It's Baaaaaack (or is it?): Microsoft Teams suffers a Tuesday totter What's the difference between Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Stores? When Teams closes down, people seem to notice. Microsoft's collaboration tool for suits started off Tuesday with a repeat performance of yesterday's wobbles for some European users. Impact related to the SI#TM206556 has returned. We'll continue to provide …
Sure, but the networking of Hangouts has been rock solid for years now: I remember having a nearly ten years ago with seamless handover between wifi and 4G. They did try various consumer toys but outside of YouTube that really doesn't seem to be their market. Credit where credit's due: they really know their networking stuff.
These big corps that enforce chat silos should all be called out in times of crisis.
We have email.
There is no global chat in 2020.
There is no global video service.
There is no global presence.
Global voice still costs a fortune per min.
We have the tech to connect granny and granchild but the likes of Microsoft and Google and the Anti-Social network make it _not_ work.
They could all be compatible with less work than it takes to make them incompatible and try to "differentiate".
They shamelessly make money from thier silos and have no interest in connecting the world.
If you are having difficulty working out if you should sms, call, skype, viber, facetime, team up or hangout with granny this weekend. Make sure you are aware who is to blame.
Haven't really had any problems with it this morning. Just had one user tell me that their webcam wouldn't work, adamant the issue was with Teams as it had a wobbly yesterday.
Turned out there's a cover on the webcam on the laptop, and they had managed to close it without realising.
Still, you got to laugh.
I suspect it is likely to be the educational sector here. Yes there have been a lot of businesses changing how they do things, but that has been spread out over at least a few weeks (the biggest growth anyway) and I suspect microsoft are keeping ahead of this aspect enough that even the further increases this week from this kind of thing would not be a problem.
What you might not realise is that a significant number of universities use the microsoft ecosystem. Microsoft give things like Office365 to them completely free. From a university perspective an industry standard corporate grade email platform for free is worth switching to, and the fact that this subscription also replaces their existing office installs with licenses they got for free whilst giving free licenses to students... oh, and we can also enable this "azure" thing for our domain controllers and we have fewer servers to maintain, and, and, and...
Once a university has signed up that well known tactic of "if all people learn at school is microsoft, companies will have to buy microsoft" kicks in. Microsoft have been trying to "encourage" universities to use Teams for a while, but the reaction has mostly been a shrug as they can't really see much point in changing how they do things and already have systems that seem to work just fine for what they actually use it for.
Yesterday several european countries officially closed all educational institutions, and whilst it is not official in the UK universities did "decide for themselves" to start switching to online-only delivery. They already have this Teams thing that they never used, it claims to be designed for exactly this kind of thing, how many will have decided to give it a try?
I have no idea about colleges and schools, but universities even if "closed" still need to continue running courses and their students are expected to be able to adapt and make use of what is available. Many colleges might also go down the online delivery route, but schools will likely just be "giving up" as they can not expect students to be able to access online resources with equipment they might not have using software nobody has ever shown them how to use. I also suspect that any colleges or schools who do go the online-delivery route are more likely to be looking at Google Classroom which has far bigger market share in that sector.
Back in March of 1997, for a glorious three weeks, I had a rather impressive (in my book anyway) 20-hour-a-day chat addiction. The internet was brand new for me, and I have found a place called the WebChat Broadcasting System (or WBS for short).
Since each conversation thread took a few minutes to respond, I have found that maintaining 20-30 of them at a time was about the right amount to keep things going. Okay, basic conversations, that would have taken a few minutes face to face or over a phone now took hours, but it was new, and possessed the mystery that the pretty girl I was pitching woo to was likely to be a fat hairy truck driver in Texas with a laptop on his steering wheel. Well, no mobile internet back then, but the same general idea.
I simply stayed in my room, chatted with the Aussies until they went to sleep, then with the Brits, then the Yanks, then the Aussies woke up, and it all started again. It had to stop.
So, my solution was to walk away, ride off into the sunset, and do not look back. Since then, every so often a company I work for insists on making me use chatting software to communicate, so I use the Ali method of problem resolution, by floating like a butterfly around the issue, then stinging like a bee against trying to force me back to successfully kicked addiction.
Anything that can be achieved by chatting or texting in a day can also be achieved in five minutes in an actual conversation. How’s that for a productivity tool?
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