[lvh]

Have you used Teams? I've had to once, to talk to people and Microsoft, and it was _hilariously_ bad. I don't know anyone who uses it in earnest, and I know people who have used Google Chat.

(I do most of the sales calls for Latacora, which feels like a decent representative sample of startups, and I think all but one, maybe two, of the companies we have ever spoken with used Slack. Order of magnitude a percent.)

[gamblor956]

My company tried slack, Hangouts, and teams. We're standardizing on teams because it's the easiest for non-technical users to understand and use.

[techslave]

que? how can one not understand slack? it couldn’t be simpler.

[Spivak]

Never used Teams. This is not a comparison just some things in Slack that are weird.

* Formatting is done with Markdown syntax instead of "word processor" style formatting.

In a word processor if you type Hello, Ctrl+b World Ctrl+b!

it would produce Hello, <b>World</b>!

In Slack it produces Hello <b>World </b>!* * .

* /commands are not discoverable or intuitive to anyone who never used IRC or CLI programs. Non-programmers have no idea what arguments are or that [brackets] means optional.

* Bots and their syntax have the same problem except that their DSLs are far more varied and arcane.

* Very few people know or understand the difference between a channel and a group.

* Threads are super weird compared to email. It's like an inbox but not really. Threads interleaved into actual message timelines are not very discoverable and difficult to follow.

* Attachments and files don't really work like most people expect.

* There are at least 5 different settings panels all with different things and scopes.

* Reminders and a bunch of stuff being implemented as a magic "account" in Slack is super confusing to people.

* Very few people really "get" apps as well in this respect. They're in your message timeline, they look like accounts, and are in some ways but aren't in others.

* The difference between a "bot" and "app" isn't super well defined. Some respond to messages in a channel, some need commands.

[ghc]

Excellent enumeration of the things Slack gets wrong. I’m not sure all of them can be fixed, either. I have more faith in Microsoft getting it right.

[Ididntdothis]

I agree that Teams is pretty bad but a lot of companies use it because they have office 365. Your view is probably skewed by looking at Silicon Valley it startups. A lot of big companies use Teams.

In my company Teams was actually a big improvement because we had nothing before.

[lvh]

Oh sure: I didn’t mean to imply nobody does, I’m definitely just talking to startups.