Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by kylen 1368 days ago
Yup. It might even be that while the engineering team is aware of the faults, the MS exec team considers Teams to be brilliant.

At the senior level the role becomes a sales role - you are continuously selling your output, team, product, vision, etc internally to the other execs, board, etc. It's important therefore to present whatever you are producing as exceptional. So you look for indicators that support your pitch. Sales and forecasts are far more important than product. Product is only as important as far as it directly impacts these numbers. And with channels / vertical integration / brand like MS, a core tool like Teams is almost a guaranteed success on these metrics as long as the product kinda works.

And then it's very easy to fall into the trap of buying into your own pitch. When you are continuously repeating how great the product is you begin believe it and ignore criticism, including public opinion. "What matters is the markets opinion not the publics opinion and Teams has huge market share".

So MS execs likely believe Teams to be brilliant, which is probably partly why there isn't the internal urgency to fix the issues.

Also - its a golden goose! Its good enough, generates tons of revenue and fills a strategic product gap. Why take a big risk and refactor it? This could be a disaster.

Takes a very brave, product focused leader to push on despite the above.

2 comments

It is the old joke. Dev says it is shit. Manager says it is dung. Senior manager says it has a strong odor. Director says it is powerful features. VP smiles in satisfaction.
Was looking for a good place to post this in the thread but I'll just drop it here. Microsoft Teams still lacks multi-account support on desktop.

As in, you can't sign on to several business organizations like you can in Slack. It's so dumb and disqualifying. Utter nightmare if you work with several organizations.

https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/idea/c9995dc8-...

I've bookmarked that page and I check in on it regularly, as Microsoft claims multi-account support is due for late 2022.

The fun part is that this functionality already has been added to teams (for over a year now), it’s just disabled and hidden by default. Might be worth enabling it if you use multiple orgs. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams/track...
Intriguing. Doesn't seem to work on macOS tho.
> As in, you can't sign on to several business organizations like you can in Slack. It's so dumb and disqualifying. Utter nightmare if you work with several organizations.

I think they were really hoping they could make that cross-tenant thing work where you only have one account that you can use as a guest in other orgs, but that really doesn't reflect how things work in the field (you have separate accounts at each organization).

This is a problem even if you work for one organization (e.g. govt or university) but have clients/collaborators in other organizations, and want to join their teams.