[dbancajas]

What is the specific complaint against it? Better yet can you come up with tools that you use instead of Teams? Is it xoom? Slack? Discord? MS is not my favorite company but my MS Teams experience has been relatively smooth.

[ygjb]

I have no objections to Microsoft as a company, I primarily use Windows on my personal devices since I am an avid gamer, and I enjoy several of the tools Microsoft publishes (VS Code, Visual Studio, most of the office suite).

The software is confusing, and at least, in my experience, doesn't have a consistent user experience or do a good job of guiding the user in how to use it.

The way it is used varies significantly between the four main user accounts I interact with (son's secondary school account, daughters primary school account, one non-profit I work with, one business that I work with).

As an alternative, I frequently find myself using Google Drive for document collaboration and sharing, and use Zoom or virtually any other video conferencing software.

Don't get me wrong, I would like it to be better, but I have also had the luxury of spending at least two extended afternoons speaking with product/program managers involved in it during a social event, and they seemed pretty ambivalent to my feedback. It's not a tool designed for users of the software, it's designed for organizational owners to mandate specific policies or behaviours, and for business owners that's fine. I just happened to have spent too much of my career working on empowering and improving user-focused and user-centric tools to care about using those bad tools unless I absolutely have to.

[scott_w]

> The platform is slow

> I regularly am confused by what I am meant to do, or how to resolve errors that occur;

Just to provide two examples of specific complaints from the parent post.

[xiwenc]

Have the same experience:

- ms teams on my windows laptop turns it into a raging heater. While i dont even have my webcam on.

- ms teams is so multi-functional you can do anything with it. Office suite, create polls (that are very laggy). It is so bloated there’s clearly no straightforward UX flows. Buttons all over the place. Desktop UI feels terribly slow.

- typing in chat boxes is laggy as hell.

I’m not alone. My colleagues experience similar issues as me.

[proamdev123]

Opposite experience: I use Teams every single workday and have never experienced the lagginess or laptop heating you describe. I’ve never heard of any coworkers having these issue either.

It’s so strange that so many people can have completely different experiences with the same software.

[samuria]

I think it's also the varying differences of experience in using different tools/platforms to communicate. For example, someone coming from Zoom may notice how laggy Teams is compared to Zoom. I definitely felt this way, once I experienced the alternatives to Teams, I just couldn't wait to stop using it.

Why does it need to have excel implemented into it? Why is the search function still there if it literally doesn't do searching. Why does it take 20 seconds to open a PDF?

Many more issues and questions stand out if you've previously used a platform where none of those are issues.

[apple4ever]

I think that's it. When you've used other better tools, you realize how bad Teams is.

[spc476]

My complaint? Well, back when I had to use it (between jobs now), I found the app (Mac M1-base laptop) to be slow and painful to use. But using Teams via a website? Way faster, which I found odd because I think both are web based (I think the "app" just contains its own instance of Chrome).

[bombcar]

I am starting to fear that I am missing out on something major, because we've used Teams for years now and it works fine (on macOS) for what we do - basic chat, multiplayer powerpoint, some video calling, etc.

Maybe it's a team size thing, and Teams just blows monkey chunks when you're one of fifty thousand employees at a company?

[Jcowell]

It’s been a year since I’ve used teams but my biggest gripe is search. Conversations are contextual. My work often requires me to find conversations that happens months ago. When unused Skype I could god into my email and recover it that way.

With teams , back when I used it, you could search no problem. What you couldn’t do is go back to a conversation and get the context. I’m not sure how on earth you ship a search feature without the ability to go back to that message In a chat application.

[kaustyap]

To add copy and pasting conversations more than one page doesnt work and there is no feature to export conversation.

[bombcar]

This may be the key - I use it as a chat program and rarely if ever search or go back more than a day

[proamdev123]

My experience is similar to yours — including at a company of over 50,000 employees.

I’m baffled as to how so many people here on HN have such horror stories with Teams, while I’ve not experienced nor heard of anything remotely so bad at the companies I’ve worked.

[apple4ever]

I don't know how on the Mac it works for you, because I've tried using it for years and its terrible on audio and video calling, and that's if it opens (which most of the time it doesn't, requiring removing some obscure cache file).

[JohnFen]

The majority of my issues are around its user interface. A gazillion problems there, from discoverability problems to basic things like the inability to shrink the window down to a reasonable size.

But there are other issues, too. In meetings (about 12 people at a time), the video gets terrible. People randomly getting kicked out of the meetings are a fairly common experience. At least 3 days a week, people have problems joining the meeting.

We tend to budget the first ten minutes of every meeting as disposable time, so that whatever the problem of the day with Teams is can be worked out enough that we can finally get everyone in the meeting.

[AnonymousPlanet]

We use TeamViewer for online meetings. Lets you share your screen. It's also used for support on customer sites. Works very reliably. We use Teams or WebEx only when interacting with customers and they demand those applications.