hands.
They don't really need to be the best or the fastest. They just have to have decent products that aren't the worst (I prefer Teams over Webex), and glom those products together into an affordable package.
For better or worse, Microsoft product suites are like the Olive Garden of the product world.
edit: whoa, got more comments than I thought. For disclosure, I did a brief stint as a PM intern there way back in the day. Wanted to join as a UX designer intern, but got shoe-horned into the PM role
At least, that's my hypothesis. It's the preinstalled browser debacle all over again.
Still better than teams though. (With the caveat that it's only useable on Chrome).
Teams hasn't been crashy, is responsive, doesn't eat memory, etc. At this point I personally cannot point to why there is so much hate for Teams. Either that or my organisation is doing something well to make it work well.
The chat is fucking useless though. We use Slack for that.
Zoom is a dumpster fire.
While some features like versioning and sharing and mail integration vary, nearly all of the 'big' ones do the same thing (OneDrive, iCloud, Google Drive, Dropbox, even box.com and MEGA to some extent).
Ironically, this sameness might actually be a good thing, as it makes it a bit more interchangeable (well, if we ignore the variety in native integrations), it would be pretty bad if there were significant missing features between them.
(and that's just the really basic out of the box usage)
When you use M365 you even get multiple sharepoint-esque instances where there is the subscription one that you get in your general web interface, there is "your own" instance which is the same but more primitive, and then there is a pseudo-instance which is used by all apps (even the web apps) to sort-of aggregate them with infinite loops as a result (some of the interfaces allow you to browse between the instances so you can to into a virtual directory, then go into the same directory but in the other instance, and from there to into yet the same directory again but in the other instance, and so forth).
I actually prefer a network drive over SharePoint because there are fewer lock and sync issues.
Especially compared to Dropbox or Google Drive (or even OneDrive) it’s so hard to use for file sharing.
I literally would prefer mediawiki from the 2000s in terms of ui and support ability.
In my team of 50+ people, the last 2 years since starting this contract have been steady transition to using Teams for all communications. They are now moving to use it for scheduling as well with it being integrated with the rest of the Office suite.
Moreover, the entire hospital system uses it as the defacto means of communication. This makes it incredibly easy to connect with any of the thousands of employees we have immediately in a lot ways.
I don't like Teams or the office suite whatsoever. However, I think the real secret to their sauce is simple: > Ecosystem integration > Cram every feature possible into each product
Those two things alone can makeup for all the deficiencies in Microsoft's products within the marketplace. Their software may be clunky, buggy, and terrible to use but if you have those two factors it will stay dominant imo.
The more the deep state (nothing about conspiracy theory, it's just the people at the oval office, and their surroundings, mostly industry lobby) want to trust and push Microsoft, the worse it's going to get in the coming years were AI, software and hardware will be the deciding factor for the civilization war we are currently living
> Microsoft insiders worry the Pentagon may walk away from its $22 billion contract for mixed-reality goggles as the device continues to disappoint the military
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-military-hololens-...
Maybe we can say military-industrial complex? Nice, venerable, well-established phrase, notably popularized by a president during his final words as a president.
Who is banning words? At least in the US you have every right to say 'deep state' all you want but it probably doesn't mean in other people's minds what you might want anymore. I mean, it's the way of language evolution that when a phrase picks up a much different and negative connotation from what it had previously people stop using it.
You can lobby all you want to cut other types of government 'pork', and you'll probably have some champions in Congress on the same page. Only the military is untouchable. It's un-American to even consider cuts in that sector.
I'd say they're equivalent to Big Pharma or Big Oil - all of which have captured any regulatory agency designed to control their misbehaviors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenhower%27s_farewell_addres...
https://www.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-us-army-combat-hololens...
Looks like Microsoft will have to do in the matter of keeping the state from being too efficient.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-01/microsoft...
We Teams as part of whatever bundle MS pushes for OS, Office etc, but no one uses Teams, we use zoom. A few people use slack, but it’s not pervasive.
If it wasn’t so buggy and non-performant, does it offer any other advantages or “killer features” by virtue of tighter integration to the MS ecosystem?
Any bad Italian restaurant microwaving stuff is better than Olive Garden.
I like their breadsticks but everything else should not be eaten by humans.
We'd never see communications, even with notifications, in the "Teams" area of teams. When I did think to look at the conversations, all of the additional whitespace and padding the Mac client adds (not sure if it's all clients) on the messages in the "Teams" area just made it very difficult to consume context around a single discussion. There were another annoyances, but we didn't use it long enough for me to remember what they were.
We now just use the "Chat" portion of teams for all conversations and rename multi-person conversations with the project name. Starting a new chat with the same group of people for a different project is far more difficult than it needs to be, but I understand that's probably not the use case with how we're using it.
Search is abysmal. When clicking a result, you jump to the message but it is invariably devoid of any contextual information. It's just the message, by itself, in the chat window. It's only use is finding the date/time for the message you need, then scrolling back (for minutes sometimes) until you find the conversation from 3 weeks ago. And then, all the reverse infinite-scroll loading makes the client slow down to a crawl.
