Well, I still believe in antitrust laws, but I feel they have become much more of a symbolic gesture in a contellation of gestures that pay lip service to the function of law as something good for society. I mean, for the majority of people, does this really give us something good? How many businesses will now switch to a different product given the tight technical integration that Microsoft offers to large and medium-sized businesses?
Tech companies have learned how to handle antitrust: now, they make their products highly interoperable and integrated. They also bundle their products and they KNOW that even if antitrust laws come to past, the initial entrenchment will already have done "the damage" of getting the product "out there", and the worst that happens to them is a small fine and some minor legal troubles, easily handled by the best legal teams.
This is systemic to big tech: as consumers, we need much more than flabby antitrust investigations. We need big tech to be dissolved completely, and a limit on the absolute size of tech companies so that the Microsoft of the future would not even have the resources to create Microsoft Teams in the first place (if they were already focused on Microsoft Office).
This does not reflect my experience - I can't make a video call from teams to someone on Zoom; I can't chat with someone on Slack. My iMessage client loses all kinds of functionality when I send a text to someone using Android. I could go on.
I worked at a place that dropped Slack for Teams. Everyone believed that Slack was the better product, but the company already bought Office which bundled Teams while Slack cost money. It's the most obvious anti-competitive practice I've experienced.
I think it clearly does the world a whole lot of good. It would be disastrous if a single company leveraged it's monopoly over a platform to force-feed the world their own instant communication service just because they can deploy an email client bundled with a spreadsheet, word processor, and misc office productivity software.
Put yourself in the position of a company such as Slack. It is beyond any doubt a far superior service than Microsoft Teams. Yet, forcing Teams to be bundled with Word, Excel, and specially Outlook ends up forcing Teams upon people in spite of being a clearly inferior alternative. If any person in the world was forced to choose between the two, I assure you that no one would pick Teams ever if not for Outlook.
So, how exactly is forcing Teams upon the world anything other than abuse of a de facto monopoly and anti-competitive business practices?
And you'd be wrong. I've joined internet groups that use Slack and left specifically because Slack is so bad, but stayed in places using Discord because it's much better. Teams is nice. Part of why Slack is bad is because they're trying to turn "send small amounts of text over the internet" into a billion dollar VC funded business and the foundations can't hack it. Part of why Teams is nice is because it integrates well with Office and Microsoft 365, that makes it a clearly superior alternative.
> "So, how exactly is forcing Teams upon the world anything other than abuse of a de facto monopoly and anti-competitive business practices?"
How exactly is making a better product (Teams) which integrates well with other products (desirable features) 'forcing' or 'abusing' anything just because you're a hater with an axe to grind?
So while you are correct that it does do good (and I acknowledged that), the good it does is merely the movement to the next in a long line of shrinking islands in a poisonous sea.
The 90s componentware comes to mind as a possible direction here. Allow interop & integration, but require it to be over public APIs that anyone can use.
I was a kid messing around with basic and c++ and then web for a lot of this time, but it seems the object-oriented world of the 90s was trying hard to create all manners of components that could integrate, embed, & use each other. Corba, DCOM, OLE, ActiveObjects, whatever NeXTStep was doing... this was going to be the future, before the internet showed up & rescoped the scale of interconnectivity to be beyond the machine level.
> This is systemic to big tech: as consumers, we need much more than flabby antitrust investigations. We need big tech to be dissolved completely, and a limit on the absolute size of tech companies so that
Not really sure if I'm opposed or not. But I do think we absolutely should have Competitive Compatibility/Adversarial Interoperability. We should be able to riff off & extend each other's software, without everyone making software getting to write whatever incredible legal moat their army of lawyers can masterfully craft around the products/business.
We are stuck in the old Ma Bell age, where Facebook says you can only use Facebook provided software to connect; it's so rampantly apparent that this hijacking of software & property law by contract law & terms of use - that gives companies whatever control they please - is a terrible curse & constraint on humanity. We need a Carterphone decision for the 21st century (for all software, not just the big softwares).
For reference, here is the complaint (2020):
https://slack.com/blog/news/slack-files-eu-competition-compl...
