[wlesieutre]

MS Teams has to work cross platform or no one would use it, they'd be "Slack except worse because part of your team can't have it."

It's not like Apple is maintaining iMessage anywhere except their own platforms. And even with that, until very recently the Mac version was second class compared to iOS, only catching up when Marzipan/Catalyst let them share one codebase between the two versions.

So that's not exactly Apple using Electron, but it's still a good example of "Even a giant company like Apple has trouble effectively maintaining separate cross platform versions of the same product."

[vxNsr]

Microsoft makes many terrific MacOS native apps (the most obvious of course being O365), idk if they have MS teams for Linux but I doubt that’d be a reason for using electron.

[copperx]

If Microsoft was developing Office today as a greenfield app, it would surely be Electron based.

[vxNsr]

And likely be terrible and would get no market share. I don’t know anyone who lives in excel all day who would be ok with the jankiness of an electron app

[criddell]

If anybody can afford to write native apps, it's Microsoft. How many Teams users are there? Tens of millions? The cost of developing native apps spread across all those users is pretty much zero.

I think the real reason Microsoft went Electron is because they plan on extending it to eventually take control of Electron on Windows. So they need some big Electron-based applications to justify that.

[drcongo]

It already is "Slack except worse". The Catalyst comparison is an interesting one though, Catalyst on macOS is still pretty horrible in terms of usability, but a lot better than Electron on system resources.