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by bacbilla 1918 days ago
I think I have to agree with OP here. To me, Teams is more of a failure of product management/design and corporate culture. It was more of a move to add value and subscribers to the Office365 platform than an attempt to build a world beating chat/conferencing platform. So many of its users simply use it because it's included in their Office365 subscription, whereas with Slack, Zoom, etc they'd be paying $8+ a month per user.

While the development effort, skill, and time, that goes into building something like Discord is certainly significant, I feel it's certainly something Microsoft could have built given their resources and technical aptitude. What you can't buy is the inspiration, ideas, and culture that make something like Discord happen.

If it follows the inspiration and ethos of tools like Github and VSCode, I'll be really happy. Given Microsoft's shift in attitude over the past few years, I really hope that's the case.

3 comments

My biggest fear is to get all those office365 integrations teams runs slow and is quite the memory hog whereas discord has a nice a svelte memory and cpu footprint. If they were to buy it and give it the traditional microsoft features bloat then that would not encourage many gamers to stay on the platform
I think, at least for corporations, the selling point is security compliance: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/security-com...

This always come first over user's convenience. But the user experience of this tech is abhorrent, so I could see that Microsoft would like to fortify Discord with security features and sell it as Teams 2.0. This actually could work if done right...

Teams have integrations with other MS products (Outlook, Sharepoint). They are clunky and look like they were bolted on, but they're there which is better than not having them at all.
> they're there which is better than not having them at all

I disagree fervently. At my current job the department has strong pushes to use these features amongst the teams and if they weren't there we could explore real solutions.

As it stands we're doing things like task tracking and taking meeting notes in teams and it's a terrible experience. I can't help but wonder what happens to that corporate data when teams eventually gets the axe

As far as I understand, the Teams meetings notes are stored in a Sharepoint, not in Teams server itself.
The Slack integrations for SP and Outlook are arguably better than what MS did in Teams.