No Stupid Questions

The upside to Teams is that you can always claim it's at fault for your fuckup. It has so many bugs that no one can ever say that something can't go wrong because of teams.

• Fell asleep at your desk and didn't see an important message or call? => "Dang, so sorry, Teams never sent me a notification!"
• Way too late to a scheduled meeting => "Omg hi, finally! Teams crashed every time I tried to enter the meeting!"
• Hungover and don't want to turn on the camera => "I'm sorry, Teams starts stuttering every time I turn on the camera, so I'm keeping it off for now."
• Forgot to get back to someone? => "Huh but I wrote you like a week ago... weird, Teams must have swallowed the message"
• Don't want to answer a tough question in a meeting? => "Sorry, your audio keeps cutting out for me. Just one moment, let me restart Teams." pretend to struggle for 20mins and give up without answering the question

I'm on Mac and I dislike it too. No flashing cursor to let me know I've selected the chat window to type. The app insists on changing to a different view when I switch windows, making me lose it. The share screen ribbon always manages to be exactly where I need it to not be. Doesn't allow any sort of Markdown-esque formatting in chat, only WYSIWYG.

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.

For a while, Microsoft Teams was pretty good. I'd say their sweet spot was roughly 2020-2022ish. It was a pretty basic chat app with a bit of workplace collaboration and office integration built in.

Then new teams happened. Now teams can be installed to a user profile, or to the machine as a whole. Now you need new outlook to get some semblance of functionality with calendars and scheduling in teams. Now teams is deployed as part of Microsoft office, or standalone, or needs to be imported as a package, but fuck you if you have a mix of these methods in your environment. Teams holds on to your data now forever, which would be great!... If the search function actually worked well. Now you have to sort through everything you've ever said to find something that someone sent you last week.

Microsoft just can't fucking resist destroying a "good" chat application by adding a bunch of bloat.

Because life is suffering.

Because it actually makes a lot of sense from a business perspective to have your meeting software integrated with your messaging software integrated with your document storage, etc. MS saw the success of things like Zoom and Slack and said "we can do that!"

And the thing about large companies with big budgets is that they get things done. Maybe it is shitty, but it is done. And the thing about an IM client is that anyone can think up the idea... So the difference between MS and a startup like Slack is that there were 100 other Slack-like startups that failed to make a useable product. Slack made a product that worked because statistically, someone has to - and then everyone uses the product because it works. But MS is not going to run out of venture capital or new CS grads eager to work 80 hour weeks to "change the world" - they will keep plowing money and manpower into a product until it is ready to ship, goddammit!

So Teams stumbles across the finish line, strictly inferior to its competitors. Except that it has an ace in its back pocket... the fact that so many businesses already run windows. Already have MS 365 subscriptions. MS can pitch ecosystem integration as a selling point, and then undercut their competitors on price to paper over any deficits in functionality. And 55 year old CFOs of accounting firms see this and say "yes, let's do that!"

And thus, Teams

Which Microsoft Teams are you talking about?

The Microsoft Teams with the purple icon and white accent, or the Microsoft Teams with the white icon and purple accent?

I fucking hate teams. Man its shit. Imagine working on that program at m$, how do they not want to die.

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

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.

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.

Why do you think there's the growing mass exodus towards Linux?

Microsoft laying off programmers and staff like they're having human diarrhea, while replacing experienced programmers with artificial ~~intelligence~~ ignorance...

You just figuring this shit out?

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.

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, 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.

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.

Shh... They'll hear you. Stop using antichrist software.

Other tech companies — Zoom and Slack — were becoming successful. Microsoft cannot allow that, so they made another terrible product and then had their marketing team start felating incompetent executives.

That's nothing, Google had almost a dozen different chat apps at different times, some of them simultaneously.

As for

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

A lot of background services run as ‘svchost’, which loads the particular library implementing the actual service. Services can be added by applications, from what I understand. They all look the same in the task manager, and also can't be properly selected in a firewall app because again it's the same executable.

This is not to say that Teams specifically uses an svchost service, but they could if they wanted.

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.