[kaugesaar]

It's just something with lots of Microsoft's latest software that annoys me. They all feel behind, laggy and lacking features in comparison to their competitor.

Slack > Teams

Trello > Planner

PowerBi > Tableau, Looker, Mode

And by the quick looks of it:

Airtable > Lists

At the same time I'm looking at that $136 billion cash pile. Oh well, at least they acquired Github...

[crazygringo]

That's just how major corporations operate.

They don't innovate much, which is too risky -- they buy/copy and they integrate into a single attractive package for businesses.

Customers (companies) don't want to have to spend months researching which separate word processor, spreadsheet, calendar, chat app, email, etc. to use. They want a single integrated choice.

Integration brings an insane amount of value to the table. When you include that, the competitors often become a clear second choice, even if they seem better when judged on their feature set alone.

Also, for people who haven't been involved in integrating products as part of a suite, the amount of work is close to unbelievable. Want to make a small improvement in Calendar, that seems like you should budget a single developer 2 weeks for? Guess what, it's a 3-person six-month-long project because now you have to update 20 other products and API's that interface with calendar, as well as handle interoperability between versions, independent rollouts and rollbacks, etc. But at MS Office scale, the improvement can still be worth it.

[screye]

Over the years there is something I've realized about the mainstream user. They do not want the best. They want convenient and 'good enough' and compliant.

All of Microsoft tools work fine, sync really well with each other and integrate natively with existing workflows.

Power users even among devs are a rare breed.

[satyrnein]

It does make sense to prioritize how well something fits into your overall workflow higher than which tools is the best in a vacuum.

[dx034]

And sync is the one big advantage of Office products. It's a pain to properly sync email, chat, file storage, calendars etc. MSFT has a very compelling way that works for end users and IT alike. Setting this up with products from different vendors is a pain.

[dade_]

That would explain Yammer.

[bnt]

AFAIK they purchased Yammer, it wasn't an in-house product.

[nojito]

Teams is leagues better than Slack simply because of how well it integrates with all of the other ms apps.

PowerBI is also on another level when compared to other BI tools due to its data modeling capabilities.

[prepend]

I disagree. I use both and Teams is very buggy. It does more than Slack with 365 integration, but it doesn’t do what Slack does well- persistent chat, document collab, calls.

I would expect to never miss a notification. I don’t in Slack, but Teams will delay notification for hours.

Search in Teams doesn’t find as well as slack. Won’t search across “teams” as opposed to multiple slack orgs.

Teams will freeze and require religion/restart but I won’t know it unless I try to use the tool. So it could have been frozen for minutes or hours without updating. Slack has never had this problem.

It’s weird how multiple times each day (I’ve used Teams for about six months) I scratch my head with some bonehead bug. Not in the free tier of Slack.

[toohotatopic]

>Teams is leagues better than Slack simply because of how well it integrates with all of the other ms apps.

In which way? From what I have seen, teams functionality is so much worse than the native counterparts that I wouldn't call it integration. Even if it is better than Slack, it's obstructive to the point that I am wondering if the teams development team has ever used it to manage themselves.

[nojito]

It integrates seamlessly with excel online, ppt online, word online.

Which makes the concept of "file sharing" moot because one just has to paste the new file and the entire team can start working on it without ever leaving the teams app.

The same story holds for integrating with the other 365 apps that MS has.

Additionally, the PowerBI integration is absolutely game changing for sharing performance reports seamlessly to everyone on the team.

[prepend]

This is my experience. The Teams viewer in word or excel is different than the full browser that is different than desktop.

A bette experience, I think, is post link to google doc in whatever chat, everyone clicks on link and edits doc in browser. I wish that worked well in Teams. Part of the problem is Word365 which seems to break under lots of collaborators and revisions. Track changes is practically unusable with lots of edits. Every time, someone ends up “starting over.” And it’s more hassle to try than to do any serious collabs. But for minor edits, it’s nice.

There’s no advantage to me to “never leave the teams app.”

[toohotatopic]

Have you tried more advanced features like making lists in word? Word and word online behave differently.

And when it comes to file sharing: how do you copy the name of a file into the clipboard?

[nojito]

Click open on desktop. Any changes you make it automatically synced to Teams.

It’s a complete seamless experience for collaboration.

[cutenewt]

There's a lot of outdated thinking that Teams < Slack.

I use both multiple times a day. Teams is far from a carbon copy of Slack.

If anything, Slack needs to pay attention to Teams. They've already out-innovated Slack on several fronts. For example, Teams is a slick hybrid of industry-std channels (Slack) and industry-std video (Zoom). Slack doesn't offer that.

[cannam]

Are Teams and Slack competitors at all? I thought one was targeted document sharing, calendaring, and video meetings, and the other was general group chat and asynchronous communication?

I haven't used either to an enormous extent - I've used both, but only to the extent that I've had to in recent weeks - anyone care to educate me?

[evanmoran]

Sure, Teams is Slack plus Zoom with Office 365 integration. It turns out that chat follows an organization’s team structures really well, so adding video conferencing and document sharing to channels are a really natural fit to help people work together.

[sergiotapia]

My children are on Teams for school from home, it's dogshit. It has that ugly MS-of-2011 sheen where anything you click you get empty white loading or worse yet a huge spinning GIF with no idea what's happening. Sorry I'm being so rough, but I have to deal with this software every day right before work and it pisses me off.

[karatestomp]

I briefly had to use it a couple years ago and found it super confusing. Lots of business tools for me are "places I put things if I want to lose them" and Teams 100% qualified.

Then again I bounced off Facebook in ~2011 because I didn't understand the UI (couldn't figure out where anything "went" or would appear for others when I posted it any of the various ways to post things—wall, others' walls, comments on things, statuses, and so on—or where they were coming from when I saw them) and Twitter's confused the hell out of me since a couple redesigns ago, so possibly I'm just dumb.

[keithwarren]

I have used lots of BI tools over the years, PowerBI is the class of the field and it is not even close.

[timwis]

I agree. Teams has felt very unintuitive, and often has duplicate notifications, and Planner is embarrassingly bad - you can’t even edit comments. I don’t understand how there are so many little bugs and annoyances they’re a massive company and they’re putting a lot behind these products.

[ibdf]

You forgot about Flow which is some terrible version of Zapier.

[laurentb]

What you're forgetting is that all of those SaaS tools came about to improve (or replace) some of the existing Microsoft products that did not live up to the expectations of the modern corporate world:

Slack -> Lync/Skype for Business/Whatever other name MSFT came up with

Trello -> MS Project

Tableau -> MS SSRS

Airtable -> SharePoint Lists & Workflow

[kart23]

I really like the latest to-do app they have, its on every platform (except linux...), nice design and relatively snappy. Sure its not the most advanced app, but it does everything I need and want.

Their new terminal emulator has potential, although I do find it a bit slow and fonts to be weird.

[raindropm]

I hates their barebone 'barely there' product too, but damn, their integration game is strong(in the enterprise world at least), especially all these recent announcement.