[npteljes]

>it's telling that Microsoft has to require folks to use Teams.

Not really I think, considering that MS bought GitHub, with all of its already existing culture. I see this move as them homogenizing the infrastructure. And also not willing to pay to another company for a product that's actually their competition.

[generalk]

Of course, and I can't fault Microsoft for that, even if (having been on the bad end of a similar acquisition and IT merge) it sucks for GitHub.

My point was: GitHub as an organization didn't choose Teams willingly, and are still paying for Slack and only using Teams for video conferencing. Of all the explanations of why that might be, the easiest to land on is "because Teams just isn't that good."

[waste_monk]

Or it could just be that "this is the way we've always done it" / that Slack has enough inertia in the organisation that changing workflow, updating shortcuts, etc. is inconvenient and thus left until the last minute to change over.

I haven't used slack but broadly speaking Teams / Zoom / all of the other platforms I've used have been roughly the same, in that they all get the job of text and (usually) video communications done. Some might be a bit nicer to use than others but largely it doesn't matter which one you use as long as everyone is on the same platform.

[FridgeSeal]

In my previous workplaces I have used primarily Slack, with teams for larger video calls.

In my current work, it’s 100% teams. I’d be doing in my heels over swapping to teams as well if I was GitHub, using it for any kind of text communication is such a massive downgrade.

[hnbad]

Given how human psychology works, Occam's razor would suggest the most likely explanation is "it's not sufficiently better to overcome the inertia of everyone already being accustomed to what they're using".

HN of all places should know better than to believe that people using one thing instead of another must mean the other thing is worse.

[jms703]

> not willing to pay to another company for a product that's actually their competition.

This. Companies are cutting costs. Teams may not be the best to use, but it doesn't make sense to have multiple chat solutions.

[epolanski]

Hmm, GitHub has a gran total 2100 employees.

Even if they were paying 10$ per user, it's basically the salary of one non-lower level engineer to have cross-company communication they are already used to.

[CyanLite2]

It's the premise of paying your competitors money to do something that you already are doing. Someone manager probably got a bonus out of this move.

And corporate espionage is more prevalent than you may think. Can you absolutely guarantee 100% that the competitor, like Zoom in China, isn't sniffing their video traffic or recordings to some of their most sensitive internal business discussions?