[mianos]

Behind this is one of the problems. In a corporate environment you can't choose the best tool for the job at hand, collaboration. MS Teams is probably the worst tool of its class in this area yet it is, evidently, chosen by people in higher positions who make decisions based solely on their opinion and for the sake of complying with corporate standards, once again, not based on evidence, but, by some MS white paper saying it is. That said I am not sure they should be spending time on more functional over getting the very basics, like video chat, working as well as almost every other platform. Just my personal opinion on what complete garbage it is when you have to use it every day of the week.

[wenc]

> MS Teams is probably the worst tool of its class in this area yet it is, evidently, chosen by people in higher positions who make decisions based solely on their opinion and for the sake of complying with corporate standards, once again, not based on evidence, but, by some MS white paper saying it is.

Could you expand more about why you think it's the worst tool in its class for collaboration?

My experiences with it seem to be at variance with this observation.

[mianos]

On the mac, the video and audio randomly do not work. In a team of 20, this means every day someone has to stop the app, restart it and rejoin the call. Doing stand-ups every day, this is a PIA. 2,000 'user-voice' votes, broken for 3 years.

Occasionally it has some bug that makes it use up endless ram.

The cut and paste does not work properly. This one has thousands of 'user-voice' votes and has been broken for over a year. edit: over 1000 people, broken for at least 3 years: https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/su...

Slack has completely changed the underlying video and voice platform and, for my teams, it has always worked perfectly.

[wenc]

Thanks for providing that insight. It sounds like a platform issue.

I’ve often been curious about the animus towards Teams because I’ve always used Teams on Windows and the experience has been pretty good. I’ve been very productive with it, especially the last little while when I had to use it to coordinate a large distributed team. I haven’t experienced any of the above issues on Windows. In fact on Windows the video codecs and video networks are so good that they rival or exceed Zoom’s in many cases. As well, we have the large enterprise license too (most of us are in E3 or E5 tiers) —- I’m not sure if it makes a difference in terms of QoS but many of the complaints I’ve come across from small business or free users I simply don’t experience on an enterprise Teams license.

I think the biggest issue is that on non Windows platforms, Microsoft does not pay enough attention to make sure there is feature or reliability parity.

I realized this recently switching to macOS. Outlook on the Mac is crippled and simple things that I relied upon on the Windows client simply don’t exist on the Mac client. Even simple features like showing a calendar panel or being able to define more complex mail rules are missing.

For Teams, the code base is ostensibly the same since it’s an Electron app but it sounds like Microsoft’s QA efforts on the Mac are not on par with its efforts in the Windows side.

I say this because if Microsoft wants to, it can do better. Visual Studio Code for instance is excellent on all platforms and keeps getting better. My main desktop is a Linux machine and i’ve switched from trusty gVim which I’ve customized for 20 years to VS Code for dev work because it’s that good.

[mianos]

The copy and paste bugs are supported on all platforms, as you say, likely on account of the common code base. Also, if you have 16 or 32G machines Windows machines you rarely see the performance issues. Working for a large corporate, in fact a very larger MS partner, probably why slack was not a choice, 8G machines are the par.

[wenc]

Oh I have a 32GB RAM machine so that could be factor too.

[MattGaiser]

If even that much thought was given to it. Teams comes with Office, so it is quite possible that alternatives were never really examined.

[julianh95]

This is my experience. I've witnessed a company migrate to MS Teams given that it was included in their existing subscription. That alone was enough to kick-off a migration from Slack.

[mianos]

Yes, I agree. Even worse. Other not considered at all, but 'because we use office'. At my last job that was the reason.