We routinely have issues with images not displaying. Sometimes loading the larger version works, many times it does not.
We routinely have issues with messages going completely missing in 1:1 chats. The sender can screenshot and show the message was sent, but the recipient never receives it, even after restarting the client.
I often get notifications of a new message in a 1:1 chat and when I goto the chat, I'm at the end of the channel and the message isn't there. I have to scroll up and then scroll back down so the infinite-scroll will load the missing message.
When in the new message box, I can CMD + UPARROW to edit my last message. This is useful because I make a lot of typos and fix them after sending/reading. A bad habit, perhaps, but it's how my process works. Anyway, this doesn't work if I someone has sent a message after mine. Teams is not smart enough to let me edit my last message with CMD + UP unless it was the last one sent. I have to switch to the mouse to make the edit. Also, if I CMD + UP in time to make an edit, submit it, then realized I missed another typo (it happens), CMD + UP no longer works. I have to manually focus the "Type a new message" box again and then it'll work. At that point I've touched my mouse, so I usually just opt to right click + edit the last message.
Sometimes after waking up my Mac, the teams window is missing. This happens to outlook too. CMD + TAB to focus the app doesn't retrieve it. I usually have to "launch" teams or outlook again (while it's still technically open) to get the window to reappear. No other App on my Mac does this, just Teams and Outlook.
Given how we use Teams, I like to "pin" chats for specific projects. I'm limited to how many I can pin. Why?
This one is minor: Gifs loaded with giphy can be paused. Copy/pasted gifs cannot. They auto play forever, which is annoying when it's the team chat I keep focused 90% of the day, but the conversation is slow that day.
I'm sure there are other things I'm missing.
The search actually used to be better earlier, it would show you the message and also the messages around it, now it doesn't.
I have a very decent build at home, new gen amd, 64gigs RAM, the linux desktop app still crashes, it slows down during search whereas slack runs like a monster compared to it.
Whenever a message comes, the tab will do its best to get you out of focus, sucks as a programmer in the zone. I had to mute lot of chats.
Actually no one at work used the teams features, it was only the normal chat. It sucked because there wasn't even the reply feature earlier and we still can't create threads.
It doesn't integrate with any bots, jira or git.
The people who make the decision on what comm platform to use don't need these features. They use email for written coms, and teams for calls.
They feel opting for something other than teams or jira will look bad on them if it doesn't work.
No links
You can’t link to conversations. This means if you want to add context to a Jira ticket or in a code comment, you can’t easily do so.
Inconsistent UI
The UI between a Teams channel and a chat with multiple people is not consistent. Direct chats:
- do not have the ability to thread; so you end up with quotes all over the place and interleaved conversations.
- don’t support ``` for code blocks. Channel chats do. Why? I have no clue.
Notifications in channels are easy to miss
It’s really easy to miss notifications from channels unless you get messaged directly about it.
The emojis are bad
They aren’t customizable, but even the ones that are available are not great.
Compared to Slack
Teams lacks these features that I find useful in Slack:
- Don’t have time to address something immediately and don’t want to forget about it? Right click → Remind me later.
- Instead of struggling to communicate a screen location, draw on the screen when a co-worker is sharing their display. Ok, Teams introduced this recently. But the first time I tried it, I ended up stuck in annotation mode and had to quit Teams to be able to interact with my applications…
- Integration with Jira for automatic linking to mentioned issues by Jira Issue Key, e.g., PROJ-123. I think this one is just a limitation because my company hasn't added the integration.
- Notifications when when activity occurs in Bitbucket or Jira. Ditto.
The hold music sucks
The music played when alone on a call sucks. I suppose this is more subjective than the rest…
My favorite Teams bug is when the arrow keys stop working for text navigation. They had to go out of the way to break something like that.
In general, Teams doesn't have real markdown support. It can detect some markdown-ish syntax and replace it with its WYSIWYG stuff, but that's not the same thing (it doesn't always replace it, it doesn't handle messages sent with markdown syntax properly, it doesn't follow standard markdown syntax, and it doesn't let you edit the markdown markup).
Other issues I've had:
- Teams for desktop likes to randomly decide your microphone isn't working, and turn your audio off. The microphone works fine in literally any other program.
- Trying to close the window doesn't close it, it just minimizes it and hides it from the taskbar. It plays the minimize animation, it still shows up in alt-tab, and it stays on the same virtual desktop when reopening the window, rather than reopening on the current desktop.
- It always throws its window up when starting. There seems to be no way to make it start in the background.
-There is no way to choose spellchecker language, it's hardcoded to use the same language as the UI.
If you're using a Mac this might be a MacOS feature/bug which you might already worked around it in another applications https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253371535
You can, at least technically, if you know the message IDs (search for Teams deep links).. Not sure why they don't expose this on the UI though.. Shameless plug: If you are looking for linking conversation to Jira, try our app: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1220851/microsoft-tea...