| > Their market is big legacy companies where tools aren't chosen based on merit the thing that most people don't understand is that Microsoft doesn't make only slack, and their other software is usually pretty good. Excel for example is a marvel of software engineering, Word is pretty great too. Outlook works well in an enterprise setting (though i wouldn't use it for personal needs). And their groupware works remarkably well. And their ActiveDirectory (Domain controller + LDAP/Kerberos) is fairly good. And guess what? If you're a 10-people company sure, you can do without Excel/Outlook/Word/ActiveDirectory/etc. But when your company gets bigger it's just the choice that makes the most sense. Oh and guess what: most of the software in named is native software and works offline too. So basically your company is not buying Teams... Your company is buying an office suite and gets Teams for free. Also... People (developers mostly, I must say) tend to forget they're not the only people on the planet. People from the accounting/hr/logistics/marketing departments are probably just fine with Teams. |
Agreed, though I would say that whatever "good" is there is mostly a relic they seem hell-bent on destroying. I say that as someone who happily switched to Windows 7 after almost a decade of Linux, and then took refuge in Apple-land when Microsoft took a turn for the worst and started churning out shit. Since then the shit stream only increased unfortunately.
Their Office suite on Windows is indeed unparalleled (assuming you need that, which not all companies - or at least not all employees - need). Likewise for Active Directory - it's something Apple still hasn't caught up on, and don't even get me started on Linux.
But all that is no good if you constantly have to fight it, which is increasing more and more. Windows + Active Directory is supposed to make managing a fleet of workstations easier so that end-users can do their work efficiently. If the admin (or end-users) now have to fight with literal adware being introduced into the OS every few updates, the value proposition falls apart. Same if the chat client can't effectively paste text without fighting you on formatting, or max out the CPU on a video call so that your machine slows down to a crawl and is no longer an effective tool to get work done.
> People from the accounting/hr/logistics/marketing departments are probably just fine with Teams.
Go back to my previous posts - I'd argue they are "fine" with it because they're used to terrible tooling and never had a chance to discover how good tooling can be. You could say the same about healthcare workers being "happy" with healthcare software even though it's often awful by any technical person's standards, but since they do not have those skills they accept the mediocrity thinking there's some unsolvable technical reason why the software they are using is bad, rather than incompetence/mismanagement on the suppliers' part.