In a nutshell:
> The complaint details Microsoft’s illegal and anti-competitive practice of abusing its market dominance to extinguish competition in breach of European Union competition law. Microsoft has illegally tied its Teams product into its market-dominant Office productivity suite, force installing it for millions, blocking its removal, and hiding the true cost to enterprise customers.
So basically, this behavior from MS is the same with IE being bundled in Windows in the 90s and, later, probably Media Player.
Agreed. As it stands, Teams will still be much cheaper than Slack so it's unlikely any enterprises will make the switch, given how entrenched Teams has become.
What specifically are teh workflow issues people have with teams?
My experience is that someone books an online meeting, i get a teams link. When the meeting comes I click the link, everyeone's face shows up, we have the meeting and then close teams.
I've never had any issue with teams, not even once.
What are the issues people have with teams because there are a lot of rants about teams but no specific issues are mentioned.
As a meeting tool its perfect, its there, just works and then goes away.
Are the rants directed to it as a chat app? or a company wide messaging app?
Because I use teams4-5 times a week and cant' think of a single time its failed me or crashed or slowed down during a meeting.
its the definition of a tool that just works and then goes away until I need it again.
What is making everyone so angry at the tool?
Yeah. The changes are already active in the EU and Office without teams is Euro 9.80 per month and with teams Euro 11.70. This will still convince managers to get Teams, torturing employees everywhere and murdering the competition.
They are indeed trying to do the separation so that in practice everybody will get Office365 with Teams.
(I think similarly, including OneDrive disrupts the market for file sync.)
The author claims there's no benefit to consumers because prices went up. The whole point of the rule is to prevent MS from killing off competition by keeping the prices low. So the benefit should be in the form of a healthier ecosystem (and long-term high quality / price tradeoff) rather than the price level today.
> Teams, which was added to Office 365 in 2017 for free, subsequently replaced Skype for Business and became popular during the pandemic due in part to its video conferencing.
Sorry, but no. Teams became popular during the pandemic because MS didn't give you a choice: with Skype deprecated and with your subscription paying for Teams whether you wanted or not, few IT managers would approve a second videoconference tool.
MS used the pandemic to force all of us into being beta testers for a crappy tool that consumed every resource it found, ranging from your computer's CPU up to your patience and will to live. So let's not pretend that Teams succeeded for any reasons other than monopoly power.
Because Skype for business(what a shit name, why not call it Skype Enterprise?) wasn't Skype at all, it was just Lync renamed, which was Office Communicator renamed, which was Windows Messenger renamed, which was Exchange 2000 Conferencing renamed.
It's like a Matroska doll of Scooby-Doo masks.
Is Slack still good or has it had its own problems?
I hate using teams but I don’t want to try to push for Slack if it has also gone downhill.
Also, I don't know if teams handles it any better, but slack has absolutely no offline capabilities / cache on the desktop. And electron sucks for electron reasons.
Should actually there be complete ban for bundling more than single program in one solution. Like you could not have email and calendar in one, or something like Word and Excel. Cleary offering email+office suite in one is too far. And what about someone like Adobe, surely each of their softwares should be split up to own subscriptions and there should be no discounts for getting multiple at one time.
As it stands, Teams is “free” for me (with Business Premium or E3 or something like that) and I’m not sure I like this news just because it sounds like more $$ for honestly the same outcome (I don’t care whether our chat app is good or not .. our messages go poof after a few days anyway. We just want something good-enough to get work done).
Does this mean that now every other org is going to send me invite links to their org channels hosted on some random chat app?
EDIT: Meditating a bit more about it, I don't think Reuters can afford to pull off a joke, as Reuters news cables can disrupt financial markets in such a way that could cause major damage.
tldr: everything opening within teams is a poor ux
Teams is unique as a combination of chat, phone and SharePoint client. Thus it was born an abomination and the laws of nature dictate that it must only get worse.
Not just chat clients, but pretty much any stable piece of SW from a major corporation that reaches peak perfection, is forced to get worse and user hostile over time, because those VPs, execs and managers in charge of it want a promotion or need to justify their bonuses on a yearly basis, so they force needless changes to have something to present to the board every year till they jump ship or retire early with their masive stock piles.
And then the next people who take over, have something to tear down and rebuild, so they can be the ones making their careers on "fixing" that product and the cycle of shittiness repeats.
They are not products anymore that need to serve the best interest of the customers, but fiefdoms and vehicles designed to propel and fuel someone's ego and career advancements at all costs.
It's an effect of perverse incentives in corporate promotions. You'll never make a career at these companies by doing QA or saying "well, the product we have was perfect already, so I did absolutely nothing to it, added no new features, just fixed some bugs and kicked back".
I was working for a large company using Office 365 back then. Our teams were using either Slack or Skype. The company pushed everyone towards Teams because it was included in 365 only to eventually backpedal and move everyone to Slack because Teams was an unfinished software. What's surprising to me is that they have had a few years to improve Teams yet its UX is still far behind Slack.
The "channels" and accompanying wiki/file store is simply sharepoint with a different web-ui -- and it inherits all the problems of original sharepoint, i.e., it is where documents go to die.
It fails miserably to recognize when the system is "locked" and to "STFU" with its bleeps/blurbs/rings for new IM's/phone calls/whatever else it decides to be noisy about. Locked system means "not at work" which should mean "no noises from you, ever".
If you first initiate a screen share with someone, you can not add in a voice call (thereby making the screen share rather less than useful in most instances). Yet, if you begin a voice call first, you can then add in a screen share and keep the voice call going.
It is an "electron" app, so it is the single biggest resource hog (second only to Win11 itself) on the system. It even manages to out-hog Google Chrome by about 50% or better, which given Chrome's legendary hogginess is a testament to MS's ability to produce bloated software.
Just about the only thing it does get right is holding meetings. Click the link, meeting widow opens, hold meeting, click "leave" when done.
Many companies auto-lock desktops after a few minutes of inactivity. If I go to chat to someone away from my desk, I definitely want Teams to make noises if somebody is phoning me - especially since I no longer have a desk phone.
No, it isn't. It moved away from electron to WebView2 for better performance: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-blog/...
I open Teams. First, Teams opens two windows. Why?
Afterwards, Teams finds my audio devices. This works sporadically.
I join the meeting. The audio input device I chose isn't sending audio for some reason. Need to close Teams completely and join again.
I am finally in the meeting.
If I join from my iOS mobile, chances are good that I'll be able to join, but exiting and re-entering the app will put me back on the login screen. While I can get back into the meeting by typing anything into the Name text box, it's still bad UX.
Then there's screen sharing. When it works, there's no guarantee that it will keep working for the entire meeting. Especially on mobile. It will die for no reason.
Zoom has none of these problems.
But Zoom is expensive because Teams comes with Office 365 for free. Just like Google Chat and Meet (two other not-so-great collaboration tools) come with Workspace.
Quoting myself regarding workflow: Two problems with information are duplication (too many copies around, all of them slightly different) and finding where it is. MS Teams makes it easy to store duplicate data and hard to find it later: did you upload the data as a file in the "development" channel, or as a link in the "updates" wiki? Nobody knows, not even the search function. And with each new project manager creating five channels per project, only two of which will actually see any activity...
> When the meeting comes I click the link, everyeone's face shows up, we have the meeting and then close teams.
When I get a Teams link I first try to open the web interface - there used to be a native Linux client, but it has been discontinued. That interface has consistently failed me for at least two years - it enters an infinite loop where I can join a meeting but get kicked out immediately with no explanation in Firefox, Chromium and Chrome. Nowadays I can only join from my phone.
> cant' think of a single time its failed me or crashed or slowed down during a meeting.
When MS imposed Teams on us during the pandemic I had to request a new laptop because the one I had could not keep up - it was fine for PyCharm which is not precisely lightweight, but Teams was just too much. Whenever I had a meeting I had to close all other programs. And do you know what what was in short supply during the pandemic? Toilet paper. But also laptops. So I spent several months dreading every single meeting until I could replace my perfectly-good machine with a newer model.
I have so many issues with Teams that it's not even funny anymore.
You get invited to meetings by those that do.
I won't pile on to the endless list of examples you asked for, but I'd like to say that this statement:
> My experience is that someone books an online meeting, i get a teams link. When the meeting comes I click the link, everyeone's face shows up, we have the meeting and then close teams.
made me sceptical of your motives here. This has never been the case for me, or anyone I know. The first thing we do now when we get an external MS Teams meeting link is request an alternative like Google Meet.
Teams audio / video calls are really good.
Chat is full of intermittent bugs that makes you question your own sanity.
Things were going so well...
Example: I've not responded to a message. Is it because I was away for 2 hours, or is because Teams shat the bed again? You'll never know!
It also makes my severely limited, monitored and controlled work laptop even more sluggish to the point that it takes a whole minute to simply start a shell, and 10 seconds to run any command on it (before the command actually runs). When coding, any keystroke takes a second to register. Is my productivity shit because I hate my job, or because my laptop is a dumpster fire in large part because of Teams? You'll never know!
I would use Teams for my classes but the interface is so bizarre and user hostile. What the hell is a walkie talkie for if there is a chat feature? Why is there a calls button and a walkie talkie and chat? I don’t get the user interface. I think Teams is a terrible piece of software.
Slack is best in class for chat though.
Teams chat sucks in a few ways:
* Posts? Why can’t messages be more lightweight.
* No custom emojis like party parrot.
* Total crapshoot whether it converts my three backticks into a code block.
* Please fuck off with trying to offer me apps every time I paste a link.
The alternative is group DMs but those come with many issues as well:
* They tend to proliferate every time you need to chat with a slightly different group of people;
* No support for threads whatsoever;
* Why is it in a completely separate place from "teams"?
> * No custom emojis like party parrot.
Custom emojis and gif search integration. I know Teams has the latter but it's clunky.
> * Total crapshoot whether it converts my three backticks into a code block.
Agree. Formatting a message in Teams is like playing the lottery. You have a chance of winning but really in all likelihood you will lose.
Slack's WYSIWYG editor is pretty bad as well, but: it's much, much better than Teams's; and I can disable it altogether.
It randomly won't connect to meetings on the PC. Calls drop regularly. Screen sharing sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. If I have joined on the phone so I can get audio working, it's a total crap shoot whether I can also open it using the PC client to see anything someone else is sharing. About half the time I have to join using the browser rather than the actual client. Nobody uses the actual team groups, the notifications of new messages appear in the activity section along with loads of other irrelevant things. It constantly pops up a window telling me I'm muted and when you close it, it pops up abother one. I could go on...
I don't know what counts as good in your book, but to me Slack is by far the best professional-oriented messaging tool around.
Certainly Microsoft Teams is not it. It's messaging UI feels as if the goal was to copy 1990s ICQ, with matching search capabilities.
Basic UX like it being clear when I'm replying to a message or starting a thread are fantastically broken. It's clunky, buggy, slow. It's just a shit-show in every respect. Normally I respect people's preferences, but your preference is wrong.
Microsoft is a little different as they never really rebuild. Outlook is basically the same as it was in 1995, including non-functional search. :)
I do believe the lockdowns might have rushed the transition as the UX felt unfinished for years. I can't think of any other reason that might have pushed them into replacing Skype so quickly.
The only exception was driven by my employer, who opted to embed Cisco Call Manager crap into Microsoft OCS (the circa 2010 chat client). I would rather communicate via requisition notes in peoplesoft than use that shit. Whatever replaced it (iirc Lync for Enterprise Business Extreme Edition) was better.
Performance is still abysmal.
That's what they mean by interoperability within the walled garden of Microsoft products.
Alternative venues include the default installation of windows to (almost) every laptop in existence.
AI/speech recognition - nuance communications (the stuff behind apple's siri)
side note: does linkedIn count?
These two products dominate every non-technical industry. I think MSFT makes mediocre software. But as long as those two gravy trains exist, they'll never lose.